Family businesses represent the driving force in Slovenian and in the global economy. They are a form of companies where the opposing systems of family and business values are intertwined. The family has to know how to harmonize and balance both sets of values successfully. Their main characteristic is including the family in the operations of the company. In order for the family business to survive, the founder has to choose his or her successor at the time of him or her conducting business already. He or she has to train and introduce the successor in the business. The essential factor here is the long-term process of socialization of children in the company. The process of socialization in the company is a consecutive process of specialized knowledge and experiences which the children gain from their parents by an intermediate observation, imitation, exercise, and experimenting from their childhood on, for they have contacts with the company since their youth. The knowledge in the company is the essential source of competition and successfulness of the company. Therefore, physical proximity to the company and aspiration towards the success of the company is essential for the good transfer of knowledge from the parents to the children. In my bachelor’s thesis, I verified the ascertainments from the literature from the first, theoretical part of the thesis on the case of the family business in the empirical part. I focused mostly on the process of the transfer of the knowledge from the father – the founder and the present owner to the son – the heir of the family business who has been included in the operations of the company in various ways since the childhood.
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