Luis Cisneros

Unexpected Succession: when Children Return to Take over the Family Business

This research explores family succession in which the successors were unexpected. We present six cases studies of children who initially pursued careers outside the family firm but who later decided to return and successfully take over the small family business. Our outcomes explain why they decided to return, the conditions that they set for succeeding their fathers, and the way they approached the management of the family firm. We show that the success they experienced in their professional careers far from the family business positioned them as legitimate leaders. They made a deliberate personal choice to succeed, negotiating the conditions, and this put them on the same level as their predecessors. These successors act as entrepreneurs, they are proactive, take risks, detect new business opportunities and do not hesitate to innovate. The changes that they implement are possible thanks to the support of their predecessors who avoids the destabilization of the organization.

Family, business and power: illustrating three extreme cases

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how small family business (SFB) leader‐founders exhibit a dominant logic of action over less dominant prevailing ones. The authors investigate three logics of action: family, power and economic.Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory qualitative research is conducted based on case studies. The authors use Cisneros and Genins conceptual model, to identify, through an iterative sampling frame, three extreme SFB cases where in the first the leader exhibits a dominant family logic, in the second, a dominant power logic and in the third, a dominant economic logic.Findings – The authors illustrate the characteristics of the SFB leaders when they exhibit a dominant logic of action and also present some of the implications of SFB leaders’ dominant logics of action on the SFB and the family and non‐family members.Research limitations/implications – The three extreme case studies provide an important building block for future studies based on larger samples...

Bibliometric study of family business succession between 1939 and 2017: mapping and analyzing authors’ networks

This study maps and analyzes the scientific research networks of family business succession. We examine coauthors’ activities in terms of not only productivity but also their importance to the coauthorship network. The most influential contributors and universities, as well as their research networks and theoretical underpinnings, are discussed. The review examines 661 articles published by 1105 authors in 224 academic journals indexed in the Social Science Citation Index and Scopus between 1939 and 2017. We used a bibliometric approach based on coauthorship analysis to measure cooperation. The results show that family business succession research is characterized by high fragmentation in the authors’ collaboration in general, but the leading scholars are strongly interconnected. We map and analyze the most influential networks by identifying the most important topics studied, the theoretical and methodological approaches employed, the scope of the research conducted, and where it has been published. Most of the identified networks are in North America and Europe, and most are not theoretically or methodologically specialized.