| 1. |
- Arshad, Nadia
(författare)
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Backers’ crowdfunding journey – An engagement perspective
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Crowdfunding refers to accumulating small sums of money from the general public through the Internet for a collective larger amount to fund small or medium-sized ventures in exchange for some benefit. The contribution can be as a donation (for no material reward), a purchase (for getting a reward in return), debt (to get money returned), or equity (for sharing future profit). The three main actors in crowdfunding are the initiators (the venturers), the backers (the crowd members who fund), and the crowdfunding platforms (the intermediaries). The crowdfunding campaign’s survival and success depends on engagement from the crowd. Using a qualitative research method, this dissertation aimed to understand the backers’ engagement with four crowdfunding campaigns selected from the leading crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, through processual analysis. Buildingon the integrative framework of service-dominant logic, engagement, and customer journey, the underlying mechanism of the backers’ engagement at the personal (micro) and interpersonal (meso) levels were explored. Based on the motivation and contribution pattern, the backers were segmented into four engagement roles: benefactors, patrons, shoppers, and utilisers. A deeper analysis showed how the engagement intensity, duration, valence, and engagement properties shaped over time across these roles. The insights from the findings in the dissertation carry managerial and policy implications.
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| 2. |
- Askenmalm, Fredrika
(författare)
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Hur mjölk i tanken blir kronor på banken : Bondförnuftets rationalitet
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Lantbrukare har under senare år ofta hörts framföra klagomål om att den administrativa bördan blivit allt tyngre vad gäller rapportering och ansökningar som ska göras till olika myndigheter. Tidigare forskning framställer det som att den administrativa bördan skulle kunna utsträckas till att också gälla redovisning, så som bokföring, kalkylering och budgetering. Detta då det beskrivs som att lantbrukare varken förstår eller använder redovisning för att sköta sitt lantbruk. Tidigare forskning tycks dock bortse från att lantbrukare ofta tillämpar en annan form av logik än den som förutsätts gälla inom redovisningsforskning. Det verkar också förutsättas att lantbrukarna ska kunna förstå och använda den redovisningsterminologi som finns inom forskningsvärlden trots att lantbrukarna ofta saknar utbildning inom redovisning. Mot denna bakgrund undersöker denna avhandling hur lantbrukare förstår och använder redovisning.Avhandlingen bygger på det grundläggande teoretiska perspektivet att se redovisning som ett språk för att på detta sätt förklara lantbrukarnas förståelse av redovisning. Avhandlingen bygger vidare på familjeföretagsforskning, speciellt socioemotional wealth (SEW), och beslutsteori för att förklara lantbrukarnas användning av redovisningsinformation.Den empiriska studien är inspirerad av grundad teori. Det empiriska materialet utgörs främst av intervjuer med mjölkbönder i Jönköpings län. Även intervjuer med rådgivare och bankmän och vissa sekundärdata har utgjort underlag för avhandlingen.Resultatet av undersökningen visar att lantbrukare har större kunskaper vad gäller redovisning än vad tidigare forskning indikerat. Delvis kan detta förklaras av att lantbrukare använder en annan terminologi än vad som vanligtvis används inom redovisningsforskning när de beskriver redovisning. Mjölkföretag drivs vanligen som familjeföretag och denna avhandling visar på en mycket stark familjeförankring i dessa företag. Det innebär att mjölkföretag ibland (speciellt vad gäller fastigheten) prioriterar annat än finansiella mål, vilket ofta kopplas samman med en intuitiv beslutsstil. Inom redovisning förutsätts generellt att finansiella mål är eftersträvansvärda. Lantbrukarnas sätt att se på redovisning påverkar också hur den används. Även om de förstår och använder redovisning är det inte säkert att den används på det mest vinstmaximerande sättet. I stället kan SEW vara det som prioriteras. Användning av redovisning anpassas efter den situation lantbrukaren befinner sig i. Vissa delar av redovisningen ses och förstås som speglingar av verkligheten eller som framåtriktade ledtrådar. När lantbrukare förstår redovisningen på så vis, uppfattas den som användbar för beslutsfattande. Andra delar av redovisningen ses som regelföljande, eller ibland till och med som helt frikopplad från själva verksamheten. Detta gäller framför allt redovisning till Skatteverket och Jordbruksverket. Dessa redovisningar används inte för beslut, men de är ändå rationellt utformade för att uppnå bästa möjliga utfall (skatteutjämning eller jordbruksstöd).
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| 3. |
- Banerjee, Anup
(författare)
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The role of the board chair : Changing expectations and hybrid organizations
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance our understanding of the changing role of the board chair and what this means for hybrid organizations and their board work. Historically, the role of the boards and their chairs evolved around safeguarding shareholders’ financial interests. Whilst this responsibility persists, boards are increasingly expected to embrace societal issues in board governance discussions and to rethink performance measurement systems to incorporate the social impacts generated by their organizations. To navigate these challenges, boards are encouraged to adopt hybrid board governance systems that strike a balance between financial and social mission targets. Board chairs can guide boards to secure such a hybrid outlook, but we lack academic insights on this role beyond financial performance. Systematically reviewing four decades of research, the first article of the dissertation demonstrates the need and opportunities for considering divergent stakeholder interests and contextual factors influencing the role of the board chair. Building on this, the second article engages with board chairs and general secretaries in social hybrid organizations and unearths different board-specific and field level challenges that currently hinder boards from implementing social impact measurements. Subsequently, the third article discusses how adopting a qualitative, engaged scholarship approach can generate practice informed research, contributing new understanding for boards and their chairs. Together, these insights offer implications for theory and practice and promote an agenda for future research that embraces a social purpose beyond profit maximization.
