Family business = Tribal chiefdoms??

CHIEFDOMS AND FAMILY FIRM REGIMES:
VARIATIONS ON THE SAME ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEMES

Elizabeth (Beth) D. Rogers, Ph.D.
Rogers Family Foundation

Alan L. Carsrud, Ph.D.
Anderson School at UCLA

Norris F. Krueger, Jr., Ph.D.
Entrepreneurial Strategies

The authors wish to thank Drs. Alfred Osborne, Jr., Karen Stephenson, Max Wortman, Jr., and Marta Vago for their
encouragement concerning this paper.

Rogers, E.D., Carsrud, A.L. & Krueger, N.F. Chiefdoms and family firm regimes: Variations on the same
anthropological themes. Family Business Review, 9(1): 15-27.1996.


ABSTRACT

Family owned and managed firms exhibit remarkable parallels to pre-industrial chiefdoms because
the typical economic environment in which they exist limits them to a size and scale equivalent to
that of a chiefdom. Using anthropological research this study inventories all known procedures of
accommodating multiple heirs to the paramountcy of pre-industrial chiefdoms. It uses this exhaustive
inventory to characterize the succession process in modern family owned and managed firms. The
major theoretical concept adopted from anthropology is that of polity, defined as an autonomous
system of institutional finance and organizational support (resource control and governance). Using
terms such as polity helps us to recognize the universality of succession processes. Thus, succession
processes in family firms are less idiosyncratic than we once thought. Thus, we can fruitfully explore
structural similarities between pre-industrial organizations and modern family firms, using the
considerable body of field research literature on chiefdoms (Goody, 1958; Barrett, 1965) which finds
that every scheme to accommodate multiple successors falls into one of two categories: (a) personnel
strategies and (b) asset strategies. A second critical concept is that while it is possible to inventory all
possible outcomes (here, succession strategies) in any dynamic system, no single outcome can be
accurately predicted in advance. The purpose of this paper is to provide an exhaustive inventory of
possible outcomes of the succession process, rather than trying to predict the strategy chosen in a
given case. Rather, the anthropological perspective provides a much-needed, empirically-based,
comprehensive model of succession processes in family firms and permits a more nomothetic
approach to family firm research.

INTRODUCTION
Family firms exhibit remarkable parallels to chiefdoms in pre-industrial societies. They both exist in economic
environments that limit them to an equivalent size and scale. Anthropological research seeks to identify
universal patterns from specific observations, rather than emphasizing the idiosyncrasies. This permits an
inventory of all known succession procedures in pre-industrial chiefdoms. We can then use this typology to
characterize the succession process in modern family owned and managed firms. That is, social anthropologists
have observed that succession processes in chiefdoms can be categorized into a relatively small number of
generic succession strategies (e.g., Johnson & Earle, 1988).
This article has three key objectives. The first is to inventory modes of succession strategies that
accommodate multiple successors to high office in tribal chiefdoms. Second, it grounds this inventory in the
proposition that a business venture is a commercial polity similar to pre-industrial governmental entities of a
similar scale. Third, the paper adopts ideas from social anthropology to present these modes of succession as
recurring constraints on succession outcomes in modern closely-held commercial firms, thus offering a muchneeded comprehensive and empirically-derived model of the dynamics of the family firm. For the family firm
practitioner, showing the structural similarity between family firms and pre-industrial chiefdoms opens the
door to understanding the family owned and managed business as a logical outgrowth of the type of historic
affiliation behavior seen in chiefdoms. We can thus clearly analyze family firms using well-documented
anthropological concepts, moving toward a more nomothetic approach to studying family firms (Rogers, 1990).

