Panel session

Family-owned businesses are acknowledged for their efforts in making collective decisions that influence the life of the owning family and business in different degrees. The responsibility of these firms is commonly linked to family, business, and community. This responsibility encompasses shareholders’ rights and duties over the company ownership and collaboration with stakeholders. Hence, such influence is beginning to be associated with sustainable development and thus, the United Nations 2030 Agenda.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims to advance sustainable business practices. In the same manner, the SDGs aim to foster more research and practice in the family business field employing sustainability as a point of departure.

Thereby, this combined keynote and panel session is organized by the Centre for Family Enterprise and Ownership (CeFEO) to discuss how sustainability guides family business owners to work with the SDGs. Sustainable ownership aims to examine how family business activities influence business practices in consideration of social textures and ecosystems. It also acknowledges that thriving businesses develop ownership and management guided by sustainability. Sustainable ownership thus invites to shift our thinking and work in family businesses by developing social/sustainable practices and innovations. This shift is central to generate changes at the micro-level that gradually stimulate a systemic transformation in companies and industries.

Therefore, we invite you to participate in an interactive session to discuss how sustainability concepts, examples, and perspectives can help resituate the field and practice of ownership and family businesses with sustainability as a base. We open the session with a mini-keynote by Marcela Ramírez-Pasillas followed by a discussion with internationally recognized panelists from CeFEO at Jönköping International Business School, Massimo Bau and Kajsa Haag. The session promotes an agenda that ‘cares for the future’ by lifting cases and examples of sustainable ownership that emphasizes collaborations of the family business with its surrounding university-industry-government-community environment to work on specific SDGs.