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| 4. |
- Byusa, Vincent
(författare)
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Money demand, real effective exchange rates, and uncertainty
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This PhD thesis consists of three distinct but interrelated research papers that collectively explore critical aspects of money demand, real effective exchange rates behavior, and uncertainty in different contexts. The first paper examines the nature of money demand in Rwanda and the rationale for the country’s monetary policy shift to inflation targeting in 2019, providing evidence of long-run money demand stability despite uncertainties affecting the global economy, and challenging the view that monetary aggregates should have no role in Rwanda’s monetary policy. The second paper investigates the complex effects of grant revenues on real effective exchange rates in Sub-Saharan African countries, revealing the outcomes of short-run depreciation and long-run appreciation. The last paper assesses how exchange rate regime choice affects the degree and persistence of real effective exchange rate misalignments, showing that, relative to a floating exchange rate regime, fixed and intermediate regimes effectively limit misalignment size, although with higher persistence. Together, these papers offer nuanced insights into the interaction between the money market, uncertainty, external grants, and exchange rate regime, underscoring the need for careful policy consideration to ensure economic stability and competitive currency values.
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| 5. |
- Bäckvall, Lisa, 1980-
(författare)
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The coexistence of family, ownership, and business : Conceptualizing entanglement and business family ownering
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This research engages with the topic of business family ownership through an ethnographically inspired study of business governance-related activities constructed as family members’ business-owning practices relationally and over time. In short, it is about what business families do when owning businesses and how this form of owning can be conceptualized.Corporate governance dominates understandings of ownership and business where ownership is constructed in a particular manner (individualistic, passive, and public) (e.g. La Porta et al., 1999; Robé, 2011). This is also (e.g. Breton-Miller & Miller, 2009; Le Breton-Miller et al., 2011), the theory in use in the family business research field in terms of governance research (e.g. Aguilera & Crespi-Cladera, 2012). Governing in family businesses has also been conceptualized as overlapping spheres of family, ownership, and business/management (Gersick et al., 1997). This study embraces the coexistence of family, ownership, and business/management as entanglement, which is lacking in corporate governance research in general and in family business studies in particular. By extending alternative framings on ownership and family governance (e.g., Brundin et al., 2010; Nordqvist 2016) via firstly an interpretative paradigm and secondly the practice turn, this phenomenon, business family ownership, is thirdly constructed through one of many possible practice theories – social praxeology (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). This theory contributes to create conditions for a renewed understanding of owning as doing within a family business, relationally and over time. Social praxeology not only directs attention to relationality but also to individual and collective embodiment, where the central concepts are capital, field, habitus, and practical sense. Bourdieu’s social praxeology acknowledges a relational ontology and epistemology in his particular version of structuralism interpretivism. In this study it implies that the first and second order structuers are contructed via a reflective field reading.Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to explore and construct the coexistence of family, ownership, and business/management through a social praxeology reading and conceptualizing the business family ownership, as done together and over time.An ethnographically inspired study (through interviews, shadowing, and participation in corporate events) of business- and governance-related activities (such as company board meetings, top management meetings, and product development meetings) generates an understanding of the entanglement of family, ownership, and business/management during an ongoing change of CEO in a family business. Drawing upon a structural reading in line with Bourdieu’s social praxeology (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), four broad business family ownership practices are constructed: the practice of choosing the next CEO, the practice of calculating, the practice of tasting, and the practice of joking. The first empirical chapter is a reading of capital forms and their structure and distribution within the business family (structures of the first order). In this chapter, the construct of family, along with Bourdieu’s assumptions, is introduced. The second empirical chapter is a reading of both first- and second-order structures, where the family habitus concept is combined with the business dimension in the change of CEO. The third empirical chapter is dominated by the reading of the second-order structures, where the practices of counting, tasting, and joking are constructed as business family owning. These business family ownership practices form an understanding of the entangled nature of a particular family business.This study contributes to generating conditions for understanding business family ownership as private, collective, and transgenerational in contrast to the well-entrenched corporate governance view characterized above. Hence it challenges the dominant views of ownership as property rights that emphasize separateness incorporated in the Gersick et al. (1997) model by instead conceptualizing the coexistence of family, ownership, and management/business as entanglement. Towards a distinction through the conceptualization of entanglement, the family and ownership categories are primarily constructed as a collective subjective corpus operating as structuring structures within a business family field. Business family ownering is a way of governing where the body and its sense reproduce and refine the structures in a family business, forming a specific cultural business family capital. Accordingly, with family habitus, owning turns into ownering. Structuring structure with the particularities of an owner family, relationally inhabited by dominated and dominating agents, forms a business family ownership as ownering, characterized by inertia and relationality.
