Entrepreneuring and family firms cofounders' familiness at work through rhetoric appeals

What is it about?

Our research objective was to explore how Romanian IT family firms enable entrepreneuring. We explored what familiness practices emerge and how these contribute to entrepreneuring. Drawing on the Romanian IT entrepreneurs’ practice from 5 case studies of IT family businesses and purposive revelatory cases, we considered the family co-founder discourse and representations of familiness presented in 31 interviews. Family entrepreneurs generate positive perceptions in favour of enterprising families using identification and persuasive communication via rhetorical appeals to familiness ethos, familiness logos and familiness pathos, family business practices contributing to supporting value creation. They are fostering familiness as a competitive advantage by communicating appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos, leading to constructive conflict management. The rhetoric of persuasion contributes to a better understanding of how familiness can be built to support family entrepreneuring. Practical implication – The analysis of the use of rhetoric contributes to a better understanding of practice in the family business. Through appeals to ethos, family business entrepreneurs enforce family values built on shared history, complementarity, and moral exemplarity. The appeals to logos in entrepreneuring involve fulfilling complementary roles, alignment and continuous learning and coaching. The appeals to pathos are about emotions and how the family entrepreneurs’ discourse enforces constructive handling of emotions. Theorizing from family entrepreneurs’ practices, we suggest that entrepreneuring requires good communication of the representation of familiness for co-founders, employees, and other stakeholders to also serve constructive conflict handling. The perceived familiness communicated through appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos contributes to legitimating the family firm structures.

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Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash