 Media reactions to family Firms’ downsizing and upsizing decisionsSebastian P.L. Fourné, Rico Kremer and Miriam Zschoche Journal of Business Research, 2025, vol. 193, issue C Abstract: The media is an important stakeholder when firms announce restructuring decisions. We argue that journalists’ reactions vary depending on what is associated with family firms and non-family firms in terms of employment practices and whether it is a negative or a positive restructuring (downsizing vs. upsizing). Both types of restructuring may create a cognitive dissonance with the family firm image. Empirically, we analyze the media reactions to announcements of all major restructuring decisions of family firms and non-family firms based in Germany 2006–2019. The results confirm our hypothesis that family firms are evaluated on average more favorably when announcing a downsizing decision but elicit less favorable coverage of their upsizing decisions (than non-family firms). Our study highlights that, when being evaluated by media stakeholders, there are not only benefits when a firm is associated with specific (mostly positive) characteristics but that the same characteristics can also be a burden in other situations. Keywords: Family firms; Media coverage; Employment restructuring; Downsizing; Upsizing; Cognitive dissonance theory (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:193:y:2025:i:c:s0148296325001717 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115348 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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