The impact of family social capital on the succession process in family controlled businesses

Abstract

Succession is a pre-eminent issue in the family firm environment, for both practitioners and academics alike. This thesis explores the impact of Family Social Capital has on the succession process in family firms and offers fresh perspective on the succession dilemma perpetually faced by them. Often succession planning may be informal and ad hoc, yet it is a critical issue for family firm survival and it is intended that this research will aid family controlled firms to become more systematic and professional in approaching this issue.

The study adopts an interpretive case study approach whereby six Northern-Irish family firm case organisations were chosen. The findings supplement the increasing view of the importance that social capital has in a family firm context, particularly supporting the rationale that signifies its potential to affect a positive process. This thesis demonstrates the value in empirically bringing together and evaluating the two constructs of Family Social Capital and Succession. Results, therefore, indicated that a) the use of Family Social Capital as a conceptual lens for viewing the relative success of family firm succession is valid; b) Trust, Communication and Common Identity (Sorenson, 2012) are important advocacy factors in the family firm context; c) The definition of Social Capital should be extended to include Learning Capital; d) Within the social capital construct, the existence of a ‘gatekeeper’ member is important (e.g. key non-family member) and e) The strength of the succession relationship is a vital component upon successor development and therefore efficacy of the process.

Date of Award	Nov 2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Martin McCracken (Supervisor), Judith Woods (Supervisor) & Alison Hampton (Supervisor)