Purpose The increasingly competitive manufacturing sector has made innovation crucial for the continued survival of family-owned SMEs. However, family firm owners are highly heterogenous and their diverse characteristics influence their approach to innovation. The purpose of this paper is to provide solutions to two heterogeneity related innovation problems: first, the failure of generic innovation policy advice to address the specific types of family firm owners; and second, the difficulty for owners in understanding how their innovation approach compares to their competitors. The solution is to create a taxonomy of family firm owner-innovators which creates innovator types. This taxonomy addresses these two problems: first, the taxonomy enables policy advice to be tailored to a particular innovator types; and second, the taxonomy allows owners to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach to innovation. Design/methodology/approach The approach is to develop a taxonomy through exploratory factor analysis (n=1,284) and firm owner interviews (n=27) in a mixed methods study. Socio-emotional wealth theory interprets the findings. Findings The findings present a taxonomy of family firm innovators which contains five types: the spontaneous radical, the statist altruist, the patient opportunist, the curious traveller and the insular denier. Research limitations/implications There are two major limitations: first, a taxonomy is static and does not include the temporal dimension of innovation which can change according to the firm lifecycle stage and, by implication, the changing preferences of a maturing firm owner; and second, the mixed methods approach of using two data sets which themselves used differing definitions of “family firm” has introduced the possibility that the constructs developed from the quantitative study may not have the precision or clarity of a study that uses a single data set with a single definition. Practical implications The practitioner implications from the research stem from the diagnostic potential of the taxonomy. SME family firm owners can establish their innovation approach by using the taxonomy to decide which type of innovator they are and by adopting an innovation approach that counterbalances the weaknesses of their type. Social implications The social implications are to improve the innovation potential of the family firm community by offering practical support to their innovation activities. Originality/value The originality of the research is in its contribution to knowledge on the role of ownership type in directing the innovation approach of SME family firms. The value of the research is in offering a theoretically informed original taxonomy that is of both academic and practical value.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of recruitment and retention practices in the criminal family firm and to provide theoretical explanation for the coercive nature of such practices.Design/methodology/approachThe case study methodology uses 18 semi-structured interviews, court transcripts and press reports to investigate a landmark case of modern slavery in the UK.FindingsThe findings tentatively suggest that the trusting relationships typical of the legitimate family firm employers are replicated in a criminal business.Research limitations/implicationsThe theoretical implications of the paper are that Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and misrecognition can be used to explain the process of worker exploitation in the family firm. Such psychological tools of domination maintain power in a situation of forced labour and blur the boundaries between employer/offender and worker/victim. From the perspective of understanding forced labour, Bourdieu's concept of misrecognition provides a theoretical framework for understanding the “stickiness” of exploitative workplace practices.Practical implicationsThe article suggests a non-economic explanation of why individuals choose to remain in poorly paid and exploitative labour, which will be of use to regulatory and enforcement bodies, seeking to understand the psychological and structural drivers of forced labour.Originality/valueDespite press interest in modern slavery in family firms, such cases have been rarely analysed in family firm literature. The paper contributes to the limited explorations of criminality in family firm businesses.

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With this article, I seek to contribute to understandings of how racial and gender hierarchies are reproduced through organizational processes. Using an autoethnographic method, I seek to demonstrate the workings of Mill's Racial Contract Theory and Ahmed's concepts of raced and gendered encounters through the implementation of a university diversity initiative: the Race Equality Charter. My findings demonstrate how the "doing" of diversity work results "undoing" the non-white diversity worker, as their lived experiences catastrophically diverge from the sunny promise of the diversity project. Furthermore, the Race Equality Charter's is revealed that the Charter is a factual, rather than normative type of contract, which enshrines a socio-political reality in which colonialism continues to shape white over non-white domination. Scholars and activists have long been naming the secret weapons of white supremacy in order to expose how anti-racist practice is co-opted by institutions. In this article, I theorize my lived experience to expose how policy and organizational processes fail to protect me, a non-white woman early career academic. I conclude that the Race Equality Charter, far from being a tool of social justice, enforces raced and gendered privileges in academic settings.

The intersection of race and gender discrimination has resulted in the pervasive under‐representation of women of color (WOC) in science careers, with research identifying that microaggressions are a key contributory factor to the imbalance. This study aims to compare individual experiences of microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations with institutional responses, thereby outlining the disconnects between the perspectives of minoritized scientists and those in positions of power. This paper draws on a constructivist paradigm to compare the experiences of women of color scientists with organizational representatives through 31 interviews conducted in science research organizations in the United Kingdom. The results find that organizational understandings of microaggressions differ substantially from those of WOC scientists. Furthermore, organizational responses favor policy‐based solutions that fail to address the slippery and deniable nature of microaggressions. The paper concludes that, contrary to the more prevalent popular diversity initiatives, a greater belief in the testimony of WOC scientists amplified by institutional responses that empower their identity as scientists would be more effective strategies to reduce the sense of shame and isolation caused by subtle forms of discrimination.