Tradition, Family Business and Beyond

That tradition plays a role in family business is a long-acknowledged but often self-evident notion in family business research. As a result, the explanatory potential of tradition is oriented towards its function as a resource for enabling organizational performance or its role in aiding stability and change within family business settings, has been overshadowed. Drawing from a reading of selected works in sociology, history and moral philosophy, this paper addresses this limitation by offering a theoretical reflection on the notion of tradition. These readings provide a way of departing from the common view of tradition as unitary, static and fixed towards a conceptualization that views tradition as both multi-layered and multi-faceted—constituting an unfolding process that is continuously being received and enacted in family firms. This theoretical paper contributes to the family business literature by strengthening the conceptual foundation of the notion of tradition by advocating tradition as a concept through which the past and future is immanent in the present. From this, a future agenda for research is outlined.