Narrow Results

The family character gathers firms whose weight in the economic activity of countries is considerable for developed countries as well as for the others. However, this type of firm is exposed to not only the threats that challenge all types of firms but they must also face dangers related to their family nature.

Several American and European studies were interested in the succession issues associated with family businesses. However, this topic received very little theoretical and empirical investigation in developing countries. In Tunisia, the push in favor of private firms was given in the 60s. Nearly 50 years later, those entrepreneurs who had received state aid to start their businesses are about to retire. How is this dealt with? How is succession "guaranteed"? Hard as it may be to speculate on the outcome of this succession, can we at least describe its phases first and then consider the factors that could have an impact on it? These central questions to Tunisia's economy have yet to be answered academically.

Our aim, in this paper, is to improve our understanding of the nature of the relation between the founder and his successor during the process of succession in the Tunisian family business while proposing reflections to be carried out to make a success of this generational change.

Our paper is organized as follows. The first part will be an analysis of the literature on family firms and the succession process. In the second part, we will introduce the methodological aspects of our study, which was conducted on six Tunisian family firms at different stages of the succession process. In the third part, we will present and discuss the results.

The entrepreneurship literature teaches us that the aspirations and competence of SME owner-managers as well as their strategic management behaviour can influence both the development and performance of their firm. However the research issues that surround the owner-manager's business venturing mode, that is, whether he or she has created a new firm, acquired an already existing firm, or acceded to a family firm's leadership and ownership by succession and/or inheritance, have rarely been addressed in an integrated manner. Now, founders, acquirers and successors may have fundamentally different strategic profiles, that is, in terms of the strategic capabilities they aim to develop and the type of performance they seek for their firm. In aiming to identify individual correlates and organizational effects of the entrepreneur's business venturing mode, an empirical study of 357 Canadian and French SMEs was thus undertaken. The results reveal significant differences between the three groups of owner-managers, that is, between the 196 founders, 96 acquirers and 65 successors with regard to their competence and motivations and with regard to the strategic capabilities and business performance of their firm. The results also reveal the owner-manager's business venturing mode to be a significant predictor of the firm's market and HR capabilities as well as its growth, productivity and profitability.

Corporate entrepreneurship has been shown to have a positive effect on the long-term growth of family firms. Out of a variety of factors affecting the promotion of corporate entrepreneurship in successive generations of a family firm, the successor as the future leader of the firm plays a critical role. Therefore, identification of competencies enabling a successor to develop corporate entrepreneurship in a family firm can be useful. In this research 17 successor competencies have been identified by studying five Iranian family firms which have been successful in transferring entrepreneurship to successive generations. The paper describes and explains the function of each competency to promote corporate entrepreneurship in a family firm.

We briefly summarize recent constructions of the disuccessor and duplicator of a quadratic operad and relate them to the Manin products, and Rota-Baxter and average operators.