Norwich Business School

It is now broadly accepted in the literature that in-migrants make a disproportionately positive contribution in the creation of new ventures in rural England. However, to date, there have been precious few advances in our understanding of either the characteristics or, more importantly, the degree of embeddedness of in-migrant entrepreneurs. This paper aspires to address this gap in the literature, drawing upon the findings of an extensive fieldwork investigation in rural Cumbria. It is argued that the attributes of entrepreneurial individuals who are not born locally enable them to follow distinct routes to starting and/or running a business, working in contexts that allow them to break away from the confines of rurality. They appear to rely less upon the local setting for the supply of materials and capital, as well as a market for their products/services and to have closer relationships with national and international sources of information than their locally-born counterparts. Thus, in-migrant entrepreneurs emerge as a key instrument in enhancing the integration of rural economies in the national and global markets as well as diminishing the strength of local ties. Weak local ties also mean that growing in-migrant entrepreneurship may be linked with the demise of rural localities as integrated entities.

There is a growing realisation among scholars and policymakers of the role of local contextual factors and circumstances in influencing the behaviour of key economic agents, including the entrepreneur. This approach has stretched the boundaries of academic inquiry well beyond mainstream conceptualisations of economic agency as isolated from its setting. An assumption that underpinned research and policymaking in the new learning is that economic activity is typically socially embedded, which is generally taken to imply local embeddedness. In our paper, drawing upon the findings of extensive research in rural Cumbria, we question this assumption.We argue that in the context of rural Cumbria, the conceptualisation of locality may go beyond territorial notions. This argument does not support a return to the notion of the isolated economic agent, but advocates a move forward to the detailed exploration of the interface between agency and context.

This article considers the causal relationships between the European farmers’ early retirement policy instrument and structural and social outcomes. The member states of Greece, Ireland and France have been among the main beneficiaries of this policy scheme, which encourages farmers aged between 55 and 66 to retire and transfer their land to a younger farmer, with multiple effects. The analysis in this article suggests that the accrued pension income is mostly higher than applicants’ previous earnings from farming, while the policy instrument is only moderately successful in enlarging farms or encouraging new entrants, with the majority of transfers occurring between members of the same family. The farmers’ early retirement scheme appears to be connected more to the regional traditions of inheritance than to farm structures per se. The impact on an unbalanced European age–farmer structure is evaluated as differing little from what would have happened anyway, with only short-term effects reported in relation to the time scale. In summary, the scheme is subject to manipulation in terms of regionspecific circumstances and thus fulfils social objectives rather than the purpose of structural cohesion.

Discussed here are the interpretations of agrarian transformation in Greece during the post-war period. These are divided roughly into developmentalist, populist and ethnographic arguments. Emphasis is placed on the necessity of an interdisciplinary method in order to understand patterns of rural change, without attributing a determining role either to a political economy perspective or to an a-historical concept of community. Using the example of ethnohistory, this survey argues for an effective comparative ethnography of rural change, thereby overcoming the usual distinction between macro and micro-analysis.

This paper examines the incidence of innovation and the configuration of innovation systems in rural areas, which are viewed as possessing weak knowledge-generating subsystems. Drawing on the results of a microlevel study in rural Cumbria, North West England, the paper shows that entrepreneurs were able to access nonlocal knowledge infrastructure. Thus, the emergent actor-constructed regional innovation system stretched well beyond the confines of Cumbria. This configuration can be explained, in large part, by considering entrepreneurial origin. New arrivals (especially immigrants) demonstrated the greatest propensity to innovate, using innovation systems which cut across the regional and national boundaries. Locally born and returnee entrepreneurs demonstrated a low incidence of innovation. The paper concludes that a distinction between regional innovation systems (as macrolevel analytical units with a normative dimension) and actor-constructed regional innovation systems (as microlevel descriptive units) offers scope for the advancement of research in this field of study.

Clientelism has predominantly been represented in the literature as an expression of backwardness and corruption with little attention being paid to the question of how clientelism has changed over the years. In contrast, this paper examines the particulars of state intervention in the agrarian economy with respect to clientelism and exposes the illogicality of contrasting patron-client relationships with citizenship. The historical focus is on the ways in which, in the course of post-dictatorship consolidation in rural Greece throughout the 1980s, the transformation of traditional brokerage-based clientelism into the bureaucratic clientelism of the political parties actually enhanced the institutions and practices of ‘rural citizenship’. Comparative qualitative research on the driving force of agrarian change shows how Thessalian villagers made the transition from being socially excluded subjects to socially included clients in two lowland village communities and the role played by a dynamic state bureaucracy.

