Mining the Past: History Scripting Strategies and Competitive Advantage in a Family Business

Bingbing Ge, Alfredo De Massis and Josip Kotlar

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2022, vol. 46, issue 1, 223-251

Abstract: History is increasingly recognized as a distinctive source of competitive advantage for family businesses. Taking a rhetorical history perspective, we study how a family business leveraged the family’s three generations long history of entrepreneurship to sustain profitable growth over 16 years. Through our analysis, we identify three history scripting strategies —embedding, elaborating, and building family history—that created important sources of competitive advantage for the family business, facilitating acceptance by broader communities, building a reputation of continuity, and inspiring innovation through tradition. These findings advance the history-informed understanding of family firms’ idiosyncratic sources of superior performance.

Keywords: family business; history scripting strategies; competitive advantage; entrepreneurial family (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:entthe:v:46:y:2022:i:1:p:223-251

DOI: 10.1177/10422587211046547

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