INTRODUCTION TO SUCCESSION AND INHERITANCE STRATEGIES

To compare chiefdoms and family firms usefully it is necessary to introduce organizationally-neutral
constructs, such as polity, from social anthropology. A polity is a named organization with an autonomous
system of institutional finance, having both resource exchange and governance functions. That is, a polity is in
essence a system to finance the mobilization of resources for desired activities. The term can thus refer to both
self-sufficient hunting and gathering family households as well as to larger-scale groups formed for economic
purposes in industrial societies. The senior officer in a polity is termed the paramount, whether the head of a
chiefdom or the CEO of a closely-held firm, the individual who controls critical resources. The tenure of a
given paramount in a given polity is formally known as a regime. Changes in regimes are termed regime
shifts, thus succession in a family firm entails a regime shift. Regime shifts (successions) are thus necessarily

characterized by shifts in who controls the critical resources. Other useful terms are kinship and legitimacy.
Kinship is a given polity’s definition of who ‘belongs’ inside the family, the degree to which they belong, and
the corresponding privileges and responsibilities. Similarly, legitimacy reflects the polity’s rules for who
‘deserves’ a particular role in that polity (who is entitled to lawful, accepted control over resources).
Using terms such as polity, regime, and paramount allow us to recognize that succession processes
in family firms are less idiosyncratic than we once thought. Rather, succession in a family firm reflects broader
phenomena anchored in human history. With the use of these terms one can turn to the analysis of field
research literature on chiefdoms (Goody, 1958; Barrett, 1965) which finds that every scheme to accommodate
multiple successors falls into one of two categories: (a) personnel strategies and (b) asset strategies. A recent
exhaustive inventory of succession strategies in an industry comprised completely of family firms finds the
same patterns (Rogers, 1990).
In personnel strategies, the various contenders are either eliminated or given various assignments to
lessen competition for a particular office. These distinctions are consistent with Rivers' (1914) view that
inheritance is the transmission of property while succession is the transmission of a particular office.
In asset strategies, polities are restructured and/or contenders are given wealth payments (paid off).
When control of financial resources in the family firm is equated to control of military force in the
pre-industrial setting, the two polities, firms and chiefdoms, appear startlingly similar.
Benedict (1968) asserts that growth in both family and firm are sources of the tensions leading to
succession crises that are equally characteristic of kindred groups. Barring violent regime shifts, aging
necessarily affects the stability of the family firm as it would any group, as the death or retirement of a
paramount necessarily results in a regime shift (Fortes, 1958; Goody, 1958; Yanagisako, 1979; Rogers, 1990).
Further Delineating Succession Strategies. The initial concepts of successor management through
personnel and asset strategies can be distilled further. Personnel strategies include both contenders and shared
appointments. Contenders can be eliminated through tests of competence, legitimacy, combat, or ostracism.
Shared appointment strategies include appointment of a successor during the reign of the original paramount
(CEO or owner), rotation of the office, and a division of labor in which potential successors are given other
jobs. Asset strategies include both restructuring the polity and wealth payments. Alternatives to restructure the
polity include start-ups, acquisitions, and fission and/or sloughing of revenue sources to form stand-alone
polities or organizations. The polity may also choose to pay off one or more contenders. Finally, a polity may
choose to handle succession with a combination of more than one strategy.
Implications of Dynamism: A Caveat. The conceptual approach of summarizing constraints on
succession processes in general is based on techniques employed in mathematical chaos theory. Dynamic
systems generate an inevitable complexity that manifests itself in a finite range of possible outcomes given any

set of initial conditions. Yet, no single outcome to a succession crisis can be accurately predicted far in advance
because of the complexity of the system and outcomes are highly sensitive to even small differences in initial
conditions. Individuals have the freedom to act within the range but not outside the range of constraints
(Crutchfield, et al; 1986).
A finite list of possible succession strategies (as opposed to an infinite number of possibilities)
suggests that we can offer choices of succession strategies to family firms. However, outcomes will be dictated
by initial conditions far more than by outside interventions.

