The changes in governance structures in Italian family enterprises

In the last decades, Italy has been undergoing a transition period in terms of legal and economic frameworks. All these reforms should have severely affected the corporate governance of Italian family firms. The latter is a key player in the Italian economy in both terms of GDP growth and employment, and as such their existence and efficiency needs to be safeguarded. This can be achieved through the application of a “good” corporate governance structure to the enterprise. The primary goal of this research is to analyze how the Italian family firm’s corporate governance structures have evolved in response to the reforms. Our starting point was a gap in existing knowledge, respectively the real and tangible effects of the reforms on family firms in terms of ownership, corporate governance structures and openness to non-family members. Being the research goal linked to personal experiences, semi-structured interviews were chosen as the best method to gather insights and ten in-depth interviews were conducted with Italian family SME’s. Then a content analysis along with a coding procedure was performed on the transcripts. The latter led to the formation of a table where the formed categories were grouped under four research areas: types of governing bodies in place, the effect of the reforms on the corporate governance method adopted, the effect of the reforms on the ownership concentration, and openness to non-family members. Overall, our research highlights that no profound transformation has happened in corporate governance structures in Italian family firms yet, and there is still room for improvement in terms of investors protection, governing bodies transparency and accountability, governing bodies demographics in terms of presence of women and younger generations, and openness to non -family members in leadership and ownership positions. It is important that these changes are monitored and analysed overtime to gather information on improvements or deterioration of certain corporate governance factors.