The Use of History and Next-Generation Engagement in Family Firms

Abstract

Recent research on the Uses of the Past and Rhetorical History (Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones, and Silverman, 2019) has shown that historical narratives can be powerful and persuasive tools in the hands of managers. Kammerlander and De Massis (2020) have called on “historical research” to be incorporated more fulling into the theorizing process in family business research. Unfortunately, little has been written about how family firms use historical narratives, aside from the passing observation by Labaki et al. (2019, p.18) that “family myths” associated with a firm’s history can contribute to competitive advantage in family firms. We know that practitioners use history rhetorically in next-generation engagement, but we lack conceptual tools for making sense of this process. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to broaden our understanding of how historical narratives are used in family firms to increase next-generation engagement. We identify three types of rhetorical history and then discuss the circumstances in which we would expect each of these to the used strategically in next-generation engagement. We believe that our theoretical model will be useful to future empirical studies of next-generation engagement.