Performance of family firms:

This special issue ends with a comprehensive review article by Zellweger and Astrachan focused on understanding what we know about the ways in which family influence affects firm performance. Their literature review is organized along the dimensions of power, experience, and culture, through which a family can exert influence on a firm (Astrachan, Klein, Smyrnios 2002; Klein, Astrachan, Smyrnios 2005). André Hoffmann’s commentary shares how the Hoffmann family has exercised its influence on the world’s third largest pharmaceutical company, Roche Pharmaceuticals, for over a century. A combination of family involvement in ownership and governance of the firm has enabled the Hoffmann family to support the “Roche way of doing business”. * Joe Astrachan is Wachovia Eminent Scholar Chair of Family Business, Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, and executive director of the Cox Family Enterprise Center at the Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. In addition he is Distinguished Research Chair of Family Business at Loyola University Chicago’s Business School. Astrachan is editor of Family Business Review, a scholarly publication of the Family Firm Institute (FFI) of which he is a former board member. He is also editor of the Family Business Casebook Annual which publishes the best in teaching and educational family business cases. Astrachan received the Richard Beckhard award, which is the Family Firm Institute’s highest honor, the Family Business Network’s award for best-unpublished research paper of 2001 (along with co-authors Smyrnios from Australia and Klein from Germany), the International Family Business Program Association’s Lifetime Achievement in Research Award, and he received the McGregor Award from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. In addition to his non-profit and community board service, he serves on the boards of six privately-owned family businesses and comes from a family business background. His extended family has owned businesses ranging from container and tanker shipping to pharmaceuticals. Astrachan earned his B.A., M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees at Yale University. ** Thomas Zellweger has studied at the universities of St. Gallen and Louvain (Belgium). With his dissertation work on “Risk, Return and Value in the Family Firm” he received a Doctor of Philosophy in Management (Ph.D. HSG) in 2006. He is member of the executive board of the University of St. Gallen’s “Center for Family Business”, and, since February 2008, senior lecturer for management and family business at the University of St. Gallen.