The impact of professional associations on the education, learning and action of policymakers with regard to family enterprises

The paper studies the role of family business professional associations in the European context. We focus on two key family business professional associations, a national association in Spain (Instituto de la Empresa Familiar, IEF) and a European association (European Family Business, EFB) that represents several national associations in Europe. This association is devoted to increase awareness among policy makers of the importance of family businesses in the European economy and to press for policies and actions that can benefit family businesses . Additionally, in understanding whether there has been a change of discourse on family businesses at the European macro level, we studied hundreds of documents from the EU Commission to observe if there was such a change.