Family businesses are constantly faced with generational disruptions of all kinds. These generational disruptions can take the form of intra-family conflicts or succession, strategic divergences within the organization, or paradigm shifts at the societal level. They thus can involve family members, stakeholders of the organization or social movements with a broader scope. No matter what form they take or who they concern, generational disruptions can threaten the long-term prosperity of family businesses. This article theorizes the concept of generations and generational disruptions in order to better explain interactions between different types of generations in family businesses. We also explain how legacy (i.e., historical narratives, memory and artifacts) can either function as a bridge to override generational disruptions by creating an impression of continuity or proximity between past, present and future generations, or as an obstructor by creating a sense of discontinuity between generations. This article promises not only to advance explanations of intergenerational dynamics in family businesses, but also to better explain the complex, multifaceted role of legacy in perpetuating (or not) such businesses over time.

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings includes abstracts of all papers and symposia presented at the annual conference, plus 6-page abridged versions of the “Best Papers” accepted for inclusion in the program (approximately 10%). Papers published in the Proceedings are abridged because presenting papers at their full length could preclude subsequent journal publication. Please contact the author(s) directly for the full papers. History and the Temporality of Entrepreneurial OpportunitiesTrevor Lyle Israelsen, Dimo P. Dimov, David A. Kirsch, Jacqueline Kirtley, Tanja Leppäaho, Rob Mitchell, Daniel Raff, Andrew D A Smith, Daniel Wadhwani and Matthew Steven WoodTrevor Lyle IsraelsenU. of Victoria (PhD Student) , Dimo P. DimovU. of Bath , David A. KirschU. of Maryland , Jacqueline KirtleyThe Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania" , Tanja LeppäahoLappeenranta U. of Technology , Rob MitchellColorado State U. , Daniel RaffThe Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania" , Andrew D A SmithU. of Liverpool , Daniel WadhwaniU. of the Pacific and Matthew Steven WoodBaylor U. Published Online:29 Jul 2020https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.13998symposiumAboutSections ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail AbstractThere is a growing interest in the ways in which entrepreneurship is embedded within, and explained by, the passage of time. Thus, in entrepreneurship, ""Broadening our Sight"" means, among other things, expanding our temporal horizons to increase the historical and temporal sensitivity with which we explain entrepreneurial processes. Unfortunately, however, such historical and temporal sensitivity is not common in the existing research on entrepreneurial opportunities which tends to focus on the nexus between individuals and more-or-less synchronic situations. This lack of emphasis on history and temporality is surprising because opportunities are manifestly about the contrast between the status quo (i.e. the past) and an imagined future which may be realized through present action. In the proposed symposium we adopt the view that entrepreneurial opportunities are best understood in relation to evolving accounts of the past, present, and future. Accordingly, on the one hand, opportunities can be viewed as specific features of broader socio-historical contexts which may be discovered, created, or otherwise actualized by entrepreneurs with consequences for subsequent entrepreneurial activities. On the other hand, entrepreneurs’ own prospective and retrospective accounts involving entrepreneurial opportunities may serve a symbolic or rhetorical function which may facilitate subsequent stakeholder enrollment and resource acquisition. The proposed symposium is intended to foster temporal-historical approaches for explaining and studying entrepreneurial opportunities. To do so, we bring together leading scholars with demonstrated expertise on entrepreneurial opportunities, entrepreneurial processes, and the history of entrepreneurship to present their ideas and respond to audience questions.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 2020, No. 1 Permissions Metrics Downloaded 0 times in the past 12 months History Published online 29 July 2020 Published in print 1 August 2020 InformationCopyright of Academy of Management Journal is the property of Academy of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.KeywordsAOM Annual Meeting Proceedings 2020

We have assembled a panel of scholars who are currently pioneering empirical and theoretical research on entrepreneurial expertise. The intent of this panel symposium, then, is to describe ways that expert skill development scholarship has been applied to the study of entrepreneurs and to discuss ways that the methods and ideas from the study of expert skill development can be further utilized to study the behavior of entrepreneurs. The symposium will further discuss ways to use these insights from expertise research for enhancing entrepreneurship research and training based in entrepreneurial behavior.

