Fashions in Doing the Business of Fashion: Insights from Family Firms in Turkish Textile and Clothing Industries

Alper Kayhan

The paper explores the different paradigms in doing business in Turkey, and has its focus on the family firms operating in the textile and clothing industries in that country. It aims to serve scholarship by drawing attention to the gap in the literature on family businesses in Turkey and by proposing a new ontological approach to the study of family businesses, with its call for and practice of analyzing the family and kinship systems prevalent in the society under focus, instead of employing an essentialist, one-size-fits-all definition of the family and of the family business. The research question has been formulated as follows: "What are the characteristics and attributes of Turkish family businesses in the textile and clothing industries, and what relationships, roles, and contributions do family and kinship relations play in the organization and functioning of these businesses?" The study is an inquiry into the family businesses in Turkey and investigates the possible link(s) between the recent socio-economic changes that the country has been going through with its rapid urbanization process, and the family businesses that operate therein, with a particular focus on the family and kinship system.