The affective extension of ‘Family’ in the context of changing elite business networks

Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects

Regional economic performance and the differential prevalence of corporate and family business

Previous studies have largely examined interregional variations of SME rather than family firm concentrations. This paper addresses this gap through an analysis of firm type indicators across Europe from the Eurostat Data Base, using social, economic and demographic statistics at the NUTS 2 regional level to ascertain the nature, prevalence and regional contexts of family firm concentrations. Hierarchical clustering is performed to map the regional distribution of European family business. Results show that the co-existence of family SMEs with large firms is negatively related to regional economic performance, and this variation has implications for our understanding of the survival and strategic behaviour of family firms. The study promotes a new family business ‘in context’ than ‘by context’ point of view and paves the way for further empirical work with interregional family business data at various spatial levels

Family business as a longstanding hybrid organisation: Logic revision as a strategy for maintenance

Hybrid organisations, organisational forms that combine multiple institutional logics, have recently attracted substantial scholarly attention. Ongoing maintenance of hybridity has been identified as a key challenge for hybrid organisations. This paper puts forward family businesses that integrate family and business logics as the world’s oldest and the most pervasive form of hybrid organisation, and explores their organisational maintenance strategies for sustaining such hybridity. Based on an oral history study of longstanding family businesses in Scotland, we propose ‘logic revision’, i.e. a socially constructed and evolving reinterpretation of logics, as another strategy for organisational maintenance in the hybrid organisational context. As opposed to the known strategies of decoupling, compromising, structural separation and selective coupling that rely on the deterministic properties of institutional logics, this strategy draws on their socially constructed nature

Multi-layered socialization processes in transgenerational family firms

Building on an in-depth case study of a four-generational Scottish family firm, we generate a triple-layered model of socialization. Our findings go beyond the traditional focus on internal family socialization and value transmission, and suggest that socialization involves three concentric layers unfolding over time, each with a distinct set of dimensions, values, challenges and processes: internal (transmitting knowledge within the family), interactive (resolving competing role demands through peer interactions) and experiential (interacting with both peer groups and malleable societal/economic frames). This novel theorization provides a promising framework for future research seeking to explain the complexities of socialization processes in transgenerational family firms

Microfinance and small business development in a transitional economy: Insights from borrowers’ relations with microfinance organisations in Kazakhstan

Microfinance is seen as an important vehicle for developing small businesses in developing and transitional economies despite the relative absence of supporting research. We use mixed methods to offer a nuanced empirical exploration of the relationship between microfinance and everyday entrepreneurial practice(s) in Kazakhstan. As in many transitional contexts, ‘unbankable’ borrowers here operate in a vibrant informal sector, face high degrees of uncertainty, and retain a strong distrust of a corrupt/predatory state. Our data-based methodology for analysing borrowers’ diverse relationships with microfinance organisations (MFOs) generates insights into their multiple pathways to business development. Both ‘outreach’ and ‘commercialised’ MFOs sustain micro-flows of resources that are critical for everyday entrepreneurs who need to finance ongoing consumption and contingencies whilst also (and by) building up their small businesses. Microfinance use did not promote formalisation or impersonalised banking relationships. Instead, MFOs focused primarily on repayment, clients’ businesses remained partially formalised or unregistered across all stages of growth and the lending relationships preferred by Private MFOs and borrowers were highly personalised. Consequently, we call for assumptions about how microfinance can (and should) drive small business development need to be rethought for transitional contexts

Migration, meaning(s) of place and implications for rural innovation policy

Advocates of rural innovation policy argue that understanding innovation through the eyes of local dwellers, offers an alternative to theorisations focusing on proximity and clustering. The paper furthers this agenda, suggesting that heterogeneity within rural communities, which is the outcome of differential meanings assigned to place by entrepreneurs with distinct migratory experiences, influences innovation. Specifically, it produces an innovation basis broader than expected given the effects of distance and low business densities. This supports the pursuit of diversification policies, the leveraging of knowledge resources, particularly transient and new, beyond the individual enterprise, and the engagement of diverse entrepreneurial actors in policy-development

Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels' experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch’s authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship