American Family Corporate Governance Structure, A Comparative Study

The paper is based on modern enterprise's theory, using such methods as combination of theory and practice, case analysis, comparative analysis and mathematical statistics, etc., is trying to set up the theory frame of enterprise government structure of family firm on the basis of summarizing enterprise management structure theory, the paper has also included a large number of cases of the family firm and compared the difference and its reason of enterprise management structure between Chinese and American family firms to find out the future developing path of the Chinese enterprise management structure of family firms.Family firms are the pillar of the modern American economy, the family firm of U.S.A. has a history of 200 years, many of them are century-old enterprises, for instance: One of five major giants of world industry —Ford Company; the largest chemical company of the most extensive business scope and the longest history in the world —E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company. And American family firm has promoted the development of U.S.A.'s economy, especially the large-scale family firm has made enormous contribution to the improvement of the productivity, For example, the production mode of Ford and management mode of Du Pont, etc. However, after more than 20 years of development, the Chinese family firms, not only met with the problem of being stagnant when they reached the scale of a hundred million yuan, but also the short-lived phenomenon that " each takes the lead for 3 or 5 years". Therefore we should draw lessons from the American family firms and find out the optimum route of sustainable development of Chinese family firms.This paper is divided into four chapters. Chapter one is the theoretical study ,chapter two is comparing study of the characteristics of family firms, chapter three is the analysis of reason that caused the characteristic difference and chapterfour is the conclusion part. The contents of them are as follows:Chapter one ,which offers the theoretical foundation for the full text, is made up of modern enterprise system theory and family firm administration structure concept.Chapter two mainly focuses the comparative study of the management structure characteristics of Chinese and America family firms, which can be divided into two major parts: First, the comparison of power assigning and power exercising mainly focus on the stock right structure and capital structure of Chinese and America family firms; Second, it is the internal and external comparison of control and encouragement of relevant persons and then to draw the conclusion: The decentralization of the stocks of the American family firms , the diversification of the capital structure, specialization of management , effective supervision to the administrator through the way of the outside controlling , are to form the effective integration of social financial capital and social manpower capital. Comparatively speaking, on the whole the stocks of Chinese family firms are relatively convergent, the capital structure of is single, the ownership and right of operation and management have not been separated yet, the decision strength of the board of directors and supervision strength of the board of supervisors are weak, the outside control is very weak yet. Therefore, the Chinese family firm is not open-minded.Chapter three is the reason analysis of the difference of Chinese and America family firm administration structure mainly from the three respects of cultural-historical factor, legal-environmental factor and market environmental factor.Chapter four is the part of conclusion: the development and revolution of the management structure of American family firm show that its success lies in constantly integrating with various kinds of social capital while perfecting the legal policy environment and outside market environment, this is exactly a important insurance of the vigorous development of American family firms. If Chinese familyfirms want to realize the integration of such social capital, they must go through the revolution o...