Mining the Past: History Scripting Strategies and Competitive Advantage in a Family Business

Abstract

History is increasingly recognized as a distinctive source of competitive advantage for family businesses. Taking a rhetorical history perspective, we study how a family business leveraged the family’s three generations long history of entrepreneurship to sustain profitable growth over 16 years. Through our analysis, we identify three history scripting strategies—embedding, elaborating, and building family history—that created important sources of competitive advantage for the family business, facilitating acceptance by broader communities, building a reputation of continuity, and inspiring innovation through tradition. These findings advance the history-informed understanding of family firms’ idiosyncratic sources of superior performance.

Rhetorical History as Institutional Work

“…They are an enigma, not only because of their economic success and longevity, but also because they succeed while defying many of the ‘rational’ prescriptions of modern corporations (Suddaby et al, 2022). A growing body of literature attributes their longevity and economic prowess to their skill in rhetorical history (Ge et al, 2022; Sinha et al, 2020), using history to maintain values, identity and trust (Dieleman and Koning, 2020) and the strategic reproduction of traditions (Suddaby and Jaskiewicz, 2020) and family stories (Labaki et al, 2019). Clearly the phenomenon of successful growth and longevity in family controlled business groups can be, at least in part, attributed to their skill in managing history.…”

Family multinationals: a systematic literature review to take stock and look ahead

“…Historical methods can be adopted to capture the role that the past and memory play in shaping entrepreneurs' mental models, and how family rituals and storytelling help transfer past family experiences over generations (e.g. Ge et al. , 2022), thereby influencing current international venturing initiatives.…”

“…Historical methods can be adopted to capture the role that the past and memory play in shaping entrepreneurs' mental models, and how family rituals and storytelling help transfer past family experiences over generations (e.g. Ge et al, 2022), thereby influencing current international venturing initiatives. Research on entrepreneurship in family firms has started shedding light on the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship and the impact that the perceived performance of parents has on the entrepreneurial intentions of next generation family members (Criaco et al, 2017).…”

Generations in Family Business: A Multifield Review and Future Research Agenda

“…Increasingly, family business research takes into account which generation runs the firm (Blanco-Mazagatos et al, 2007) to understand, for instance, how socioemotional wealth is preserved (Berrone et al, 2012; Gómez-Mejía et al, 2007), or which factors influence the advice-taking preferences of individual family members (Strike et al, 2018). However, this research field often uses generations as a label for “peer groups” (i.e., a family or societal group), downplaying their important role as communities that preserve and transfer resources over time (Ge et al, 2021; Sasaki et al, 2020). Overall, researchers are faced with a variety of competing uses of the concept, making it difficult to understand what bearing, if any, generations have on family business research and practice.…”

“…On the other hand, our research aims to reach a bidirectional exchange across fields (Jaskiewicz et al, 2020; Neubaum & Micelotta, 2021) and gives back to major theories in other social science fields by extending the conceptualization of generations beyond its demographic nature. Family firms indeed provide us with a unique setting to unveil specific dynamics and complexities that characterize the notion of generations as communities that preserve and transfer resources over time (Ge et al, 2021; Sasaki et al, 2020), contributing a new perspective on generations that enriches social science fields and their boundary conditions. Our investigation within and across multiple research fields contributes to the literature in two main ways.…”