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1. Introduction
The family office (FO) “is usually analyzed as a family governance mechanism. The traditional concept of an FO is that of a business managed by and for a family. Its main function is to centralize management of the family assets, and its financial resources come from the entrepreneurial family's capital, which has often been built up over generations” (Rivo-López et al., 2017, p. 262).
Any phenomenon that we find today exists because at some point, it arose in the past. No fact of the present can be explained or understood without outlining its origins and evolution. In the scarce literature on FOs (mostly in the framework of family business governance), there are disputes regarding their origins and subsequent development. Some authors trace them back to the major domus of ancient Rome (Amit et al., 2008), and others to the creation of European private banks (Decker and Lange, 2013) or the years following the Industrial Revolution in the USA (Rosplock, 2014; Welsh et al., 2013). Another report establishes FOs' roots in the 6th century and the modern concept of them in the 19th century with the House of Morgan (Bierl and Kammerlander, 2019). For this reason, we believe that the origin and subsequent evolution of FOs should be studied to understand and apprehend these organizations today (Foster et al., 2017).
Moreover, in the literature on FOs, there is no explicit reference to a specific theory (Decker and Lange, 2013; Fernández-Moya and Castro-Balaguer, 2011; Gilding, 2005), although some authors use the agency theory (Wessel et al., 2014) or stewardship theory perspective (Welsh et al., 2013). None, however, use the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective as a theoretical framework to explain the establishment of an FO by a business family. By setting up an FO, family members intend to stay together, continue their family legacy, preserve their family identity and reengage entrepreneurial endeavors (Lumpkin et al., 2010; Suess-Reyes, 2017; Zellweger et al., 2012). Motivations are linked to the preservation of the family's SEW (Bierl and Kammerlander, 2019), which refers to “non-financial aspects of the firm that meet the family's affective needs, such as identity, the ability to exercise family influence, and the perpetuation of the family dynasty” (Gómez-Mejía et...