This paper analyzes the family business as an organizational entity and as a proprietary form useful to transmit personal values and company assets to the next generations. This paper aims to introduce the legal instruments in Italy to transfer family businesses and to evaluate how these are useful for ensuring not only the survival of the company in the market but also that family values and characteristics pass from one generation to the next maintaining a prosocial humanistic management perspective. The (...) legal status of the family business and the fact that most small- and medium-sized companies in Italy are not listed, which considerably affects disclosure obligations and makes it more challenging to get consistent and reliable information at affordable costs, has to date limited research on this model. In recent years, given their growth in size and market share, the strategic potential of family businesses was recognized by both academics and practitioners, giving rise to further study. A primary goal of a family business is to maintain its competitive advantage in the market and pass down its values in the succession line. Hence, one of the most important themes on which scholars focused has been how this process takes place to ensure continuity. This paper argues that the trust and the family pact are both valid legal instruments to this end, albeit with different advantages depending on the circumstances surrounding the succession. (shrink)

This article focuses on the concept of worldviews, arguing that a change in managerial worldviews is the key lever for addressing the social and global challenges facing humanity. We draw from a new synthesis of science and spirituality, with the addition of “other ways of knowing” that go beyond rational-empirical analysis, to suggest that what we call Quantum Worldviews are capable of generating the prosocial and pro-environmental behavior consistent with humanistic management. Using the yin-yang symbol as a metaphor, we suggest (...) that a transformation in consciousness, at the level of the paradigmatic assumptions held by managers about the nature of reality, can be understood through adult development theory. We also go beyond the metaphor to propose a quantum worldview based on a more literal interpretation of quantum science to fundamentally re-conceptualize what it means to be human, drawing on quantum research that suggests ontological wholeness and interdependence of all. Quantum Worldviews can help leaders, and the various systems of which they are a part, transition to a new science-based consciousness - long intuited by indigenous and nonwestern spiritual leaders - of an interconnected and dynamically coherent world. We identify a variety of practices that give managers a direct experience of Oneness, changing who they are at the deepest level of self-concept. Our research suggests that only when using such practices, and in sufficient numbers, will business leaders become agents of world benefit with the collective influence to bring about meaningful solutions to climate change and other wicked problems—in other words, needed system transformation. (shrink)