Robin Mackie

Bio: Robin Mackie is an academic researcher from Open University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Testamentary trust & Limited liability. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 12 publications receiving 108 citations.

Family ownership and business survival: Kirkcaldy, 1870-1970

Abstract: (2001). Family Ownership and Business Survival: Kirkcaldy, 1870-1970. Business History: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 1-32.

Succession and inheritance in Scottish business families, c.1875–1935

Abstract: This paper explores the dynamics of succession and inheritance in Scottish business families during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making use of the unusual quality of Scottish testamentary records, it explores the management of succession within family firms, focusing on the relationship between the choices made by business owners, their family circumstances, and the future of their firms. Taking the ‘family-centred’ approach to business development used by historians such as Morris, Owens and Barker for the period of the industrial revolution in England as a starting point, it argues that a broader understanding of inheritance can explain business succession, and that the control and ownership of family firms was changed by the uses made of limited liability.

"Best for the family": researching families and business.

Abstract: For most of us, the term ‘family firm’ summons images of an old-established and perhaps rather conservative business that has been passed down through the generations. This article starts by using a study of one firm to argue that the stereotype conceals significant questions about firms, families and the relations between them. It goes on to outline some recent historical work on family firms by looking, in turn, at research on the incidence and character of family business, on the strategies and performance of companies, and on the family dimension in enterprise. It stresses the importance of the small-scale and the local in this research and notes that historians are now using a range of sources familiar to local and community historians to develop this field.

Bearing ‘the burden and heat of the day’: The experience of business failure in Douglas & Grant Ltd.

Abstract: This article looks at the role of business culture in a business failure. Using the extensive records of the Scottish engineering firm of Douglas & Grant Ltd., it explores how the choices made by the firm's leaders were shaped by their values and assumptions. The article argues that the failure of the firm to manage expansion in the first decades of the twentieth century was rooted in these values, which both encouraged its leaders to take risks and constrained their ability to manage change.

Career patterns in the British chemical profession in the twentieth century

Abstract: This paper uses material on the careers of chemists in the twentieth century from the ‘Studies of the British Chemical Community, 1880-1970’ project to place the experiences of chemists in the context of this dynamic new research area. The paper highlights the way that the values associated with a traditional professional ‘ideal type’ of the independent practitioner were retained despite a marked shift to salaried employment during the twentieth century. Career mobility amongst chemists was underpinned by these values and by the transferability of their core skills.

Stewardship vs. Stagnation: An Empirical Comparison of Small Family and Non‐Family Businesses*

Abstract: Two major perspectives can be construed in the literature concerning the nature of family owned businesses (FOBs). The first implies that these enterprises have unique charac- teristics of stewardship. FOB owners are said to care deeply about the long-term prospects of the business, in large part because their family's fortune, reputation and future are at stake. Their stewardship is said to be manifested by unusual devotion to the continuity of the company, by more assiduous nurturing of a community of employees, and by seeking out closer connections with customers to sustain the business. The second perspective is less flattering. It proposes that FOBs are unusually subject to stagnation: they are said to face unique resource restrictions, embrace conservative strategies, eschew growth, and be doomed to short lives. This paper develops and examines the merits of the two perspectives, neither of which has been systematically articulated or researched. It does so in an empirical study of only small firms that are owned and managed by their founder. Within this sample, it compares firms that are FOBs, that is, family owned and managed, with non-FOBs, that is, owned and managed by a founder with no other relative involved in the business. The findings show significant support for all three aspects of the stew- ardship perspective of FOBs, and no support for any elements of the stagnation perspective.

Why Do Some Family Businesses Out‐Compete? Governance, Long‐Term Orientations, and Sustainable Capability

Abstract: This article seeks to link the domains of corporate governance, investment policies, competitive asymmetries, and sustainable capabilities. Conditions such as concentrated ownership, lengthy tenure...

Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy

Abstract: This book explains the transitions in twentieth-century industrial leadership from Britain to the United States and, most recently, to Japan, in terms of the changing business investment strategies and organizational structures in these nations. The author criticizes economists for failing to understand these historical changes. The book shows that this intellectual failure is not inherent in the discipline of economics; there are important traditions in economic thought that the mainstream of the economics profession has simply ignored.

Filling the institutional void: The social behavior and performance of family vs non-family technology firms in emerging markets

Abstract: Family businesses (FBs) are said to treat their employees with unusual consideration to form a cohesive internal ‘‘community’’. They are also claimed to develop deeper, more extensive ‘‘connections’’ or relationships with outside stakeholders. Both behaviors may increase the viability of a business intended to support an owning family and its later generations. Such social linkages, we believe, may compensate for the lack of capital, product and labor institutional infrastructures in dynamic emerging economies. This survey study of a most challenging emerging-market sector, namely Korean hightechnology businesses, argues three major points. (1) Relationships of community and connection will be more common in FBs than in non-FBs. (2) These relationships will enhance performance in emerging-market hightechnology sectors, which, because of their competitive, complex, and everchanging nature, rely on significant expert knowledge and social capital within and outside the organizational community. (3) The performance of FBs will benefit more from these community and connection relationships than the performance of non-FBs, because in these personally intimate settings employees and external partners will be especially likely to return the generosity of a visibly active owning family, or to penalize its selfishness. Significant empirical support was found for most of these hypotheses.

Stewardship or Agency? A Social Embeddedness Reconciliation of Conduct and Performance in Public Family Businesses

Abstract: Two contradictory perspectives of family business conduct and performance are prominent in the literature. The stewardship perspective argues that family business owners and managers will act as farsighted stewards of their companies, investing generously in the business to enhance value for all stakeholders. By contrast, the agency and behavioral agency perspectives maintain that major family owners, in catering to family self-interest, will underinvest in the firm, avoid risk, and extract resources. This paper argues that both these views have application but under different circumstances, determined in part by the degree to which the firm and its executive actors are embedded within the family and thus identify with its interests. Stewardship behavior will be less common, and agency behavior will be more common the greater the number of family directors, officers, generations, and votes, and the more executives are susceptible to family influence. These findings are supported among Fortune 1000 firms, as well as among the subsample of those firms that are family businesses.