• Work

• Feedback Cycles

• Reconciling stakeholder interests

Family firms are popular amongst politicians and policy makers. Both the Dutch government and EU stimulate the creation and continuation of family enterprise. However, the current popularity of family firms contrasts sharply with their historical assessment. Family businesses have been viewed negatively in historical and economic literature in the past. Though the ‘real-world’ consequences of this academic debate have been addressed sparingly, it has been claimed that in the Netherlands family firms were disparaged in the 1950s and 1960s as they hindered economic growth and societal change. This sharp contrast between historical discouragement and current encouragement of family enterprise in the Netherlands is the focus of this paper. This paper examines how the evolution in the political narrative on family business between 1945 and 2015 in the Netherlands can be explained. The Netherlands has been marked by a transformation from a coordinated market economy with a critical attitude towards family firms, to a liberal market economy that praises entrepreneurship and family enterprise. Combined with conceptual ambiguity on what a family firm is, this changing context explains how the appraisal of family enterprise underwent such significant changes. Building on the current trend of Digital Humanities, an extensive digital collection of Dutch parliamentary records will be exploited, in order to present a quantitative overview of the historical frequency of the use of family business in political debates. Subsequently, this collection is used for a qualitative analysis of the use of the ideograph family business to present the different and developing narratives over time. Combined, these analyses explain the evolving political narrative surrounding family firms in the Dutch parliament and political debate between 1945 and 2015.

Why and how did the attitude towards family business change markedly since 1945?

• Collected during project

• Longitudinal survey
• Archival
• Text Analysis

No

Online collection of digitised Dutch parliamentary records

Online collection of digital Dutch parliamentary records

• Structured
• Unstructured

• Dutch

01/01/1945

31/12/2015

The Netherlands

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