There is growing concern that many approaches to stakeholder engagement are insufficient due to their fragmentation and lack of sophistication. As a result, the stakeholder-engagement literature is disorganized and piecemeal–e.g., dispersed among various branches of CSR/CSP research. In this paper we report an analysis of the stakeholder engagement literature that identifies an underlying latent structure centered around solving problems stemming from five recently-systematized types of “unknowingness”: risk, ambiguity, complexity, equivocality, and/or irreducible uncertainty. Where stakeholder engagement is conceptualized around acting to solve systematically-identified knowledge problems based in unknowingness, future stakeholder engagement research and practice can better be organized and implemented.

Prior research in entrepreneurship suggests a relationship between the experience and personal history of the entrepreneur and the identification of opportunities. However, the task of an entrepreneur or stakeholder in evaluating a new business idea involves the critical interpretation and evaluation not only of one’s own personal history but also of the broader historical context. Thus, an individual’s cognitive process of perceiving an opportunity can extend beyond the analysis of the individual experience of the would-be entrepreneur or stakeholder to also include the broader history of the external environment of existing products, technologies, markets, or industries. In this study, we integrate prior entrepreneurship research on analogical reasoning with emerging research on the strategic uses of the past. We introduce a novel theoretical construct, historical analogy, to describe the language whereby entrepreneurs establish a conceptual link between a new business idea and the history of the broader opportunity context. We also conducted two experiments to test the effect of historical analogy on opportunity perception and found modest support for our hypothesis that, when controlling for an individual’s prior experience, historical analogy increases the subjective perception of entrepreneurial opportunity. In doing so, we demonstrate how understandings of history can influence understanding of future possibilities.

In this paper, we focus on the cognitive-symbolic role of rhetorical history in imagining and rationalizing entrepreneurial opportunities. We suggest that the process whereby a prospective entrepreneur imagines an opportunity to create new value includes the production of a novel account of the past in order to demonstrate how action in the present might bring about an improved future. In addition, we theorize that rhetorical history also enables entrepreneurs to rationalize their efforts by subtly manipulating their interlocutors’ prior conceptions of rationality which, we theorize are grounded in social memory and social imagination, and thereby begin to martial stakeholder support.

In recent years, entrepreneurship research has looked for those factors that inhibit entrepreneurial behaviour and that act as barriers to entrepreneurship. Within this stream of research, scholars have focused on the role of the fear of failure. Although entrepreneurship researchers have made progress in understanding fear of failure in entrepreneurship, they have investigated this construct from multiple different perspectives. These perspectives use definitions and measures of fear of failure that are potentially in conflict, limiting the power of existing findings on the relationship between fear of failure and entrepreneurship. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to more precisely delineate the nature of fear of failure in entrepreneurship. Specifically, we use a qualitative approach to examine this construct as a complex combination of cognition, affect and action. In so doing, we provide a unified perspective of fear of failure in entrepreneurship in order to facilitate the progress in understanding its impact on entrepreneurial action and outcomes.

Those who are in desperate poverty have lost economic hope, have no grounds for economic hope and/or suffer from extreme need, anxiety, or despair due to economic hopelessness. In this paper we argue that desperate poverty persists because a welfare-destructive social and economic anomaly persists: corruption-based opportunism. We examine the extent of desperate poverty, and offer three propositions that associate desperate poverty, corruption-based opportunism, and ethical entrepreneurial practices/actions, to contribute as follows: (1) to the mitigation and possible alleviation of desperate poverty through ethical entrepreneurial practices; (2) to an “insurance” view of desperate poverty – a reciprocity-based theory of desperate poverty that is more culture and values neutral; (3) to an analysis of how desperate poverty results from entrepreneurship without ethics; and (4) to a theoretical exploration of an insurance view of desperate poverty that leads to liberating new value, and also those who may be economically captive to corruption-based opportunism.

In making decisions about new opportunities, managers are faced with both uncertainty regarding the opportunity itself and the difficulty of gaining stakeholder commitment as a result of this uncertainty. Herein, we draw upon the psychology literature to investigate the question of when and why managers utilize structurally similar analogies in discussing their decisions about new opportunities as a way to manage these uncertainties. Specifically, we hypothesize that general and specific human capital, metacognitive experience and environmental dynamism increase managers’ use of structurally similar analogies. We also hypothesize that specific human capital and metacognitive experience each interact with environmental dynamism to affect use of structurally similar analogies. Using data from 127 CEOs of technology firms, we find that environmental dynamism is positively related to managers’ use of structurally similar analogies and that the relationship between environmental dynamism and use of structurally similar analogies is more positive for CEOs with higher metacognitive experience. Surprisingly, we also find that specific human capital is actually negatively associated with managers’ use of structurally similar analogies.