Varieties of Family Business compares the institutional and cultural environment that family businesses faced in the United States and in Germany from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The book adds an in-depth case study to the Varieties of Capitalism literature that explores the evolution and causes of institutional similarities and differences between (developed) capitalist societies.

The book consists of six chapters organized along analytical lines; within a chapter, the authors then proceed chronologically. The opening chapter describes the long-term trends and diverging path dependencies in the United States and Germany. In this chapter, Hartmut Berghoff and Ingo Köhler conclude that family control of corporations was (and still is) more prevalent in Germany than in the United States. By contrast, U.S. companies more often turned to capital market financing and were managed by professional managers. In addition, family businesses in Germany appear to be older on average than those in the United States.

The chapter does a decent job of highlighting the structural similarities and differences of corporate governance between the two nations. However, it struggles with two problems that have consequences for further reading. First, as in many other studies, the authors face the problem of an accurate definition of what constitutes a family business (must it be multigenerational or just family managed?). An even more critical problem is that statistical surveys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries collected capital and employee numbers of companies but did not capture ownership structures and forms of governance. Therefore, the chapter mainly refers to current surveys—for example, the Global Family Business Index by EY and the University of St. Gallen. This data allows statements about the distribution and age of family businesses that survived until the 2010s; however, it does not identify whether and how the distribution of family businesses shifted over the study period.

The authors recognize the problem and supplement their analysis with studies that collect data for earlier years. Unfortunately, though, these must remain incomplete. It is relevant to note, however, that the scattered evidence suggests that commonalities between the two countries prevailed until the early twentieth century. For example, in the United States, a stronger trend toward capital-market-financed managerial enterprises can only be observed from the 1930s onward. At the same time, Germany's organizational form of the family business remained strong, even increasing in the crisis-ridden middle of the century. The decades from 1930 to 1960 thus seem to be a crucial turning point that deserves even more attention in future research.

The following three chapters explain the observed pattern focusing on inheritance law, corporate governance, and promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through economic policy. Neither of the two countries directed economic policy explicitly to family businesses, instead sponsoring SMEs, a portion of which were family run. However, it is unclear how high this share was in each case. Therefore, the differences in inheritance law and capital market development seem to have the most explicative power. While German inheritance law had many exceptions that favored family members, U.S. inheritance taxes were almost confiscatory at times (in particular, the 1940s to the 1970s). These differences had deep cultural roots. In the United States, meritocratic values dominated, while in Germany, group identities were much more robust.

In the United States, entrepreneurs also had better access to capital markets, and incorporation rules facilitated the formation of corporations. Strict disclosure requirements and investor protection enforced by the stock exchanges supplemented these rules. In Germany, in contrast, universal banks dominated corporate finance, incorporation rules were stricter, and investor protection was feebler. Berghoff and Köhler present the traditional picture of capital market development in the two countries. However, more recent research has shown that differences in capital market development and investor protection were less pronounced around 1900. It was not until the 1930s that the development paths diverged more sharply. The authors could have emphasized this development more strongly.

The three chapters give the impression that the institutional differences between the two countries were most remarkable during the deglobalization period. However, with the renewed wave of globalization starting in the 1980s, there was more and more (institutional) convergence.

The last two chapters discuss path dependencies and corporate cultures. In contrast to the former chapters, they concentrate on cultural values and macroeconomic conditions. Although both countries had favorable conditions for family businesses, the authors argue that they followed different paths resulting in the differences described in the first chapter. Greater political stability, larger economic output, and the early emergence of a consumer society destabilized family business cultures in the United States. In Germany, in contrast, the upheavals of the early twentieth century and the lag of an affluent consumer society until the second half of the twentieth century restabilized family business cultures.

The last two chapters are somewhat disjointed from the others. Differences in corporate culture are also an expression of corporate governance structures and are also part of the phenomenon that needs an explanation. I therefore suggest reading the last chapter immediately after the first and then returning to the remaining analytical chapters.

Overall, the book provides a decent overview of research on family businesses in the United States and Germany. The book is particularly welcome as a meta-study of family businesses and their cultural and institutional framework. This innovative approach has hardly been pursued yet, especially in German business history, and it would be desirable that more such studies follow.