The Dependence of Family Businesses on a Single Decision-Maker
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the premise that family businesses are substantially dependent on a single individual, the owner-manager. A national survey of Canadian family-owned businesses is used to address two issues: (1) the degree of dependence of family-owned businesses on a single individual, and (2) the factors associated with this reliance. Responses from family business owners provide evidence of a high level of dependence on the owner-manager.In 75% of all family businesses, respondents believed that the company was either dependent or very dependent on the owner-manager.In addition, 65% of owner-managers responded that they made all the major decisions in at least three out of five functional business areas. These businesses had few key managers. In 57% of all businesses, there were only two or fewer key managers in addition to the owner.In 62% of all family businesses, a successor had not been chosen nor had a procedure been put in place for choosing a successor. Six factors were identified to explain this extreme dependence, related either to the owner or to the firm itself. (JSD)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".