| 26. |
- Sandino Vargas, Enrique
(författare)
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Capturing the antecedents and aftermath of a family business process : The entrepreneurial journey of a displaced agricultural family in Colombia
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study examines a displaced agricultural family during its entrepreneurial journey in Colombia using a single case study, following an inductive and interpretivist approach. The main objective of the dissertation is to explain how family interactions, historical events, and context influence the decision to start and potentially reactivate an agricultural family business. It adopts the family as a unit of analysis for examining the intergenerational dynamics between spouses and siblings, parents, and offspring, and explores the family’s influence on decisions about creating a farming business, being forced to leave the land, and using the restituted land to potentially reactive the family business. The case study was conducted between 2016 and 2019 and includes a snapshot visit to the field, face-to-face interviews with members of three generations of the Cabrera family and other stakeholders, as well as abundant secondary materials. The snapshot visit to Colombia was important for obtaining sensitivity and an understanding of the displaced agricultural family on its land and the violence and crime that its members were e-posed to. The study adopts a narrative approach for presenting the accounts of the second and third-generation members. It adopts a window of time of the family-life context from 1958 to 2019. Family members’ life stories highlight critical events during the entrepreneurial Journey of the displaced agricultural family.Following the family through its life context, this study interprets the agricultural family members’ accounts of the formation of the family and its business, its land, displacement from the land, restitution of the land, and the potential reactivation of the business against the backdrop of violence, crime, and land evictions in the country. The Cabrera family’s entrepreneurial journey is interpreted along four phases making sense of the family history.The study extends habitualization as a perspective for addressing the underlying processes that influenced the family’s entrepreneurial Journey before the family created its family business and after the business exit. The habitualization perspective is interpreted considering how the family built its family capital and familiness. Familiness’ products, the family habitus, and the family business habitus are housed in the family’s experiences and knowledge. During its entrepreneurial Journey as a displaced agricultural family, the family also adopted different organizational forms, for instance, becoming a family or starting a family business, and as a result, gained the attributes of the transition affecting the construction of what constitutes its family habitus and the family business habitus. This dissertation proposes that the habitualization perspective can help us better understand the entrepreneurial Journeys of displaced agricultural families. Habitualization provides a bridge connecting a family’s past with its present and future. Recognizing the contextual circumstances, habitualization allows us to communicate a family’s past and its relation to the land, the former family business, and its familiness with the possibility of reactivating the farming business on its land or the family’s involvement in new businesses. Then, the familiness will not be lost in the past. In this way, the e-perience and knowledge of family members involved in the family business work for the benefit of the entrepreneurial activity and give the former family business a new and broader dimension of development.This dissertation also sheds light on the entrepreneurial journey of creating and recreating family dynamics around the possibility of starting and potentially reactivating a family business considering the family’s land and observing the effects of its contextual circumstances. Taking into account that the family clings to the family business for developing the family business habitus, the influence of the family business gains a greater scope, suggesting that the family business exerts a positive influence on the family and its interactions in favor of entrepreneurship and the family business. Finally, this study draws attention to the importance of displaced agricultural families in developing countries as a relevant phenomenon for studies on family businesses in circumstances surrounded by violence and crime. Considering that agriculture is a representative activity with family involvement in business and close interactions within the family, it is important to investigate this aspect more.
