La métaphore familiale appliquée aux entreprises organisées en groupes de sociétés

This article analyses a very usual metaphor, especially in French : referring to a company that controls another one as a ?mother? or ?parent? company, the one that is controlled as its ?daughter? (subsidiary), and thus thinking of their relationships in terms of kinship and treating all the entities constituting a corporate group as a ?family?. This metaphor is not simply a convenient way of talking about corporations, but more fundamentally a key concept and a coordination tool to ensure the intelligibility and proper functioning of groups that are a particularly sophisticated type of organisation compared to an integrated firm or to independent firms connected by market relations.