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Legitimation strategies in an emerging field: family firm succession consultancy in Germany

Legitimation strategies in an emerging field: family firm succession consultancy in Germany AbstractFinding a successor has become a severe challenge for family firms in Germany. As family firms are disproportionately concentrated in rural economies, succession has also become a considerable threat for peripheral regions and their labor markets. It therefore lies in the interest of regional stakeholders to help support family business continuity. One way to do this is by providing consulting services for family entrepreneurs, especially when searching for a family-external successor. Succession consultancy, however is still in its infancy. Applying the framework of the organizational field that centers on the concept of legitimacy, this paper examines the strategies consultants employ in order to get selected by family entrepreneurs in their succession process, as well as consultants’ strategies to match family firms with external successors. Based on expert interviews with succession consultants in the region of Upper Palatinate in Bavaria, we demonstrate the importance of geography and interpersonal linkages in establishing legitimacy in the early stages of field formation, when heterogeneous groups of actors offer their services without set rules or standards. Our content analysis sheds light on the variety of strategies based on trust, networked, and public reputation in order to gain legitimacy as consultants, depending on whether or not they can draw on existing relationships with family firms. We furthermore identify a discrepancy between these legitimation strategies and the actual ways that consultants use to match family firms with external successors. Here, regardless of their previous contact with family firms, geography plays a major role in constraining both consulting and succession: Family firms more readily accept local consultants, and the consultants also preferred to screen succession candidates through their regional networks due to the higher chances of successful succession when finding external successors from within the same region. Conceptually, our analysis contributes to institutional theory by carving out legitimacy-enhancing mechanisms in emerging organizational fields, and by demonstrating the crucial role of geography and interpersonal linkages for succession as well as field formation processes. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie de Gruyter

Legitimation strategies in an emerging field: family firm succession consultancy in Germany

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
0044-3751
DOI
10.1515/zfw-2019-0019
Publisher site
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Abstract

AbstractFinding a successor has become a severe challenge for family firms in Germany. As family firms are disproportionately concentrated in rural economies, succession has also become a considerable threat for peripheral regions and their labor markets. It therefore lies in the interest of regional stakeholders to help support family business continuity. One way to do this is by providing consulting services for family entrepreneurs, especially when searching for a family-external successor. Succession consultancy, however is still in its infancy. Applying the framework of the organizational field that centers on the concept of legitimacy, this paper examines the strategies consultants employ in order to get selected by family entrepreneurs in their succession process, as well as consultants’ strategies to match family firms with external successors. Based on expert interviews with succession consultants in the region of Upper Palatinate in Bavaria, we demonstrate the importance of geography and interpersonal linkages in establishing legitimacy in the early stages of field formation, when heterogeneous groups of actors offer their services without set rules or standards. Our content analysis sheds light on the variety of strategies based on trust, networked, and public reputation in order to gain legitimacy as consultants, depending on whether or not they can draw on existing relationships with family firms. We furthermore identify a discrepancy between these legitimation strategies and the actual ways that consultants use to match family firms with external successors. Here, regardless of their previous contact with family firms, geography plays a major role in constraining both consulting and succession: Family firms more readily accept local consultants, and the consultants also preferred to screen succession candidates through their regional networks due to the higher chances of successful succession when finding external successors from within the same region. Conceptually, our analysis contributes to institutional theory by carving out legitimacy-enhancing mechanisms in emerging organizational fields, and by demonstrating the crucial role of geography and interpersonal linkages for succession as well as field formation processes.

Journal

Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie – de Gruyter

Published: May 26, 2020

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  • Acquiring a family firm: A case study
  • Theorizing change: The role of professional associations in the transformation of institutionalized fields
  • Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorie der Wissenssoziologie
  • Family business succession and its impact on financial structure and performance
  • Promoting family: A contingency model of family business succession
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  • Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research
  • Transitional leadership of advisors as a facilitator of successors’ leadership construction
  • Strategic Responses to institutional processes
  • Roads to institutionalization: The remaking of boundaaries between public and private science
  • Succession planning as planned behavior: Some empirical results
  • Trust, power and control in transorganizational relations
  • A relational assessment of international market entry in management consulting
  • Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse
  • Managing legitimacy: Strategic and institutional approaches
  • Family businesses: Seekers of advice
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  • Reputationsnetze: Zur Internationalisierung von Unternehmensberatern. Eine relationale Theorie
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  • Geographies of field-configuring events
  • The succession transition process: A longitudinal perspective
  • Unternehmensnachfolgen in Deutschland 2018–2022
  • How institutions get materialized in space: “Spatialized logics” along Jerusalem’s western wall
  • Entrepreneurial ecosystems as fields: Integrating meso-level institutional theory
  • Analyse qualitativer Daten mit MAXQDA
  • Making embeddedness work: Social practice institutions in foreign consulting markets
  • Factors preventing intra-family succession
  • Do we need to use an accountant? The sales growth and survival benefits to family SMEs.
  • The role of intermediaries in the small business transfer process
  • Unternehmensnachfolgen in Deutschland 2014 bis 2018
  • Interorganizational institutions
  • Instituional entrepreneurship in emerging fields: HIV/AIDS treatment advocacy in Canada
  • Advising family enterprise: Examining the role of family firm advisors
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  • Pre- and post-succession governance philosophies in entrepreneurial family firms
  • Development of leadership skills: Experience and timing
  • Erhebung und Analyse zur Unternehmensnachfolge in Bayern
  • Temporary events and spaces in the Swedish primary art market
  • Family business succession and its impact on financial structure and performance
  • The enigma of the family successor – firm performance relationship: A methodological reflection and reconciliation attempt
  • Services and innovation
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