Paper short abstract:

Organizations, such as corporations, represent modern society and are concatenate decisions systems, that tend to organize everything around. Certain environments induce family firms to transform into organizations, but in others, they organize around patron/client relations.

Paper long abstract:

States and supranational organizations, such as the European Economic Union, NAFTA and MERCOSUR (American commercial treaties) are great organizations (Luhmann, 2010) that tend to organize productive units so as to have control over them. On the other side, managerial literature tends to affirm that family firms are not productive and have to disappear on behalf of highly organized corporations. Even though, research on family firms shows that even within these tendencies, family firms represent over the 80% of the Spanish firms (Instituto de la empresa familiar española), more than 65% of the Chilean (Martínez Echezárraga) and may be around more than the 95% of the Mexican (Pérez Lizaur,2010). Fieldwork among Mexican, Chilean and Catalonian family firms show different responses and patterns of development in these organized environments and pressures, depending on many sort of strategies. Many family firms tend to find their way so as to cope with supranational and State's organizational policies, on behalf of familiar interests, based in patron/client relationships. These strategies may help family firms to innovate managerial and productive systems. Those firms and families unable to cope with highly organized environments tend to disappear.