Being in time and the family owned firm

Moving ahead: how time is compressed and stretched in strategy work

Purpose

To contribute the process perspective on strategy the systems theoretical concept of time binding and show how time, when unfolded and linked, is compressed or stretched, thereby demonstrating the motion of temporal spaces within organizations.

Design/methodology/approach

Case approach and with emphasis on communicative events.

Findings

The finding of three different time bindings in strategy work showing not only how time is unfolded and multiplied but also how these bindings were unexpectedly found to be experienced simultaneously, thus turning a seemingly linear strategy based on goal achievement into a complex of interrelated motions driven by performativity, potentiality and reiteration.

Research limitations/implications

The research implications are significant to the process perspective on strategy as time should not only be understood and investigated as different unfoldings and time-links within organizations, but also on the motion of these temporal spaces, which is to say, how they move the organization ahead.

Practical implications

From a practical perspective, when taking both the existing and future research on strategy into account, one notices that most management literature and the mainstream courses held at business schools tend to draw on one-dimensional casualities and chronological timelines in order to combine accurate forecasts with predicted end-results. Such attempts reflect one unfolding, one binding, one temporal space and one way of moving, but if managers want to improve knowledge on deliberate change, temporal awareness should be part of their strategic change repertoire alongside the ability to match different motions to the skills and capacity of an organization.

Social implications

The concept of time binding is a way to extend the ways by which we seek to comprehend the temporal nature of social relations and structures within organizations and in particular those practices that are considered strategic. In particular, it offers ways of understanding how strategy is a temporal exercise that provides organizations with different temporal spaces within single events and hence different motions – all of which simultaneously move the organization differently ahead in time.

Originality/value

By providing the system theoretical concept of time binding it brings new and original value into the process and practice field of strategy research. The empirical findings demonstrate how unusual and not yet seen unfoldings and bindings between before and after appears and how such bindings take the form of temporal spaces that simultaneously and differently moves the organizations ahead in time.

Entrepreneurial families in business across generations, contexts and cultures

Purpose

This article is the editorial for the special issue on “Entrepreneurial Families in Business Across Generations, Contexts and Cultures”. We aim to develop a road map that can help academics and practitioners navigate the findings of the articles contained in this special issue. We also suggest future lines of research around the topic of entrepreneurial families in business.

Design/methodology/approach

We develop a conceptual model for interpreting and understanding entrepreneurial families in business across contexts and time.

Findings

Our conceptual model highlights the importance of context and time when conducting research on entrepreneurial families in business.

Practical implications

The findings in this special issue will be of relevance for decision makers who tailor policies that embrace different economic and social actors, including entrepreneurial families.

Originality/value

This editorial and the articles that make up this special issue contribute to family business research by contextualising the phenomenon of entrepreneurial families in business. We propose a new holistic perspective to incorporate context and time in the study of entrepreneurial families that own, govern and manage family firms over time.

Traveling concepts: Performative movements in learning/playing

This article examines the generative interplay between learning and playing in managing and organizing by taking a performative approach that theorizes learning/playing as an assemblage in which playing and learning emerge as co-evolving processes in practice. Addressing the methodological challenges associated with this performative approach, the learning/playing assemblage is probed using traveling concepts, which attend to the dynamic movements rather than the stabilities of organizing, functioning as proposed by Vygotsky as both a research tool and an emergent result of research. This notion of “travelling concepts” is developed empirically by engaging with Mead’s “sociality,” which he defined as the simultaneous experience of being several things at once. Three interweaving strands of sociality—relational, spatial, and temporal—are elaborated in the context of traveling with and through four artisan food production sites, each of which sought to engage differently with the esthetics and functionality of the food we consume.

Encompassing Stability and Novelty in Organization Studies: An Events-based Approach

The stability versus novelty relationship remains a conundrum in organization studies, partly owing to conventional views of time and temporality. In this article, we address organization as a stability-novelty intertwinement through the lens of organizational events. The advantage of an events-based approach is that stability and novelty are expressed as parts of the same acts, and not different acts, which tends to be the assumption among mainstream theories of organization change. The events-based approach developed for this article shows how the organization may be defined as a structure of past and anticipated events, defined and redefined on an ongoing basis. From a case study of the development of a competency management tool in a bank, we show how the intertwinement between stability and novelty is articulated through events throughout the project and how every event is both an act of stability and an act of change.