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| 6. |
- Caccamo, Marta
(författare)
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Cross-boundary knowledge work in innovation : Understanding the role of space and objects
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation studies the topic of cross-boundary knowledge work from the perspective of sociomateriality. Cross-boundary knowledge work refers to the collaboration of actors belonging to different social worlds to achieve shared knowledge outcomes. Sociomateriality is a theoretical perspective that acknowledges the role of objects and spaces in organizational life. The empirical field of collaborative innovation provides a context for this dissertation.Cross-boundary knowledge work is an important topic given the emergence of novel challenges that require collaboration across disciplines and organizations. Innovating across social and organizational boundaries is a demanding task that calls for new ways of working. Working in new ways refers to using new organizational models and engaging in new organizational practices. To address the increasing need for cross-boundary knowledge work, this dissertation turns to the design of objects and spaces as a defining aspect of organizational life.The overarching goal of the dissertation is to understand what role spaces and objects (physical and digital) play within cross-boundary knowledge work. The dissertation is structured into four papers. Paper 1 builds the foundation of the dissertation by providing an extensive literature review about boundary objects—a theoretical construct that denotes objects that enable knowledge-based collaboration across diverse social worlds. The subsequent empirical papers study cross-boundary knowledge dynamics in three different collaborative innovation contexts. Paper 2 addresses how boundary objects can be designed to enable knowledge integration during interdisciplinary corporate hackathons. Paper 3 shows how innovation spaces and the objects that are part of them support collaborative innovation through knowledge integration and the development of new practices. Paper 4 conceptualizes startup accelerators as boundary spaces that lead to the creation of different types of knowledge communities.This study makes important contributions to the fields of cross-boundary knowledge work, sociomateriality, and collaborative innovation. First, the four papers show that cross-boundary knowledge work needs to consider other dynamics happening at the boundaries within interdisciplinary and interorganizational contexts. For instance, the creation of a shared identity appears to be a fundamental aspect to consider in order to achieve knowledge goals. Second, this dissertation deepens our understanding of the actual practices afforded by objects and spaces within collaborative settings. Each paper strives to provide an in-depth account of how individual objects, systems of objects, and spaces support knowledge work. Third, this dissertation offers a relevant theoretical perspective to illustrate the challenges involved in collaborative innovation, at the same time suggesting how material infrastructure may help collaborating actors achieve shared knowledge outcomes. Finally, innovation managers can find relevant advice on how to leverage the built environment to enhance their practice.
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| 7. |
- Correa, Miquel
(författare)
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On new homes and green lands : Three microeconometric essays as if urban costs and rural sustainability mattered
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is structured as a compendium of three self-contained articles, all single-authored. In the first paper, I analyze the effect of a mortgage cap, a policy implemented as a macroeconomic prudential measure by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority in 2010, on the likelihood of the young adult population purchasing a house in Sweden. I find that the purchasing rate decreases less for the wealth-constrained individuals in relation to the wealth-unconstrained during a four-year period after the implementation of the policy.In the second paper, I examine how experiencing working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to out-migration of the working-age population of large Swedish cities. Using register microdata of individuals in the period 2015–2021, the results show that the remote work experiment significantly increased the likelihood of moving out of large cities and of moving to the hinterlands compared to the usual internal migration flows before the pandemic.Finally, I analyze the role of geographical and cognitive proximity in the decision to adopt organic farming in Sweden for the period 2010–2016. I find that the nearby presence of earlier adopters in a parish influences current adoption, indicating the existence of proximity effects in the diffusion of environmentally sustainable technologies across a diversity of farming industries in Sweden. The effect also becomes more pronounced when farmers share cognitive similarities, defined as per type of farming industry, in particular for the dairy sector and mixed farming activities.
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| 8. |
- Cyron, Thomas
(författare)
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How organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication : The role of media and modal affordances
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Organizations are increasingly opening up to external voices that might carry new insights and help organizations to find their place in society. But the context through which organizations communicate with their stakeholders shapes how communication unfolds. Traditionally, organizations communicated with their stakeholders through shareholder letters, town hall meetings, or printed advertisements. Nowadays, cyberspace has opened up communication in multiple ways. It affords fast and boundless two-way communication between organizations and stakeholders and among stakeholders, that can be both a blessing and a curse. In any case, changes in the communication landscape have affected all types of organizations—large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, and newly started ventures.My research connects to ongoing discussions on how new media have shaped the landscape of organizations. Specifically, I explore how organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication from a practice-based view. This view allows me to magnify and understand better how the communication context shapes the interaction. My empirical research focuses on stakeholder communication in a single-case study of the world’s largest miniature model railway exhibition and three new venture ideation cases. I employ a mix of qualitative research methods, including digital data collection techniques.A bricolage of the four papers included in this dissertation frames the insights under the assumption that communication constitutes organization. It allows me to conceptualize the incorporation of new insights from stakeholder communication as a co-authoring process. Specifically, I show that modes provide the meaning-making resources through which humans communicate organizations into being. Media act as vessels of modes and shape how stakeholders can interact with—and co-author—the modes.My future research agenda focuses on two aspects. First, I suggest following more closely how new narratives that stakeholders offer during the co-authoring process subsequently travel through an organization. This question is particularly relevant in larger corporations where the newly proposed narratives have to travel more considerable distances between stakeholder communication practices and decision-making practices. Second, I suggest investigating stakeholder communication from a design perspective, that is, a study of the heuristics that managers and entrepreneurs employ before engaging in stakeholder communication.
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| 9. |
- Dujeancourt, Erwan
(författare)
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Labor, firm and wealth effects of gender and sexuality
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The prevalence of LGBTQ+ individuals, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and additional identities, is steadily increasing in society. Global surveys conducted in 2023 indicate that 9% of adults in the world identify as LGBTQ+ individuals, with the proportion increasing to 18% among the youngest generation (Jackson, 2023). This demographic shift emphasizes the necessity for further economic research regarding LGBTQ+ populations. The aim of this thesis is therefore to explore the role of gender and sexuality in labor, firm, and wealth disparities.The first paper, "Sexual Orientation, Entrepreneurship, and Firm Survival," draws on Swedish population and business registry data from 1995–2020. The findings reveal that sexual minority men are 7.8% less likely to engage in entrepreneurship than comparable heterosexual men, while sexual minority women are 4.8% more likely to do so than their comparable heterosexual counterparts. Additionally, it examines the survival rates of firms founded by sexual minorities, where disparities are found particularly for ventures led by sexual minority women. The results show that both external factors (such as attitudes toward sexual minorities and the density of same-sex couples) and internal factors (e.g., the presence of a romantic partner) may contribute to the differential survival of ventures founded by sexual minority women.The second paper, "Wealth, Gender and Sexual Orientation – Evidence from Siblings," analyzes administrative data to explore wealth differentials across genders and sexual orientations. This study shows nuanced patterns, such as a wealth penalty for men in same-sex couples below the P80 percentile and a persistent wealth penalty for women below the P95 percentile.The third paper, "Sexual Orientation and Multiple Job Holding: Evidence from Swedish Administrative Data," investigates the incidence of multiple job holdings among sexual minority individuals. This paper finds that sexual minority individuals are significantly more likely to hold multiple jobs, with the drivers of providing self-insurance for men and career mobility for women. Notably, holding multiple jobs among sexual minority women is associated with reduced unemployment and increased earnings growth.In the fourth paper, “The Role of Legal Gender Change in Labor Market Outcomes,” a cohort of over 900 transgender individuals in Sweden who underwent legal gender changes is studied. A comparative approach reveals disparities in labor market outcomes, showing a reduced likelihood of employment and lower salary for transgender individuals compared to their cisgender siblings. Furthermore, transgender men have lower salaries, while transgender women have higher salaries but encounter challenges in finding employment after changing their legal gender. These findings highlight the vulnerable economic standing of transgender individuals in Sweden.Through empirical analysis, this thesis underscores socioeconomic (in)equalities and their drivers across both sexuality and gender, offering insights into the economic opportunities and challenges of a growing population group.