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| 27. |
- Sindambiwe, Pierre
(författare)
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The challenges of continuity in family businesses in Rwanda
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Focusing on a developing country, this study investigates how an owning family builds its business’ continuity. While scholars of family businesses tend to depict the continuity of a family firm in terms of family succession, preserving the family legacy, or the firm’s longevity, in the social context of a developing country that is dominated by instability and hostility, family firms are subject to day-by-day survival risks. My approach is viewing family businesses’ continuity as day-by-day survival for the sake of ensuring the long-term orientation of the family businesses in the context of a developing country. The family is situated in a broader social context, and therefore the business is embedded in the family’s social networks that cannot be detached from the country’s social context. The developing country context is important because of its culture, politics, and history that differ from a developed world.In this thesis, the continuity of family businesses is understood as: (1) sustaining the family’s legacy coming of the founder’s achievements, (2) succession, sustaining the business beyond the founder’s tenure, and ensuring that both the family and business stay together, and (3) longevity, ensuring a long-term orientation which is a crucial characteristic of all family businesses. This last category is relevant to this thesis because long-term orientation is achieved through futurity, persistence, and continuity patterns. This thesis focuses on continuity as daily and short-term survival to ensure the long-term orientation of a family business. Different theoretical lenses including portfolio literature, socialization literature, and commitment literature were tried for in this thesis. Commitment literature was found binding both portfolio and socialization literature. And therefore, commitment literature was considered reliable for understanding the challenges of family businesses’ continuity. Using commitment literature, this study uses data collected from founder-led business families in Rwanda and investigates how the commitments of actors at multiple levels affects the day-by-day survival of family businesses.The thesis follows a qualitative approach with multiple cases of research design. It uses data from six founder-led business families in Rwanda. It follows the interview approach and uses the INVIVO program to code the transcribed data. The phenomenon of how the family built its business’ continuity is investigated following a multi-level analysis, that is, how each level affected the continuity of the family business or individual, family, and business levels in a business family. The individual level has founders, next generation members, women, in-laws, and non-family employees (Sharma, 2004). It uses the grounded theory for elaborating on matters arising when investigating the continuity of family businesses (see Figure 6.1). A family business’ continuity model is built to map ‘how’ a family builds its business continuity as well as ‘what’ is the expected role played by each level (see Figure 7.1), and a day-by-day continuity model of the family business is crafted to understand the mechanisms behind its day-by-day continuity (see Figure 7.2).The findings of this thesis show clearly that family businesses in Rwanda are focused on preserving their firms for retaining the family legacy, but unfortunately, they are unable to plan for a long-term legacy. I posit that short-term survival, repeatedly, will lead to long-term survival and, subsequently, to longevity. The findings highlight the role of the specific context and associated cultural aspects of continuity in family businesses. The three aggregate dimensions developed present three main challenges to the continuity of family businesses in Rwanda. First, due to Rwandan cultural obligations of inheritance by the next generation, both the founding generation and the next generations are committed to family businesses’ continuity. Unfortunately, there is a detachment among generations in Rwanda, which is contrary to the cooperation expected in family businesses. Second, the uncertainties and inertia resulting from the absence of co-ownership and the inter-generational distance due to cultural aspects lead to separate and parallel planning for businesses’ continuity. Third, when it comes to the involvement in the management of family businesses, inter-generational conflicts and uncertainties result in weak family embeddedness that may push some family members away from the family businesses. This situation is a challenge because the absence of co-management between the incumbents and the next generation is abnormal since both parties, like dancing partners, need to manage the transition.Ignoring the three challenges that they face, business families in Rwanda strive for continuity through (1) created and protected family legacy, (2) created inner cohesion among the next generation’s members, (3) in-laws and non-family members assimilated into the family business, (4) the family forming norms for succession, governance, and order-conflict processes, and (5) the family business’ resilience maintained for the family and community. Missing this mindset of planning for the long-term explains why many business families in Rwanda fail to continue after the founder’s tenure. There are many reasons for not planning for the long-term. In this thesis, the factors in a family business’ continuity are linked to (a) the family setting and the social capital of both direct and invisible members that ensures on-going activities of the family business; (b) the cultural setting related to inheritance management, heirship/legal ownership succession, family chieftaincy retention, and leadership succession, and (c) the institutional uncertainty and Ubuntu or a communitarianist nature of family firms as a way of living in a developing country making it difficult to plan for the long term.This study contributes to an understanding of the heterogeneity of contexts in family business research. It will also assist owners and practitioners operating in changing environments to design informed continuity plans that have the potential to ensure the survival of family businesses in Rwanda. Theoretically, the study concludes that a commitment to continuing family businesses is shared by different levels in business families, but each level has one primary form of commitment and many forms of secondary commitment for the continuity of family businesses. There is a fluidity in commitment among multiple levels in business families.
