Case Studies, Movies, TV Shows and Other Family Business Resources

The demand for family business education is soaring around the globe, and several higher education institutions are introducing new courses and programs that focus on this dominant type of business organization. Yet, as we discuss in our recent Academy of Management Learning & Education article, universities and teachers have yet to realize the full spectrum of resources available to help them develop and deliver family business education programs.

Current trends in higher education are emphasizing “experiential learning” and technology to enable online, hybrid and collaborative learning. This means that we need to look beyond the traditional textbook and embrace the potential benefits of using a more varied set of resources in the classroom and online learning environments. This motivated us to develop a list that organizes and maps existing learning resources for family business education at undergraduate, masters and executive levels. 

Our list includes webinars, television shows, Ted Talks, magazines, movies and case studies. The list is intended to be especially useful for instructors teaching stand-alone family business courses or emphasizing family business issues in other core management courses. It is just a starting point; much much more remains to be done to develop new resources, map resources available around the world, and develop guidelines for their use in the classroom. We invite family business educators to expand and further enhance the pool of learning resources available for family business education. 

Acknowledgements 

We would like to thank Carlotta Benedetti, PhD Student at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, for her excellent work in helping us to update the lists of movies and teaching cases for family business education. We also gratefully acknowledge the scholars involved in the FERC community for their helpful inputs and feedback. Finally, we are thankful to FamilyBusiness.org for the attention paid to this project, which we feel important for one of the core activities of our mission as family business professors, i.e. the education of the young and senior generations of family business owners and managers. 

References

De Massis, A., Kotlar, J. (2015). Learning resources for family business education: A review and directions for future developments. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 14(3), 415-422.

On the Small Screen

Teachers can find webinars, webcasts and short video-clips made available by the Business Families Foundation, the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise and the Family Firm Institute. The BBC series Hidden Histories: Britain's Oldest Family Businesses includes three documentaries about the extraordinary history of Britain’s longest-running family businesses. Moreover, teachers can use material from many TV shows such as Arrested Development, The Sopranos, The Sons of Anarchy, and most recently, HBO’s Succession, as well as some animated sitcoms such as Bob's Burgers.

Table 1: Selected List of TV Series for Family Business Education

TED Talks

We also identified some TED talks that can be useful to appreciate and grasp a number of family business topics, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Selected List of TED Talks for Family Business Education

Magazines

Magazines can be a very valuable resource for family business education. They give students direct access to updated information on current issues relevant to family businesses, as well as many real case examples. Magazines also provide more international perspectives and expert opinions, covering a very broad range of topics and geographical regions. They can be particularly useful for experiential learning. Magazines can be used by educators in a number of ways -- for instance in “blended teaching” initiatives in which a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction is replaced by learning based on magazine extracts to infuse real-world, practice-oriented learning opportunities into established theory- and notion-based courses.

A growing number of published magazines explicitly focus on family businesses, such as Campden FB, Family Business Agenda, Family Business Magazine, Tharawat magazine and The Practitioner. Moreover, general business magazines increasingly feature family business articles, including Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Finally, teachers can benefit from articles published in blogs and forums with the focus on family business, such as the Family Firm Institute (FFI), Family Business Place, Family Business United, Family Business Network (FBN), Family Business Wiki, the International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA), and the Institute for Family Business (IFB) Forum.

On the Big Screen

Teachers rely increasingly on films in their classes, and their use will become even more frequent as experiential learning continues to grow. Benefits include increasing students’ attention and helping them visualize theoretical concepts and issues. This is likely to be particularly valuable in family business courses, as films can depict the many intangible and often sensitive and private aspects of managing family businesses. In our survey of existing courses around the world, we found a broad spectrum of sources for firms that can be used in family business education.  

Below is a list of 44 movies that can be useful for engaging students in discussions about family business issues.

Table 3: Selected List of Movies for Family Business Education

Teaching Case Studies

An increasing number of business schools rely on case studies as a primary means for delivering education contents, which emerges as important means to help students link theory and practice. Real-life case studies can help improve students’ ability to match theories and models commonly taught in the classroom to actual problem situations, and to learn how to address them. Case studies are likely to be particularly well suited for family business education, as examining the case of “others” offers a privileged opportunity to safely address sensitive and private issues.  

In our review, we identified 59 case studies. Table 4 lists these case studies. In order to facilitate search and selection, the table reports the title of each case study, source, industry, geography, firm age, and the topics addressed in each case study. These cases can be used to teach a variety of family business topics to undergraduate, graduate and executive education classes.

Table 4: Selected Case Studies for Family Business Education

Additional Search Terms: entrepreneurship courses, teaching ideas, teaching resources, classroom ideas, entrepreneurship classes, business schools, business school classes, entrepreneurship students, professors