Family Businesses in Subsaharan Africa

This book presents methods for dealing with conflict in family firms. The first part of the book defines conflict in general and then in the context of family businesses. It then identifies several approaches to dealing with conflict. As the author makes clear, conflict can negatively impact the performance of a family firm while unresolved conflict often results in unsuccessful transition to the next generation. Therefore, she presents a model that looks at the causes of conflict and ways of resolving it.

The challenge faced by family businesses and their stakeholders, is to recognise the issues that they face, understand how to develop strategies to address them and more importantly, to create narratives, or family stories that explain the emotional dimension of the issues to the family.