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| 10. |
- Feng, Songming
(författare)
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Craft production in the Kingdom of Crystal (Glasriket) and its visual representation : Constructing authenticity in cultural/marketing production
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Authenticity is a core concept and phenomenon in contemporary marketing, as both marketers and consumers seek the authentic. Individuals, companies, and industries all work to establish and accomplish authenticity for themselves and related stakeholders. As a marketing point for creating differentiation and singularity, authenticity has the potential to augment the value of a product above and beyond its promising functional, esthetic, or experiential significance. However, authenticity is a concept with heavily debated characteristics, and it is not well understood in its market manifestations. Academic work on authenticity remains vague in terms of both its definition and its marketing relevance. There has been limited empirical understanding of and theorizing about what is meant by authenticity and how it is manifested in production and consumption in the marketplace. In practice, the nature and use of authenticity in the field of marketing is still full of ambiguity and confusion. For marketers, brand authenticity is easy to recognize but hard to manufacture. How producers and marketers manage the development, positioning, and communication of authentic offerings and how they engineer, fabricate, or construct authenticity remain unanswered questions.This dissertation answers the call of Jones, Anand, and Alvarez (2005, p. 894) to determine which strategies are used for creating and defining authenticity and how these strategies shape our understanding of what is authentic and the call of Beverland (2005a) to find out how brands and marketers create and develop images of authenticity. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how authenticity of market offerings is constructed in two cultural/marketing production sites—the craft production of glass objects and commercial photographers’ image production as visual representation of the former—to understand the mechanisms behind the authentication of market offerings and the paradoxes within the construction work.This purpose was fulfilled by pairing the two theoretical domains of cultural/marketing production and authenticity for the investigation of an empirical site—the Kingdom of Crystal (“Glasriket” in Swedish)—located in southern Sweden. As a traditional craft-producing industrial region and a tourist destination, the site has been dedicated to making consumer glass products, maintaining its production mode and ethos as a handmade craft, for more than one hundred years. Being producer focused, the craft sector and craft production offer a strong empirical instantiation of authenticity and can serve as a fertile field to explore and problematize the issue of authenticity at the intersection with cultural/marketing production. The research was conducted over a three-year period with an interpretive and ethnographic approach tapping into multiple sources of data.This dissertation finds that the glass producers in Glasriket substantively construct five categories of authenticity (technique, material, geographical, temporal, and original) of market offerings via craft production and that commercial photographers communicate and authenticate the craft production world via their image-making practices, which are dimensionalized into a typology consisting of five categories of practice: reproducing, documenting, participating, estheticizing, and indexing. Illuminating the two-step micro process of cultural/marketing production—the concurrent practices of the product makers and the promoters, this dissertation theorizes about how authenticity operates vis-à-vis two types of production (substantive product making and communicative image making), yielding a number of contributions to authenticity scholarship and the literature on cultural/marketing production. It provides managerial implications for marketers/producers in Glasriket regarding how they can leverage cultural resources to conduct retro marketing as well as suggestions for marketers beyond this context about visual marketing and authenticity-based marketing.
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| 11. |
- Fredén, Sophie
(författare)
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Från värnplikt till frivillighet : Hur en ny reformidé mötte den etablerade praktiken i Försvarsmakten
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the summer of 2009, the Swedish Parliament decided to suspend the century-oldpractice of military conscription, and introduce all-volunteer forces. One year later,1 July 2010, the Swedish Armed Forces became an organization "as any other", thatshould attract, recruit and try to maintain its employees. The process of this reformis the topic of this dissertation.Previous research has shown that reforms are quite difficult to conduct, as theyrarely go exactly as the reformers planned: planned changes are often accompaniedby unintended changes (Brunsson and Olsen, 1990). In order to describe all changesthat take place during attempts to reform, a translation model (Czarniawska andJoerges, 1996) has been used. The process of change was seen as a travel for thereform idea from its carriers to those who were to put it in practice in local units.Even if local practices are usually well-established, such practices are notunchangeable, especially if a new reform idea raises interest. The aim of the study isto contribute with increased understanding of reform processes by following theidea of voluntarism into an established practice of conscription.The process of reform has been studied in various places: in the headquarters,during the meetings between the top leadership and commanders of local units, andin the local units. Appropriate field study techniques were used: interviews, directobservation, shadowing and document analysis. Fieldwork started in 2010 andcontinued until 2015. The analysis of the collected field material followed theprinciple of abduction, i.e. an iterative interpretation of field material and previousresearch results, using the translation model as a frame of interpretation.The idea of reform has been inspired by an international trend of moving from massarmies staffed by conscripts to all-volunteer forces. It was then edited to fit theSwedish situation, and started its travel from idea-carriers to idea-users. On its wayit has been translated in quite a few ways. Sometimes it was seen as an attempt atmodernization, other times as an increase in cost-effectiveness, as a culturaltransformation, as an attempt at professionalization of services, or as entering thecompetition among employers in the labor market. Even translations that shared thesame label (for example, competition or cultural transformation) could beinterpreted in detail in quite different ways at different local units.Some attempts at integration of different translations failed; demands and expectationsin conflict with one another, or a translation of the reform idea was incompatiblewith the local practice. Such situations can be seen as paradoxical but, asLuhmann (1995) pointed out, a paradox is often perceived as paralyzing by the observers,while the actors feel mobilized to de-paradoxify them by appropriate actions.The study shows that the roles of idea-carriers and idea-users were not clearlyseparated: the same persons could engage in both activities, depending on thecontext. A suggestion for future studies could be to explore the activities, instead ofthe roles, which are flexible, and also pay attention to the new, digital "means oftransportation" – especially through the social media.
