ACROSS THE GENERATIONS: AN EXPLORATION OF INTERGENERATIONAL INFLUENCE AND ENTREPRENEURIAL LEARNING IN A FAMILY BUSINESS
Eleanor Hamilton, Lancaster University Management School
Principal Topic
The family business literature is largely dominated by managerialist, functionalist perspectives which seek to separate elements of the family and the business and analyse them using rational, positivist approaches with a view to informing and improving organisational efficiency and effectiveness. In contrast, this study adopts an alternative, interpretivist perspective. It is part of a wider research study focusing on understanding the nature of the influence between successive generations. This study seeks to explore the links between the past and the future, concentrating on the shared, but different, experience of individuals from two generations.
Method
A phenomenological approach was adopted for the interviews. This generated narrative accounts of a family business, as told by the father who founded the business and by the son who took over and runs the business today as Managing Director. The recordings and transcripts were then treated as ‘life stories’ and analysed using a framework originally proposed to explore how such narratives help to create and unify identity, and how that might inform our understanding of succession in family business.
Results and Implications
The ‘life stories’ revealed a reality of the family firm embracing powerful issues: family and personal identity; power and control; work and wealth creation; the past, the present and the future. These themes are embedded in the experience of families who own and manage businesses spanning more than one generation. A link between the personal identity of the individuals and that of the business emerged. As the participants constructed the narrative which made sense of their experience, their own development and identity appeared inextricably linked to the way the business was operated. Discontinuity and difference rather than continuity was revealed as a necessary part of succession given that the business must operate in the social, technological, economic and cultural climate of a new generation. Explicit management practices, such as ways of dealing with suppliers, could be identified as having been learned, together with the less obvious but perhaps as important role of another family member as ‘sounding board.’ Thus, this study demonstrates that new approaches to studying succession and entrepreneurial learning may enrich our understanding of those processes.
CONTACT: Eleanor Hamilton, Entrepreneurship Unit, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK; (T) +44 1524 594727; (F) +44 1524 592652; e.hamilton@lancaster.ac.uk
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