[17] ... There is also of course, an extensive literature which emphasises the inherent weaknesses of family firms and their inability to adapt to the pressures of competition and change. The declining numbers of such firms in the twentieth century have been interpreted as evidence of an inability to compete with the large, modern corporations in which widely dispersed shareholding has been professional, salaried managers working within extensive administrative hierarchies. A similar interpretation, associated particularly with Elbaum and Lazonick, has concluded that from the late nineteenth century successful competitive economic performance in the international arena depended on the replacement of the institutions of traditional competitive capitalis by large-scale corporate enterprise on the Chandler model. From their perspective, the survival of family firms, conservative and resistant in the face of pressures for change, are seen to be both symptomatic and a cause of the institutional sclerosis that afflicted British industry from the late nineteenth century. [B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick (eds.), The Decline of the British Economy (Oxford, 1986).] ....