(Please insert Table 1 about here)

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO FIRM SUCCESSION

Although succession and other processes in chiefdoms have been extensively studied (Goody, 1966),
the role of succession in industrial societies has fallen primarily to family firm and entrepreneurship researchers
from psychology, sociology, banking, law, and accounting (Davis, 1983; Dyer, 1988; Kets de Vries, 1993;
Lansberg, et al., 1988). The family firm remains largely uncharted territory for social anthropologists despite a
vital need to better understand the interactions between work and family (Kanter, 1989). More importantly,
this failure of anthropology to adequately impact the study of family and closely-held firms has deprived those
interested in the phenomena with potentially useful concepts to help understanding. This is quite similar to
anthropology's lack of impact on entrepreneurship (Stewart, 1993).
While fragments of industrial society have been studied, no comprehensive theory-driven vision of the
family firm as a social/economic entity has emerged. Much family firm research focuses on the dynamics of
family relationships, particularly focusing on pathologies. Meanwhile, anthropologists' studies of modern urban
settings have typically examined single factories, neighborhoods, or small towns. A notable exception is
Stewart's dissertation research (1989) on a rapidly growing Canadian entrepreneurial firm. The problem with
most anthropological studies of modern economic processes is that the foci are generally based on geography,
not on kinship or economic groups. Firms embedded within industries are unique to industrial society and are
increasingly less geographically localized because of modern transportation and communication technologies.
Social and cultural embeddedness thus get less consideration.
Anthropologists have been biased by historical trends in methodology that view pre-industrial and
postindustrial societies as two separate universes. The first universe is ‘embedded’ or has an economy built
around social relations while the latter is ‘disembedded’ or solely driven by market-negotiated events (Polanyi,
1944). The reality in family firms today is clearly closer to pre-industrial societies than either modern market-

driven economists or social anthropologists care to admit. Economic sociologists such as Granovetter (1985,
1992) demonstrate that most behavior is deeply embedded in its social context and that interpersonal bonds
make economic institutions socially constructed. Thus, family firms cannot be understood without
understanding social context, including the centrality of the family dimension where interpersonal bonds
simply cannot be ignored. Similarly, research that focuses on family dynamics alone risk ignoring that family
firms are polities.
Alfred Chandler (1977), the business historian, maintains that modern business activity in large
decentralized organizations is carried on by administrative teams of managers. These managers have vested
interests, both obvious and hidden. More important, he shows that legal ownership is generally divorced from
control; managers operate the firm, not the shareholders. Management need not equal ownership. Similarly,
ownership need not equal legitimacy. In family firms, issues of ownership, management, and control are even
more entangled.
Clearly, neither are family business activities mindlessly transacted in the marketplace, but have very
strong intrapersonal and interpersonal attributes. To Chandler, wealth (or resources controlled by social units)
is key to studies of any political economy, a situation especially true in the family firm. Thus changes in the
control of resources (i.e.,succession) is critical to understanding family firms in modern industrial societies.

COMPARING POLITIES

One frequently hears that a firm failed because of financial reasons. While this may certainly be one frequent
cause, the reality is that the polities in any industry reflect the same human processes of aging that affect other
domestic and kinship groups. It is important to note that ‘kinship’ is an style or method of carrying out
transactions and warfare. In today's societies, warfare has generally moved from the battlefield to the
courtroom. At this point it is appropriate to examine personnel and asset management strategies in more detail
(please refer to Table 1). First, personnel strategies subsume two major types of strategy: Elimination of
Contenders and Shared Appointments.

