Abstract
Business families control substantial private wealth globally, deploying resources across multiple organizational forms: legacy businesses, family offices, foundations, and investment vehicles. Yet we know little about why families own together across diverse entities.
This dissertation proposes the concept of family ownership purpose: an active, sustained, and shared commitment among multigenerational business family members to create, develop, and manage multiple organizations through their ownership and governance rights, balancing economic and societal value creation. Family ownership purpose operates through authority to create entities, control over strategic direction, and continuity across generations. This distinguishes it from organizational purpose, which assumes single entities, and family purpose, which addresses shared values without requiring organizational governance.
Through four complementary studies examining family offices and family boundary organizations, the dissertation identifies four pathways through which family ownership purpose develops: managing legacy imprints when creating new entities, aligning objectives among co-owners, formalizing personal interests into collective commitments, and creating supportive structures for transgenerational participation.
The dissertation makes three theoretical contributions. First, it introduces purpose at the collective ownership level, extending organizational purpose research beyond single entities and managerial perspectives. Second, it identifies ownership continuity as the mechanism through which purpose transcends organizational boundaries, persisting even when individual entities fail. Third, it advances understanding of family-related ecosystems by examining how purpose develops at the collective ownership level across multiple entities, rather than within single organizations.