Women rarely pursue me the way they did recently in São Paulo airport. I was heading home after a week in Brazil, my luggage too tightly packed to fit a large, document folder embedded with 12 multicoloured, miniature flip-flops. This mini-footwear turned out to be female catnip: several women stopped to ask where I had got the folder. I had to explain that it had been a gift from a local, family-run company, Camargo Corrêa, which owns businesses ranging from cement, to the manufacture of footwear—including global Brazilian flip-flop brand Havaianas.

While my female admirers were fascinated by the container, my interest was in the documents, which explained the company's position on sustainable business. In the past, few family firms controlled this sort of brand. Now, as globalisation becomes increasingly driven by the emerging economies, particularly in countries such as Brazil and India, we must lift the lid to see whether these family-run firms are better or worse at handling the corporate responsibility and sustainability challenges.

Activists and the corporate and social responsibility (CSR) "industry" have tended to focus their campaigns on publicly listed companies, partly because such businesses have had the scale to create globally visible problems, but also because campaigners have discovered that corporate reputations could be used against those who owned them. As one Greenpeace director put it in the wake of Shell's mishaps in 1995, discovering the power of targeting brands was like "discovering gunpowder". Given the low levels of transparency in the average family firm, can we really hope to hold such companies to account in the same way?

At Camargo Corrêa, the drive to engage in CSR comes from its family shareholders. Among those I spoke to were sustainability champion Renata Camargo Nascimento, whose father founded the firm, and her daughter Luiza, part of the third generation working in various roles across the group.

The third generation is often the one responsible for bringing the rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory to its shuddering denouement. But today's third generation are likely to have trained at Harvard or Stanford and will be engaged with at least some aspects of the CSR and sustainability agendas. It will be fascinating to watch as they grow their businesses with a very different sense of ownership and timescale to most of today's short-lived CEOs.