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| 12. |
- Genedy, Mohamed A.
(författare)
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Beyond the bright side : Investigating dark aspects of independent entrepreneurship, family entrepreneurship, and corporate entrepreneurship
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Entrepreneurship is often perceived as a driving force for employment, innovation, and knowledge creation and is linked to poverty alleviation and economic growth. While entrepreneurship is often seen as a pathway for economic development and societal welfare, it does not consistently deliver the expected outcomes and, in certain instances, may exacerbate poverty, impede development, and present challenges to societal well-being and equality. This paradox within entrepreneurship emphasizes the necessity of exploring the negative (dark) aspects pertaining to entrepreneurship. Neglecting these negative aspects can lead to an incomplete understanding of entrepreneurship. Accordingly, this dissertation challenges the conventional positive view of entrepreneurship by (1) investigating some negative (i.e., dark) aspects of independent entrepreneurship, family entrepreneurship, and corporate entrepreneurship and (2) what might potentially mitigate these negative aspects. This is essential for achieving a balanced and comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurship’s role in the economy and society at large.I draw on the theory of entrepreneurial allocation, which posits that entrepreneurship can be productive, unproductive, or destructive, as the main theoretical perspective of this dissertation. This dissertation includes three empirical papers, each focusing on a distinct type of ownership: owner-manager ownership (independent entrepreneurship), family ownership (family entrepreneurship), and external investor ownership (corporate entrepreneurship). Together, they offer different insights into the potential negative aspects pertaining to entrepreneurship. Each paper draws on different theoretical perspectives and aligns with particular Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).In paper 1, we draw on the scale-up, firm growth, and well-being literature, taking an employee perspective to examine the impact of scaling on employee well-being. Using data from 10,908 employees in new Swedish ventures, we find a positive association between scaling and employee burnout, along with a negative association with job satisfaction. This emphasizes that scaling, often associated with a positive view, can also bring challenges to employee well-being. Meanwhile, we show that employees with managerial roles and prior new venture experience are two groups of employees who are less likely to experience the negative consequences of scaling. Paper 2 investigates how family dynamics (the upbringing environment) within entrepreneurial families can influence offspring career choices. In this paper, we draw on the birth order literature, which adopts an evolutionary theory perspective, to suggest that offspring are exposed to a different upbringing environment due to the unequal distribution of parental resources, potentially affecting their personality and behaviors and thus resulting in unequal career opportunities. In this paper, we use data comprising 205,247 offspring residents in Sweden to show that later-born offspring, though more likely to join the parent’s business, often have a higher tendency to leave compared to their early-born siblings. However, these later-borns can be particularly advantageous in competitive or challenging business situations. In an additional analysis, we show that earlier-born offspring are more inclined toward independent entrepreneurship. Lastly, paper 3 focuses on the negative aspects pertaining to corporate entrepreneurship. Drawing on agency theory, paper 3 shows that institutional investors (e.g., investment banks, insurance companies, etc.), while they are usually viewed positively because of their known sophisticated investment strategies and long-term horizons, induce negative effects and have a potential dark side on corporate entrepreneurs. Specifically, I argue that the extant literature views institutional investors as a homogenous group in terms of their innovation preferences. This oversimplified view overlooks the possible variations within these institutional investors. Following an empirics-first (EF) approach, I segment institutional investors based on their innovation preferences, using portfolio data and historical trading information. This analysis identifies three distinct segments: innovation-friendly, innovation-unfriendly, and innovation-investment-oriented. Using a sample of 6,438 U.S. publicly traded firms, I find that firms predominantly owned by innovation-unfriendly institutional investors experience a decrease in innovation productivity and overall firm value compared to those dominated by innovation-friendly investors. Moreover, I show that firms can strategically position themselves to attract innovation-friendly institutional investors in order to mitigate the negative effects enacted by innovation-unfriendly investors.This dissertation offers several contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. First, it contributes to the potential (social) costs of entrepreneurship by investigating some negative aspects pertaining to independent, family, and corporate entrepreneurship. Second, it adds to the ongoing discussion on how to mitigate these negative aspects. Third, this dissertation contributes to the theory of entrepreneurial allocation by revealing that beyond traditional institutional actors like governments, there are other influential forces, suh as the entrepreneur, entrepreneurial firm, and institutional investors, that can direct entrepreneurial activities towards productive, unproductive, or destructive paths. This dissertation provides implications for policymaking relevant to four specific Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 3 (promoting well-being), SDG 8 (fostering a decent work environment), SDG 10 (addressing inequalities), and SDG 9 (enhancing innovation). It also has implications for practitioners such as entrepreneurs and their followers (i.e., employees).