Personnel Strategies: Elimination of Contenders
We can classify strategies for eliminating contenders into four types: (a) tests of competence, (b)
legitimacy, (c) combat, or (d) ostracism.
Competence. Barring cases of extreme mental and physical inadequacy, competence becomes relative
to the scale and specific demands of the office or position. In a medium-scale polity with a relatively stable
revenue base, the paramount must carry some of the leadership burden. Thus, prospective chiefs must prove

themselves or at least make significant efforts to acquire critical skills. For example, in the Polynesian
chiefdoms described by Bell (1932) the chief was expected to fish, be skilled in crafts, maintain prestige
displays, and manage redistribution of resources such as food. In modern family firms we certainly observe
cases of mentally incompetent successors. If a firm survives under new leadership for the better part of a
decade, it is hard to assume incompetence, and in fact most CEO's demonstrate a wide variety of skills.
Competency may also be questioned where potential successors disagree vigorously over the firms' future
strategic direction as in the current battle at Dart Group (Swisher, 1994; Torry, 1994).
In general, achievement-based succession in chiefdoms strongly implies the assumption that kindred
represent a very viable pool from which to take competent heirs. In the family firm this may be increased if
heirs have been general managers, a natural training and recruiting pool for competent successors. One need
only look at century-old family firms in North America such as Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, and Seagram to see
the ability of families to produce sufficiently competent heirs, especially in non-technology based firms. The
same is true in other regions of the world.
Negotiating Legitimacy. An examination of the field research literature on pre-industrial societies
illustrates the slippery and negotiated character of many supposedly ‘sacred’ principles of legitimacy. That is,
legitimacy has both substantive and symbolic aspects. Even ‘divinely’ selected paramounts must live up to
certain obligations to others outside the clan (which may, or may not, include competence). Conquering rulers
such as the Normans (Searles, 1988), depended on local nobles to provide their military organization. Thus,
they were vulnerable to some form of election or consent by the elders of other local kinship groups. In
successions based purely on substantive achievement, a successor may marry one of the previous monarch's
relatives or acquire the paraphernalia of office in order to gain symbolic legitimacy. An example of this is the
Franks who had Pippin. Here was a man without royal relatives, who was "anointed by God" in a ceremony
from the Old Testament revived especially for the occasion (Goody, 1966).
Kinship Issues in Legitimacy: The idiom of how pre-industrial societies conceptualize legitimacy
reflects the interplay of kinship ties and supernatural and religious sanctions, as shown in examples both
historical and current. Most of the contenders for the status of ‘chief’ in the Hawaiian Islands had ties with
many dynastic lines, and genealogies could be easily adjusted to prove membership in the current royal dynasty
(Earle, 1978). If all else failed, the former monarch could be proved a tyrant to justify a return to the ‘rightful’
dynasty. This was done to Richard III by the Tudor propagandists of Henry Vll (Kendall, 1965). The
internecine family struggles in the Dart Group offer a current example where the father went on television to
accuse his son of malfeasance (Swisher, 1994). Recall that, as a rule, kinship does not in and of itself carry
rights to succession or even property. Its role depends on the particular polity. Julius Caesar's biological son did
not inherit Rome. John Paul Getty gave the bulk of his monies not to his children, but to his art foundation,

