An Entrepreneurship-as-Practice Perspective on Family Business Successors

Ge, Bingbing and Hamilton, Eleanor and Haag, Kajsa (2023) An Entrepreneurship-as-Practice Perspective on Family Business Successors. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2023 (1). ISSN 0065-0668

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Abstract

Following recent calls to develop the Entrepreneurship-as-Practice perspective, we adopt a practice-based approach to family business to understand processes of next-generation engagement involving multiple individuals over long periods in the family life. Drawing on a culinary family business’s published cookbooks theorized as ‘discursive artefacts’, we examine how next generations become successors through enactment of family business practices. This study contributes to family business research on intragenerational interaction and offers new insights into practice theory-building on the emergent Entrepreneurship-as-Practice perspective. Our findings suggest that family business practices – for example, cooking as an everyday practice embedded in family lives - have three dimensions – socializing, bridging, and leading – that contribute to understanding the development of the next generation as successors.