KEY PRINCIPALS OF FAMILY BUSINESS COMPREHENSION WITH HELP OF THE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Family business is the most extended and permeant form of business over all the history. The issue of family business started to pay attention of scholars relatively a while ago, thus there are some non-clarified points. The purpose of the paper is to investigate definitions of family business and define tendencies in specification of that. For insight into that phenomenon, it was decided to study the historical sources of the family business concept development during the twenty and twenty-thirst century, after evaluate them with the help of Vallone's three key principals of determination of family business. The paper was prepared on the basis of research of the most cited scientific papers relating to the definition of family business with help of general theoretical scientific methods, in particular analysis, synthesis, analogy, comparison, generalizations, deduction and methods of expert estimates. As a result, it was found, that majority of family business definitions were created based on ownership criteria, the second most popular criteria is family members' involvement in the business. The third offered criteria "intention to the succession" was used the least, despite that, criteria contribute to investigate the small and micro-family-owned enterprises. Although, for facilitation the identification of a family business with the help of the third criteria, it was suggested to examine a family ties of family business. The results of this study have allowed the finding of a definition for the family business, thereby, the structure of family ties of the biggest Czech family companies was determined.