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| 13. |
- Hashim, Sumaya
(författare)
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Women Entrepreneurship : Masculinity, Legitimacy and Well-being
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overarching research purpose of this dissertation is to understand how women entrepreneurs establish and grow their businesses in a patriarchal society. This research question is addressed through the compilation of four research papers. The first research paper is a literature review that synthesizes current literature on women entrepreneurs in the Gulf States and identifies possible research avenues.The remaining three papers are empirical studies that use Bahrain, one of the Gulf States, as an empirical setting. The first empirical study challenges the assumption of entrepreneurship as a gendered phenomenon and sets out to understand entrepreneurship as a new phenomenon in a context that is male dominated. It draws on masculinity theory to understand the interplay between women entrepreneurs and the different forms of masculinity enacted by men. The second empirical study challenges the persistent traditional representation of the male entrepreneur as the founder and leader of a family business by using legitimacy-as-perception as a theoretical lens to investigate how female-led family ventures gain legitimacy from family and non-family members. The third empirical study challenges the stereotypical view of women entrepreneurs in developing countries by drawing on eudaimonic well-being literature to understand why and how some women start or grow a business after initiating a divorce, while others do not.The dissertation makes several contributions to (women) entrepreneurship and to the different theories that it adopts in various ways. First, the dissertation extends women entrepreneurship literature by showing how women entrepreneurs influence their social context to attain royal awards, deal with different forms of masculinity enacted by men, and rebuild their eudaimonic well-being through their entrepreneurial activities. Second, the dissertation introduces the notion of “Asabiyyah” to explain the unique social makeup that informs the behavior of women entrepreneurs. Third, the dissertation contributes to the theoretical lenses that it adopts, for instance to the legitimacy-as-perception lens by showing the reciprocal nature of legitimacy. It broadens the masculinity theory by bringing attention to “own-business” as an institution where the private and the public spheres overlap and organize gender relations. This dissertation also contributes to the growing literature on eudaimonic well-being by offering an understanding of the interplay between entrepreneurship, engagement in meaningful activities, and eudaimonic well-being, an area that has largely remained a black box. Last but not least the dissertation offers several practical implications to further improve and foster entrepreneurship for women in Bahrain.
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| 14. |
- Hedvall, Lisa
(författare)
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Management of safety buffers for effective delivery capability
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A company's delivery capability is crucial for competitiveness, which becomes challenging due to variations. While some variations can be reduced, safety buffers are important for absorbing remaining stochastic variations. Some actions to reduce variations may require large investments compared to perceived benefits and the alternative of a safety buffer in form of for example materials (i.e. safety stock) lead to tied-up capital that needs to be considered. Some variations are self-induced by internal rules, routines and behaviours, that companies may not reflect on, simultaneously as there is a tendency of excessive safety buffers due to a lack of attention on the safety buffers that enable sufficient delivery capability. In other words, there is a potential to develop in this area that could lead to positive effects such as reduced costs and increased responsiveness in a changing business environment. Companies in two research projects have expressed a need for decision support in managing safety buffers to effectively mitigate negative impacts of variations, and only general development work has been found in the literature. The purpose of this dissertation is therefore to increase understanding of decisions to reduce and absorb variations, guiding the establishment of a process for effective delivery capability in the management of safety buffers.This dissertation includes six papers that are based on a combination of case studies, literature reviews, conceptual research, and logical reasoning. The factors to consider in the decisions to reduce and absorb variations serves as a basis for proposing a process for the management of safety buffers. The proposed process consists of four subprocesses, six activities, and 32 steps aligned with findings from the appended papers. The findings suggest that a more effective delivery capability can be achieved by using the proposed process and considering a holistic perspective in terms of e.g. cross-functional collaboration, fact-based decision making and the need of working iteratively in the management of safety buffers. The appended papers provide valuable information to facilitate decision making in practice, including a framework for selecting safety buffers.
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| 15. |
- Kamugisha, Samuel
(författare)
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Strategies of New Firms in the Formative Years of a Developing Economy : The Case of Rwanda
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores how new firms navigate the regulatory environment of a developing economy in its formative stage to ensure their continued operations and survival. The study’s context is Rwanda which is a developing economy that is undergoing a process of reconstruction and transformation after devastation by the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.The study seeks to understand the strategies undertaken by new firms to navigate uncertain regulatory environment to ensure their continued operations and survival. The study identifies four strategies undertaken by new firms in response to pressures arising from the changes in the regulatory environment, namely maneuvering, foresight and proactiveness, changing paths and professionalizing.The findings highlight: (1) the unlocking and lock-in effects of the changes in regulatory environment on firms’ strategies, (2) a continuous integration of strategies in a trial-and-error approach to find a tradeoff between the strategies and the pressures arising from the regulatory environment, (3) a learning-by-doing approach which also indicates the strategies undertaken at each stage of development, and (4) a boomerang effect of some of the strategies on the firms’ continued operations and survival.The study extends our understanding of how new firms cope with uncertain institutional environments. The study’s findings and theorization elucidate critical dynamics between the specificities of changes in the regulatory environment, the strategies undertaken by new firms, and the firms’ continued operations and survival. The study will also help entrepreneurs and managers to devise tailored strategies in response to the challenges associated with the specificities of changes in the regulatory environment.