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| 28. |
- Umulisa, Yvonne
(författare)
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The prospects for the East African Monetary Union : An empirical analysis
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis operationalizes the theory of optimum currency areas, which describes the preconditions (criteria) that countries must fulfill prior to forming a monetary union. In light of the different dimensions of the theory that are examined, the empirical findings from the four papers in this thesis seem to favor forming a monetary union among East African Community (EAC) partner states. Hence, the findings are important for EAC policymakers, as they decided to participate in a monetary union by 2024.The first paper uses a gravity model to determine to what extent membership in the EAC has affected intraregional trade. One common argument is that if there is not much trade between EAC member countries, there is no interest in forming a monetary union. The paper implements the fixed effect filter estimator, which uses a two-step approach and has better performance than the standard fixed effect estimator. The empirical findings in this paper show that EAC membership has a positive and significant effect on intra-trade among member countries. The second paper investigates business cycle synchronization and core-periphery patterns. Greater synchronization is needed for an easy transition towards monetary union. Unlike previous studies, this paper uses wavelet decomposition, a powerful tool for analyzing the comovement of business cycles. It is found that business cycle synchronization is more significant for Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, the countries that also form the core of the East African Monetary Union.The link between business cycle synchronization and trade intensity among EAC countries is established in the third paper. This analysis is relevant, as it is associated with the hypothesis of the endogeneity of the optimum currency area criteria, whereby a monetary union among member countries is predicted to increase trade among them, which, in turn, may lead to more synchronized business cycles. The empirical findings show that trade intensity among the considered countries has indeed led to more synchronized business cycles, suggesting that monetary union among EAC countries may be beneficial.Moreover, the fourth and last paper uses a similarity index and a rank correlation measure, Kendall’s tau, to investigate the movement of inflation rates among EAC countries. The results show that changes in inflation have become more similar over time and that there are high correlations between EAC countries. This paper also investigates the convergence in inflation rate levels among the EAC countries. It is found that these levels have tendency to converge. These findings favor the formation of a monetary union among these countries.
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| 29. |
- Wielsma, Albertha
(författare)
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To be or not to be a family firm : An exploration of identity management in business families
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation comprises of a cover and four separate articles, which, together, aim to advance understanding of identity processes in family firms, specifically regarding the connection of family and firm identity. This connection can have advantages and disadvantages for both the family and the firm. However, identities, whether on individual, group or organizational level, are not static, so there is no reason to assume that the connection between the identities in family firms is static.With the goal to explore how and why business families manage the identity connection between family and firm, a longitudinal case study was conducted in which 13 family firms in the hospitality sector in the Netherlands participated. The analysis is anchored in the related theoretical concepts of identity and reputation and literature from the field of psychology.The review of the family firm literature in paper 1 shows that reputation can be seen as a key construct from various perspectives and that it is strongly connected to family firm literature about identity, goal setting, and the behavior of family firms. The empirical findings in paper 2, 3, and 4 show that a family firm identity, and the maintenance of the connection between family and firm, can have a profound effect on identity processes on individual, family and firm level. Perceived incongruences within and between these levels are incentives for owners to renegotiate how these levels are connected, although this does not have to be a conscious process. This renegotiation can include a change in identity to restore congruence. Perceptions about both external and internal stakeholders play a very important part in the degree to which and the way in which owners connect the family identity to the firm identity. Six interrelated dimensions of identity connection management were identified.The dissertation contributes to the family firm literature by offering explanations for the management of the identity connection on the level of firm, family and individual family members and to the corporate communications literature by highlighting the influence of the family on communication decisions and vice versa.
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