The Bouchayers of Grenoble and French Industrial Enterprise, 1850–1970. By Robert J. Smith. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xix, 247. $42.50

Michael Miller

The Journal of Economic History, 2003, vol. 63, issue 1, 254-255

Abstract: Ever since David Landes's seminal work on the French family firm and the interplay of culture and economics, French business history has wrestled with the question of French particularism and the role of family enterprise in determining business outcomes. For well over a quarter of a century, historians have challenged or qualified Landes's arguments, first by pointing to successful family enterprises in France or elsewhere, second by reassessing French economic performance in modern times, and third by identifying other factors to explain slower growth in macro or micro terms. Robert J. Smith's thought-provoking study of Bouchayer et Viallet, a medium-sized French firm that rose and fell on family leadership and culture, squarely confronts, once again, the issue of family influence on business success and failure. Combining access to family papers with an astute appraisal of personality and context, Smith has produced a first-rate inquiry into the dynamics of family business firms. Mindful of the fact that family firms still account for a predominant part of GNP, but that few family firms continue as such for more than several generations, Smith asks how family control and values contributed to the success of Bouchayer et Viallet yet also braked growth at a middling level and ultimately undermined the continuity of the company. Intended as a case study in the trajectory of family enterprise, Smith weaves together business, family, and cultural history in exemplary ways that will benefit practitioners of all three fields and that demonstrate the value of the first approach for studying and writing the second and the third.

Date: 2003
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