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The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse in-depth how family owners develop autonomy through ownership for family members within the family, the family within the business and the business within its context.

A cross-cultural in-depth case study with best practice cases from China, Germany, Sweden, England, Tanzania, Israel and the USA. It was based on in-depth interviews of family members and non-family employees.

A business-owning family has to balance paradoxical choices such as safety or loss of attachments; a stable notion of self or grasping new opportunity; own drive or dependency on others. These constituted the micro-dynamics of autonomy. The macro-outcome of negotiating autonomy was strategy formations such as succession, cluster ownership, stewardship, new business models.

The research findings enable a more differentiated analysis in case studies and qualitative research and with this theory development on family owner motivation.

It will give insight for practitioners, advisors and family owners, on the complexity of maintaining family health, family member commitment and emotional issues when developing ownership strategies.

The paper offers a model over the complexity of autonomy, a main drive for entrepreneurship within our economy. It shows the complexity of gender and life stage choices.

The paper offers a model over the complexity of autonomy, regarded as the main drive for entrepreneurship and family ownership. It shows how this process is fundamental for understanding how the family develops its ownership.

With strategy-as-practice theory the authors explore successful business-owning families hand-over of roles to the next generation. The authors argue for the usefulness of strategy-as-practice theory in exploring the complexity and plurality of best practices in intergenerational hand-over. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A cross-cultural in-depth case study with best practice cases from China, Germany, Sweden, England, Tanzania, Israel and the USA, based on in-depth interviews of family members and non-family employees.

The authors identified three different succession patterns: a “monolithic practice,” a distributed leadership hand-over, and active ownership with a non-family managing director/CEO. Two other types of hand-over practices were categorized as incubator patterns that formed a part of, or replaced, what we traditionally see as a hand-over of roles. Families would switch between these practices.

Surprisingly, a monolithic succession practice (a one-company-one-leadership role) was rarely used. Quantitative and qualitative research should consider, as should advisors to family owners and family businesses, the plurality of succession practices. Education should explore a variation of succession and how the dynamic of gender influences the process.

Giving practitioners, such as research and practitioner, an overview of strategic options so as to explore these in a client or research case.

Adding the notions that the family is an incubator for new entrepreneurship makes it possible to show how not only sector or public policy generate new ventures. That family as source of entrepreneurship has been well established in the field but it mainstream policy thinking the family is not seen as such a source.

The paper offers an integrative model of the complexity of hand-over practices of ownership and leadership roles. It shows how these practices are fundamental for understanding how a family’s ownership and their leadership of businesses and new entrepreneurship develops.