much to the pleasure of the art world and the citizens of Los Angeles. Also, the nature of ‘kinship’ can vary
between polities (e.g., matriarchal versus patriarchal). As kinship is defined by the polity, a family firm might
re-define ‘kinship’ to include a promising in-law or long-time manager.
Legal Issues in Legitimacy: Legitimacy in the modern family firm takes a much more legalistic form,
but it is often still driven by ancient traditions. For example, males, not females, are still frequently seen as the
preferred legitimate successors. Legitimacy today can be purchased as when general managers are successors
after a buyout. In modern economies, questions of legitimacy have moved primarily to the legal arena and away
from the kinship and supernatural (or religious) arena of pre-industrial settings. Kinship group participation in
family firms is normally underscored by some set of vested ownership rights that can be bought and sold.
These rights also confer authority. The key similarity between the two types of polities is the system of
"legitimizing through ideological or legal claims," or the ‘rights’ to an office. No system works purely on
‘might’ (or even legal ownership, as Chandler noted) in today's industrial societies. Regardless of how ruthless
the takeover, the event still is clothed in legal language that is the legitimacy ceremony of modern society. That
is, legal settings are often designed to convey symbolic legitimacy as well as substantive legitimacy.
Combat. Gluckman (1954) argued that in Basutoland, multiple heirs disperse the rights to office and
paralyze or fragment the state. Combat and eventually reunification by a powerful individual then followed.
Murder to eliminate excess relatives is still endemic to chiefdoms dependent on military force for authority.
Goody (1966) describes Hogan's work on the Cene'l Eoghain, one of the two kinship groups to rule Ireland
between 879 and 1260. Hogan calculated a rate of "dynastic homicide" and found that approximately 46
percent of the men in that dynasty met with violent death, and of these approximately 50 percent died at the
hands of their own kinsmen (Goody, 1966). While not to be condoned, murder as a succession tool occurs
even today in criminal organizations (and elsewhere, at least according to lurid media accounts).
Battles today are often over ‘stock.’ A clear tension exists between the frequent practice of giving
equal shares of stock to all siblings while appointing one, normally the senior male, as president. Combat
related to succession and inheritance in American family firms is now fought largely with battalions of
pin-striped professionals. Battles to the death are now conducted with substitutes where heirs to a company
dispute control using lawyers and accountants as ‘warriors.’ It is not unheard of to see a sibling forced out of a
firm by another sibling after extensive litigation. This was certainly the case in the family control of Campbell
Soup. Most recently, father and son are wrestling for control of the Dart Group, with family members using
fifteen different law firms (Torry, 1994).
Ostracism. Banishing, or ‘firing’ a potential successor was not easily accomplished in the
pre-industrial setting, since surrounding territories were often hostile, and the ‘royal’ identity of the successor
could serve as a rallying point for potential contenders for a throne. For example, William, a son of the Norman

dynasty, was shipped to Sicily to avoid conflict with an elder brother (Searles, 1988). One can see the same
mode of ostracism when relatives vote a founding entrepreneurial CEO out of office, pushing him/her out of
the company. Since kinship alone is not sufficient to establish ownership rights in a firm, heirs could be
excluded from share ownership unless they do undertake legal warfare. Finally, ostracism can lead an heir to
simply choose another career and become irrelevant to the firm.

Personnel Strategies: Shared Appointments
Other personnel strategies include appointing successors before formal regime shifts, rotation of
offices, and division of labor (potential successors are given other jobs). Below is a discussion of each
alternative personnel strategy.
Shared Appointments: Pre-Mortem. Various mechanisms short of outright murder have been tried
to alleviate the problem of too many royal successors. Goody (1966) refers to pre-mortem succession as a
process in which the aging incumbent appoints his own successor, a phenomena repeated today in several
northern European monarchies. Goody equates the resulting leadership situation to dual paramountcies where
the successor assumes some duties of the paramount, such as that between two nephews of the K'Awas lineage
recorded among the Haida at the Kiou village (Stearns, 1984). A less anthropological situation is dramatized by
Shakespeare in King Lear. This strategy may precipitate rather than quell rebellion. For example, Lear divided
his kingdom between two of his daughters, excluding a third. Although a seemingly legitimate and
substantively equitable arrangement, it served to pit his children against one another and cause civil war.
Family firm practitioners can certainly identify with this oft-recurring phenomenon. For example, in modern
family firms a successor may be appointed while the paramount was still serving. The successor then works in
the firm as the heir apparent. This can result in serious family conflict, such as forcing a parent to retire, or
causing unsuccessful siblings to resent, or even sabotage the chosen heir.
Shared Appointments: Rotation. Two types of rotation occur in the ethnographic literature. In the
first, the paramountcy moves between brothers, instead of between sons, giving each member of the dynasty an
opportunity. The current Saudi monarchy operates in this manner. The awkwardness of such arrangements is
apparent when the issue arises of moving the paramountcy to the next generation. Another such arrangement
was documented among the Haida in the Pacific Northwest (Stearns, 1984). The second type of rotation is
through several different lineages. Among the Nupe in western Africa, three clans, the families of Umar,
Masaba, and Usman Zaki, rotated the paramountcy while other lineages were shed (Nadel, 1942). In the
modern American family firm, no equivalent norms exist about rotation between siblings, but it is not unheard
of as in the case of Roy Disney, brother of Walt, at the Disney Company.
Shared Appointments: Division of Labor. An alternative form of accommodating excess successors

