Gervase Bushe Project on Family Businesses Awarded SSHRC Research Development Initiative Funding

Associate Professor Gervase Bushe has recently received project funding through SSHRC’s Research Development Initiatives (RDI), which supports ground-breaking high-risk research initiatives. This is the first time that a member of our faculty has applied for and received funding through this program. The specific objectives of the RDI are to help researchers:

• develop new research questions;
• explore conceptual and methodological perspectives and directions; and
• critically analyze and assess research, including its achievements, impacts, strengths and state of development.

Project Summary:
The proposed research is motivated by the following key questions: How can family business support the development of successful business families? And, conversely, how can successful business families support the success of family businesses? The research team assembled for this project proposes to develop an innovative research methodology to try and answer those questions.

Most of the literature on family business considers interpersonal family dynamics a problem to be overcome in managing family businesses. In particular, the transition in control and ownership between generations is viewed as a time of tension and most of the research in this area has studied failures of transition and the reasons for those failures. The literature on family business focuses almost exclusively on the success of the business and suggests that business owners ignore familial aspirations, emotions and motivations when making business decisions.

There is almost no useful guidance for family business owners on how to act on aspirations they might have for using their business to create and support family relationships, and almost no consideration in the academic literature of how family dynamics might contribute to the success of a business.

This developmental interdisciplinary research initiative integrates literature in the area of family dynamics, organizational theory and business management, and seeks to generate new knowledge about building successful business families and family businesses. We propose to study cases where the business has continued to be successful as a business, and the family has continued to be successful as a family. We will study companies that have had multiple, successful, inter-generational transfers of a family businesses, using “appreciative inquiry” style interview guides, which focus on gathering “best of stories.” These narratives will be analyzed in order to develop theories and models that will be empirically verified in a future stage of research.

An integral part of this study is the assessment of the utility of appreciative inquiry as a methodology for model building research. While a number of studies show that appreciative inquiry can help organizational stakeholders identify and act on inspiring futures in ways that create collective will to work toward implementing those visions, very little research has been conducted using appreciative inquiry as a research methodology. Recent calls encouraging its use in research highlight its potential for theory and model building. Because appreciative inquiry focuses on the best of what is in order to inspire new theories and models of what could be, it seems particularly appropriate to address the questions that motivate us.

A noteworthy aspect of this application is the team that has been formed to carry out this research: collaborators include highly respected researchers and clinicians in family business and family therapy. In addition, two of the largest family business centers in North America have agreed to be Partners, assisting with the identification of cases to study, providing in-kind support for data collection, interview transcription, and the dissemination of preliminary findings.

For more information on Dr. Bushe’s research please follow this link.