Approaches to Succession in East Asian Business Organizations." Family Business Review

By concentrating on the approaches to succession in Japanese and over-seas Chinese family businesses, this article attempts to come to terms with the question of why Japanese firms enjoy corporate longevity while overseas Chinese firms do not. Succession in the overseas Chinese family (coparcenary) is different from succession in Japanese families (primogen-iture) at every relevant point, and these differences have important con-sequences for overseas Chinese family business. The article also discusses economic, historical, and social functions of the two inheritance systems. It is bound to strike us that the Japanese ie belongs to a different world of structure from that of the Chinese chia, even though the two terms are written with the same ideograph.... The ie is a corporate group: it never (in principle) dies. But the chia is in a perpetual state of dissolution, for when the partition of family takes place, none of the resulting units retains the precise identity of the unit from which it springs