Business Elites and Family Capitalism. The Case of the Swiss Metallurgy Industry during the 20th Century

The aim of this contribution is to highlight the long-term evolution of family capitalism in Switzerland during the 20th century. Using a large database on Swiss elites including the members of the 110 largest Swiss firms, this research focuses on a sample of 22 big companies of the machine, electro-technical and metallurgy (thereafter mem) sector, whose board of administration and general directors (634 persons) have been identified for five benchmarks across the 20th century (1910, 1937, 1957, 1980 and 2000). The contribution develops then around two main aims. The first one is to identify the degree of family capitalism for each company and each year, in order to highlight the evolution of this form of corporate governance during the whole century. For this purpose, we take up the distinction made by other authors between family-owned and family-controlled firms. This allows us to show the strong persistence of family capitalism in the mem sector until the 1980s, and then its relative decline at the end of the century. Second, we focus more specifically on the question of the control of the firms, with an analysis of the educational profile of the actors holding a decisive executive function in our 22 companies (195 persons). The main objective of this section is, first, to highlight the long-term evolution of their education, and, second, to determine if the educational profile of the heirs of family firms differs from the one of the “outside directors”. This allows us to show that family members are in general highly qualified, their educational background being quite similar to the one of “outside directors”. In other words, being an heir do not exempt them from getting a qualified training in order to accede to decisive executive functions in the family business.

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