Succession in family businesses: Kinship culture and Islamic law of inheritance

Authors

Nasir Afghan, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract

Majority of research has been carried out on succession within family firms in the positivistic tradition of research and also has a very strong normative element to it. The successful research has been defined using researchers determined criterion such as firm performance, viability and harmony among the family members etc. This type of research obviously assumes an independent reality ‘out there’ ready to be collected by objective researcher. This positive stance has been apparent even in the case based research mostly conducted by practitioners. On the contrary, to carry out this research an interpretive approach was adopted. The aim of interpretive research is to understand the social actions of human agents on the basis of meanings these agents attached to actions. The meanings are subjective and have to be understood from the agent’s perspective. In succession within family business, what are the ‘ideals’ of succession process in terms of when a child should be inducted into the business and when should he be given the ownership and full control (if it should be given at all) is a highly subjective issue. What is ‘success’ itself is a highly subjective issue. Is it profit, family harmony or something else? And then what is ‘family harmony’ again is a subjective matter and its definition will vary across people. Succession process within a family business will be influenced by family members’ interpretive schemes including their conceptions of rules of “rights and wrongs”. In order to understand and explain the succession process within a family firm, it is believed that it is very important to understand these interpretive schemes and rules. These interpretive schemes are influenced by culture of the place. Culture which appears and hit individuals like an objective reality itself emerge from subjective understanding objectified through human interaction. Objective of this research has predominantly been to describe the succession process from successors point of view e.g. (Longenecker and Schoen, 1978; Handler, 1994; Sharma, Chrisman & Chua, 2003).

Keywords

Succession, Family businesses, Kinship culture, Islamic inheritance law

DOI

https://doi.org/10.54784/1990-6587.1197

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Afghan, N. (2011). Succession in family businesses: Kinship culture and Islamic law of inheritance. Business Review, 6(2), 104-118. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.54784/1990-6587.1197