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| 16. |
- Kekezi, Orsa
(författare)
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Labor mobility across jobs and space
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of one introductory chapter and four independent papers. Each paper looks at different aspects of labor mobility, especially focusing on the transferability of specific human capital and the role of space for job matching.The focus of the first paper is to examine how diversity of previous work experience of employees in creative industries matters for labor productivity. I further distinguish between related vs. unrelated occupation and industry experience to better understand how they matter for knowledge flows within a firm. The results show that diversity, and especially relatedness of previous occupational experience, are positively related to labor productivity.In the second paper, I study how co-location of knowledge-intensive business services influences the innovative capacity of the sector. The results suggest that co-location facilitates labor mobility and thereby knowledge flows as well as innovation capacity across firms.In the third and fourth papers, the focus shifts from the firm to the individual. The third paper examines how regional characteristics, especially Marshallian labor market pooling, influence the type of employment obtained after job displacement. The results show that regional industrial and occupational structures are crucial for facilitating job matches and occupational upgrades of individuals. The fourth paper examines whether there are wage returns to migration after job displacement, after the job match is considered. The results indicate that returns to migration are positive only when combined with a re-employment that matches the skills of the worker.
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| 17. |
- Kim, Jiyoung
(författare)
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External enablers and new venture creation : How characteristics of environmental changes and enabling mechanisms influence entrepreneurial responses
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Changes in the external environment—whether technological breakthroughs, natural environmental disasters, regulatory reforms, economic shifts, sociocultural movements, or demographic transitions—provide the essential enablement of entrepreneurial endeavors and outcomes. Despite extensive existing research on this topic, the predominant focus on a single type of change has hindered the attainment of broadly generalizable insights or advancements in theoretical and practical knowledge. This dissertation aims to foster a unified understanding of how environmental changes enable the creation of new ventures. To this end, it draws attention to the characteristics of changes and enablement shared across different nominal types of change.The notion of external enablers and the external enablement framework provide conceptual foundations for the four research articles included in this dissertation. The first article, a systematic literature review, demonstrates the potential for studying the characteristics of environmental changes and external enablement as a means of accumulating vastly broadened knowledge. The three remaining empirical articles delve into entrepreneurial responses to environmental changes. Experimental data evidence that variance in the characteristics of environmental changes and external enablement causes systematic differences in perceptions of entrepreneurial potential and intentions to create specific types of new ventures, i.e., family vs. non-family. This dissertation offers novel theoretical insights into the enabling impact of environmental changes on entrepreneurship. It also showcases different pathways for advancing generalizable knowledge that can be strategically applied.
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| 18. |
- Lappi, Emma
(författare)
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Post-entrepreneurship productivity
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent decades, public policies have been implemented to encourage individuals to become entrepreneurs. However, the individual and social benefits of such policies when some of these individuals eventually leave entrepreneurship are unclear. The purpose of this thesis is to empirically assess the productivity effects arising from the labor market experience of entrepreneurship, measured as self-employment, in subsequent wage employment.This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four independent papers. The four papers evaluate the consequences of the self-employment experience either for the individuals’ wages or for firm productivity when firms hire such individuals. All the papers compare the self-employment experience relative to wage employment.The first paper estimates how individuals’ earnings are influenced in post-entrepreneurship careers when they return to wage employment. The findings suggest that former entrepreneurs suffer large earnings losses, especially in the first year as employees, and for the higher educated, these losses persist even after seven years in employment. The second paper studies the role of professional ties in entry wages when finding employment after self-employment. The results show that even when using former coworker ties in the hiring process, the former self-employed, except for those who have ties with incumbent employees when they had their own firm, earn significantly lower entry wages.The third paper evaluates the productivity effects of different labor flows, with an emphasis on hiring former entrepreneurs. The paper finds that new hires who come from entrepreneurship, in general, are just as productive as those employees hired from another firm but are more productive than those coming from unemployment. The fourth paper analyzes how having employees with former entrepreneurship experience is related to firm productivity. The results show that having more former entrepreneurs as employees in a firm increases performance.
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| 19. |
- Lu, Shanyun Sam
(författare)
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Managing contexts for innovation and renewal : Strategies of incumbent firms in traditional manufacturing industries
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Innovation is important for established firms (i.e., incumbents) in traditional manufacturing industries (TMIs) to continuously survive and thrive. While internal factors often receive attention, different factors external to these firms enable and hinder the creation and realisation of novel products and processes. Firms in TMIs thus need to strategically deal with their outer contexts. How they do so in the post-industrial era and why they act in particular ways remain unclear in extant innovation studies. This dissertation offers nuanced explanations of the strategies of incumbents in TMIs, regarding managing contexts for innovation and renewal.This dissertation investigates three cases involving firms in five different TMIs in Sweden. It shows that even firms that are expected to be the most inert display a proactive reorientation by developing radical and sustainable technologies that potentially revolutionise their industries and drive societal change. Innovative firms simultaneously manage multiple external factors such as societal norms and regulations, diverse networks, and place-based (lack of) resources by leveraging, shaping and fostering the alignment of those factors to protect and empower innovations. A core take-away for innovation managers is to “work in but also work out!”
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| 20. |
- Löfström, Helena
(författare)
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Trustworthy explanations : Improved decision support through well-calibrated uncertainty quantification
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed fields like disease diagnosis and defence. Utilising sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) models, AI predicts future events based on historical data, introducing complexity that challenges understanding and decision-making. Previous research emphasizes users’ difficulty discerning when to trust predictions due to model complexity, underscoring addressing model complexity and providing transparent explanations as pivotal for facilitating high-quality decisions.Many ML models offer probability estimates for predictions, commonly used in methods providing explanations to guide users on prediction confidence. However, these probabilities often do not accurately reflect the actual distribution in the data, leading to potential user misinterpretation of prediction trustworthiness. Additionally, most explanation methods fail to convey whether the model’s probability is linked to any uncertainty, further diminishing the reliability of the explanations.Evaluating the quality of explanations for decision support is challenging, and although highlighted as essential in research, there are no benchmark criteria for comparative evaluations.This thesis introduces an innovative explanation method that generates reliable explanations, incorporating uncertainty information supporting users in determining when to trust the model’s predictions. The thesis also outlines strategies for evaluating explanation quality and facilitating comparative evaluations. Through empirical evaluations and user studies, the thesis provides practical insights to support decision-making utilising complex ML models.