is to assign various members of the dynasty to different positions in the polity. Robert, the younger brother of
Richard founder of the Norman dynasty, became the archbishop of Rouen (Searles, 1988). The modern family
or closely-held firm often offers similar jobs. A father is the CEO while the elder son is a manager, the younger
son a salesman, and the daughter, son-in-law and sister all at other jobs.

Asset Management Strategies
Asset strategies can be classified as restructuring or wealth payments. Below is a brief discussion of
each alternative.
New Polities Started, Acquired, Divided or Sloughed. At times, a portion of an existing polity may
be used to form a new polity to give to a dissident successor. Among the Trobriand in the South Pacific
(Malinowski, 1922) and the Haida (Steams, 1984), separate villages were established by collateral branches of
the main chiefs at South Boyowa and Xaina, respectively. William the Conqueror invaded England in part to
extend domains for the younger generation of Normans. Similarly, a previously consolidated entity such as the
Carolingian Empire may be broken up among heirs (Searles, 1988). Similar strategies are used today in buying
and selling firms. A wealthy family may acquired a company for a daughter and son-in-law and transfer part of
their customer base to help two sons establish a new organization. Rather than dissolve or pass on the older
structure, the family may use the connections provided by the older structure to start new ones in areas more
suitable for the heirs, a process occurring today in Hong Kong. Another way to view this is new product line
which can be started to manage non-succeeding (or dissident) members of the organization. We might observe
this where a non-successor has competence, but not legitimacy, or where success demonstrates competence and
thus legitimacy.
Wealth Payments. Capital disbursement may be made to cancel rights in succession. Cases are
documented among pre-industrial settings of royals selling their patrimony. One only need recall the Old
Testament story of Esau selling his birthright. Firth (1936) records such an incident on Tikopia in the Solomon
Islands where a chiefly contender, Taupe, was bought off by being given an orchard in perpetuity. His father
was a high chief, but his mother was from another island, and the local chiefs did not want him as a successor.
In another case, Mauger, one of the Norman heirs, was given a wife with a substantial dowry to step out of the
line of succession (Searles, 1984). In the modern family firm this can be seen when a sibling is bought out
with a payment of land, money, or some other hard asset.

IMPLICATIONS

Now that an exhaustive typology of succession has been described, it is appropriate to look at the

