No abstract

:Our research started with the following question: have longstanding family businesses been conducting sustainable development policies long before the word became a fashion. After presenting our methodology, we investigate the sustainable development concept and review the family business (FB) literature on longevity in light of the key questions related to sustainable development (SD). We then set out investigate the case of six family businesses which have been in operation for two generations or more. We interviewed 17 different family business owners and members, of six French family businesses, totaling 27 hours of interviews on the longevity of their company. Based on this, and occasionally on written documents, we set out to identify what factors family members associate with the longevity of their company and how these factors stand as regards to the FB and the SD literature.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to first empirically illustrate the construction of accounting for sustainable development tool (Bebbington and Gray, 2001) and, second, to discuss the operationalization of accounting for sustainable development (Bebbington and Larrinaga, 2014). Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a unique intervention-research approach, the main author having worked part-time for four years on the development of the tool for a business organization in the organic food sector. Findings This paper proposes an operationalization of sustainable development within an accounting tool and presents the results of the calculations. It also touches briefly upon the organization’s decision not to adopt the tool. The research concludes on the difficulty of operationalizing the economic, social and environmental capitals while proposing results that demonstrate “unsustainability”. Practical implications This research in operationalizing sustainable development paves the way for future potential use of the tool described, and future developments to address the model’s current shortcomings, notably in interconnecting social and economic capitals with natural capital. Social implications The non-adoption of the accounting tool raises questions about the acceptability among practitioners of visualizing the unsustainability of their own organization, in particular within “green” and “socially responsible” businesses. Moreover, it raises the question of growth and decoupling of the organization’s impact from its economic growth. Originality/value This paper makes three contributions to the current literature. First, it furthers the discussion on how to operationalize accounting for sustainable development, notably by trying to implement capital as a liability (a debt), placing its “maintenance” at the very heart of the design. Second, it offers an initial operationalization of “system thinking” within a tool to account for sustainable development. Finally, it contributes to the literature on “engagement research” through a four-year intervention-research project.

No abstract

Despite the growing interest in resilience in the family business context, little attention has been devoted to understanding the influence of religion on the way business families respond to adverse environments. We use a unique ethnography of a Middle Eastern faith-led family firm to investigate how religiosity influences the way the business family resists and rebounds from environmental shocks. We identify religious role expectations as a pivotal driver of particularistic responses in family firms to advance a religious-based foundation for business family resilience.