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| 21. |
- Malisa, Amedeus
(författare)
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Pensions, retirement behaviour and financial fraud victimisation
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four articles that explore pension investments and retirement behaviour.The first article investigates how pension communication affects the trading behaviour among pension savers. By using geographical variation in the timing of the distribution of information letters sent from the Swedish Pension Agency to savers, I show that pension information statistically significantly affects investors’ trading activity. Still, the letters’ economic relevance is limited due to low general engagement among the savers—however, those who respond to the letters by reallocating their portfolios benefit by having better portfolio performance and lower fees in the upcoming years.The second paper (co-authored with Johannes Hagen) studies exposure and reaction to financial fraud in one of the largest Swedish pension scandals, the Allra case. The third paper (co-authored with Johannes Hagen and Paul Nystedt) analyses the relationship between intelligence and fraud victimisation among investors in the six companies who have been thrown out of the Swedish Premium Pension System by the authorities for not acting in their clients’ best interest. The results of these two articles show that while individuals who end up in the fraudulent companies are not socioeconomically different from others, they are more likely to work with financial advisers, some of which steered them into these funds. More intelligent people are less inclined to invest in fund firms that turn out to be fraudulent, and if they do, they are more likely to divest from them after, but not before, the fraud has been revealed.Finally, the last paper addresses how grandparenthood shapes the labour supply for people who are close to retirement and its effect on the mobility of households. The results show a significant increase in the retirement of similar magnitude for both grandmothers and grandfathers when their first grandchild is born. Moreover, people who have a child become significantly more likely to move closer to their parents (i.e., the child’s grandparents).
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| 22. |
- Petreski, Aleksandar
(författare)
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Green Finance in Real Estate, Housing Price Volatility and Rental Swaps
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four papers that explore several aspects of the housing market in Sweden: financing of the housing construction sector, price volatility patterns of apartment and house segments and the role of the swap rental market in access to housing and household mobility.The first paper explores the effect of a firm’s reputation of being a green bond issuer on its financing costs. Results show that repeated green bond issuance reduces the real estate firm’s cost of capital and cost of equity and that past green bond issuance is positively related to present green bond issuance.The second paper empirically investigates the differences in idiosyncratic price volatility patterns between apartment and house segments at transaction level, using new spatial-temporal form of garch model. Results show that the segment of apartments shows stronger mean-reversion and auto-correlation, in contrast to houses. Volatility effects increase with wider geographical distances between observations.The third paper investigates the effect of rental swaps on the waiting time of households queuing for permanent tenancy in rental market. Numerical comparative statics from a calibrated search & match model show that active swap market, increases waiting times for less than one year, in average.The final paper in the thesis empirically investigates the household propensity to swap and the effects of the rental swap market on the horizontal and vertical mobility of households. The results show that the swap market increases mobility of locally bounded short-distance movers and helps to make a slight neighbourhood upgrade.
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| 23. |
- Reitsma, Ewout
(författare)
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Sourcing strategising in the new product development process : Insights from the strategy-as-practice lens and engineer-to-order context
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In many cases, manufacturers have changed from sourcing only a few, simple, and separate components from local suppliers to sourcing a high variety of modules from globally dispersed suppliers. This has resulted in the implementation of a wide variety of sourcing strategies, including, for example, multiple sourcing and supplier integration. All these and other sourcing strategies are aimed at achieving a certain level of supply chain (SC) responsiveness. The level of SC responsiveness ideally matches the characteristics of a product. For example, highly innovative products typically require highly responsive SCs.In order to match products with their SCs, manufacturers are advised to engage in sourcing strategy in their new product development (NPD) process. However, there are at least two knowledge gaps in the literature on this topic: (1) the lack of a widely accepted, comprehensive conceptualisation of how manufacturers can engage in sourcing strategy in NPD, and (2) the lack of empirical insights into manufacturers operating in the engineer-to-order (ETO) context. This dissertation focuses on filling these knowledge gaps.Addressing the first gap, the dissertation uses the theoretical lens of ‘strategy-as-practice’ (SAP) and the literature to conceptualise the ‘doing of sourcing strategy’ in NPD as three interrelated dimensions: (1) practitioners, (2) activities, and (3) practices. Through discussing these dimensions and their potential interplay throughout NPD, the dissertation demonstrates the potential of the SAP lens in providing a common framework and reducing the fragmented nature of the literature. By using the SAP lens, the dissertation also contributes to practice. Despite not being ‘actionable’ in the sense of constituting detailed guidelines for acting, the SAP lens produces insights that can help practitioners to become more reflective. For example, they can learn to see sourcing strategising as a multidimensional, dynamic concept and the place it can occupy in the NPD process.The second knowledge gap in the literature regards the lack of empirical research focusing on the ETO context. Therefore, the dissertation includes a case study focusing on practitioners’ sourcing strategising activities and practices in this context. First, five approaches to performing sourcing strategising activities in NPD are explored in terms of their conditions and intended outcomes. Secondly, four practices that can support sourcing strategising in NPD are identified. These practices – referred to as ‘Design for Supply Chain’ (DFSC) practices – are also examined in terms of their interrelations. Practitioners can use the case study findings to compare the advantages of the five sourcing strategising approaches when sourcing items or services. Furthermore, the findings allow practitioners to assess how the four interrelated DFSC practices can support their sourcing strategising efforts in NPD.
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| 24. |
- 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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| 25. |
- 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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