various implications this has on different groups interested in family business. These are the family business
professional, the family firm member, and the academic research community. Succession may be the most
salient phenomenon in a family business, but family business research lacks a comprehensive model of
succession. Too often, research treats succession as essentially idiosyncratic, or at least too complicated to deal
with parsimoniously. Too often it is merely viewed as the conflict of the personal ambition of the entrepreneur
with that of an heir, solved only by legal techniques. Findings from social anthropology firmly contradict this,
offering evidence that there are a finite number of possible strategies for handling succession. As in any
dynamic system, one may not be able to predict which strategy will be chosen, but one can identify the
advantages and disadvantages of each strategy. Finally, there is the obvious implication is that anthropological
concepts offer a comprehensive model of the family firm itself.
For Family Business Professionals. Danco (1984), the well-known family firm consultant, once said
that when dealing with family businesses, he was merely restudying and drawing upon the ancient Greek
tragedies. Social anthropology research suggests that this is more than a clever metaphor. Given a lack of a
coherent model of effective functioning in family firms, it is imperative for those interested in the institution to
have available the perspective of humanity's historical methods for dealing with changes in regimes. It should
be comforting to see that industrial society is an outgrowth of pre-industrial forms. For example, while we (and
lawyers and accountants) can argue, often strenuously, for pre-mortem succession planning, the case of King
Lear suggests that succession planning often has unintended consequences.
For Family Firms. While each succession crisis in a family firm is a unique, and sometimes a painful
situation, there are only a limited number of possible outcomes that can occur; The choice of which end result
is up to the participants involved. Knowledge of those outcome options could help in communicating options
to all concerned, but the pros and cons really depend on the players involved and their own personal ambitions.
For lawyers, accountants, and organizational behaviorists, using historical and anthropological examples could
be useful in reducing the barriers to insights that members of family firms often raise when more immediate,
and personal, events are used in discussion.
For Academic Researchers: Future Directions. The anthropological perspective allows for an
understanding of the universality of human interaction processes. Much research on family firms focuses on an
idiographic approach, often focusing on family dynamics and concepts from family therapy. This reflects the
assumption that family firms are relatively idiosyncratic phenomena. To study family firms from a more
nomothetic approach requires the assumption that critical processes are relatively universal. Anthropological
research on chiefdoms lets us delineate a limited number of relatively universal succession structures and
processes common to all polities across several millennia and across different levels of technological
sophistication. Research in a more nomothetic direction has already proven useful in family business

(McCollom, 1990; Rogers, 1990).
This discussion also illustrates how anthropologists can learn from family business research. One limit
on classical anthropological research is that it underplays the influence of family dynamics. With the modern
family firm, there are an enormous number of potential cases for possible study by social anthropologists.
Anthropology provides the family firm researcher with a comprehensive, yet parsimonious model for
understanding succession. The vast number of organizational units that constitutes the current industrial world
provides researchers with the base of statistical and qualitative data necessary to understand more fully the
patterns of constraints that characterize all social organizations.
We may wish to focus research efforts in directions that bridge the differences between idiographic
and nomothetic approaches. For instance, are specific patterns of family dynamics associated with specific
succession strategies? (With successful succession strategies?) We also know that growing up in a family
business significantly influences beliefs and attitudes toward family business (Krueger, 1993). Are specific
succession strategies associated with prior experiences? (For example, is a specific succession strategy chosen
because it was learned from past successions?)
Finally, the most intriguing research challenge will be to use this typology to characterize future
observations of succession in family firms (and to characterize past observations from the literature and
archival sources).

CONCLUSIONS

This is not merely a list of all possible procedures for accommodating succession in preindustrial chiefdoms.
We wanted to show how these seemingly abstract categories can be used to characterize any succession process
in modern family owned and managed firms in industrial societies. To facilitate this comparison, we introduced
the anthropological concept of polity that defines autonomous groups in terms of institutionalized financial and
organizational support. The intent is to provide the consultant, the academic researcher, and the family firm
member with an exhaustive inventory of possible outcomes of the succession process. This was done not to
predict the outcome in any given case, but to provide a theoretical approach that accurately reflects the chaotic,
yet limited range of alternatives that often characterizes succession in firms. As with any dynamic system,
succession has a finite array of possible outcomes. However, no single outcome can be accurately predicted, we
can only eliminate infeasible alternatives. Only through knowledge of the past can the family firm avoid being
doomed to repeating it. In reality, chiefdoms in tribal Africa and family firms in the United States reflect the
same robust social processes, a universality we can profitably use in research and in practice.

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TABLE 1
SUCCESSION STRATEGIES

PERSONNEL STRATEGIES
Elimination of Contenders
Competency
Negotiated Legitimacy
Combat
Ostracism

Shared Appointments
Pre-mortem arrangements
Rotation of Paramountcy
Division of Labor

ASSET STRATEGIES
Restructuring (New polities started/acquired/divided/sloughed)
Wealth Payments

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