Previous studies on family-SME internationalization have largely focused on what resources are needed to drive an incremental process rather than how resource management occurs in historical time. This paper focuses on the latter, adopting a social capital perspective (capturing both internal, i.e. among family-SME board members, and external, cross border agent dyads, relations) in order to decipher case study data from the East of England. Findings show that it is not the presence or absence of organizational-social-capital that affects family-SME internationalization success but rather its variable use over the years driven by the future pursuit of longevity, not growth. Key within this context is the variable use of the international expertise and management capability of non-family managers in the family SME intra-organizational context. Ultimately this may lead to change and learning that occurs erratically, often including reversals, without causing family-SME progression across a sequence of incremental stages.

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch’s authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship.

Purpose: This editorial aims to investigate the interface between gendered processes and family business by exploring the extent to which gendered processes are reinforced (or not) in family business operations and dynamics. This approach will complement the agency and RBV theoretical bases that dominate family business research (Chrisman et al., 2009), and further contribute to extending gender theories. 

Design/methodology/approach: Acknowledging that gender is socially constructed, this editorial discusses the interface between gendered processes and family business within entrepreneurship research.

Findings: Despite a growing interest in gender and family business, there is a limited literature that explores gender theory within family business research. A gender theory approach embracing family business research contributes to a needed theoretical deconstruction of existing perspectives on the operations, sustainability and succession of family businesses in the 21st century.

Originality/value: This article makes a contribution to extant scholarship by extending gender theories through an exploration of the gendered processes in family business research.

This chapter provides a discussion of the key methodological issues followed by a review of the relevant national literature. It also provides an outline of the locality. The chapter explores the incidence and characteristics of rural entrepreneurship and enterprises, as well the issue of entrepreneurial embeddedness. In the case of indigenous entrepreneurs other important sources of information include other businesses in the same industry and trade journals, whilst in-migrants rely heavily on market research and trade fairs. The identification of a specific demographic group that demonstrates lower than average incidence of entrepreneurship lends support to the thesis that supply-side rather than demand-side considerations may provide a large part of the explanation. The chapter argues that differential access between the Eastern and Western parts of rural Cumbria constitutes one aspect of a profound divide between the Eastern and Western parts of the study area.

Is the traditional method of family business leadership succession, where the successor joins the business at a young age and gradually learns the values and business knowledge from the senior generation, still the best approach? In this week’s FFI Practitioner, contributors Zografia Bika, Peter Rosa, and Fahri Karakas examine this question through a study of a multi-generational Scottish construction company and share actionable insights for advisors helping clients with succession planning.

Drawing on forty-nine oral history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socio-economic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively-loaded ‘family values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects.

Previous studies have largely examined interregional variations of SME rather than family firm concentrations. This paper addresses this gap through an analysis of firm type indicators across Europe from the Eurostat Data Base, using social, economic and demographic statistics at the NUTS 2 regional level to ascertain the nature, prevalence and regional contexts of family firm concentrations. Hierarchical clustering is performed to map the regional distribution of European family business. Results show that the co-existence of family SMEs with large firms is negatively related to regional economic performance, and this variation has implications for our understanding of the survival and strategic behaviour of family firms. The study promotes a new family business ‘in context’ than ‘by context’ point of view and paves the way for further empirical work with interregional family business data at various spatial levels.

Building on an in-depth case study of a four-generational Scottish family firm, we generate a triple-layered model of socialization. Our findings go beyond the traditional focus on internal family socialization and value transmission and suggest that socialization involves three concentric layers unfolding over time, each with a distinct set of dimensions, values, challenges and processes: internal (transmitting knowledge within the family), interactive (resolving competing role demands through peer interactions), and experiential (interacting with both peer groups and malleable societal/economic frames). This novel theorization provides a promising framework for future research seeking to explain the complexities of socialization processes in transgenerational family firms.

Clientelism has predominantly been represented in the literature as an expression of backwardness and corruption with little attention being paid to the question of how clientelism has changed over the years. In contrast, this paper examines the particulars of state intervention in the agrarian economy with respect to clientelism and exposes the illogicality of contrasting patron-client relationships with citizenship. The historical focus is on the ways in which, in the course of post-dictatorship consolidation in rural Greece throughout the 1980s, the transformation of traditional brokerage-based clientelism into the bureaucratic clientelism of the political parties actually enhanced the institutions and practices of ‘rural citizenship’. Comparative qualitative research on the driving force of agrarian change shows how Thessalian villagers made the transition from being socially excluded subjects to socially included clients in two lowland village communities and the role played by...