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This study aims to explore the dialectical interplay between traditional roots and contemporary challenges faced by family businesses, specifically focusing on “Osmice” (in Slovenian; in Italian, “Osmize”), which are family enterprises that embody the cultural and historical heritage at the intersection of Italy and Slovenia. In particular, the purpose of this study is to understand how these businesses, deeply rooted in the communal life of the Karst region, evolve amidst changing social, economic and cultural landscapes.

Building on an alternate template analysis, the research includes the examination of archival data and 34 in-depth narrative interviews. This approach captures details about the historical establishment, persistence and evolution of Osmice, with a particular focus on their ways of facing contemporary challenges while preserving their traditional roots.

The findings reveal that Osmice navigate the tension between past and present through high sensitivity to the cultural identity of the land in which they are embedded. Thus, the study interprets these dynamics through a dialectical lens as the synthesis of preserving traditional roots and adapting to contemporary challenges, articulated through a particular sensitivity to cultural identity.

This investigation contributes to the discourse on how family businesses can maintain their traditional roots while adapting to contemporary challenges. It offers novel insights into the role of cultural identity in balancing tradition and modernity. Through this lens, the study underscores the capacity of family businesses such as Osmice to thrive amidst change, providing implications for both theory and practice in the field of business studies.

The person who works in an office starts his or her day with a choice of attire. The way they look in the office depends on the decisions they make on their clothes. This study aims to identify the challenges faced by employees in the management positions in the Sri Lankan apparel industry who regularly come into contact with customers when they have to decide upon the most appropriate work attire for the position they are occupying in their organization.

Collection of data was primarily achieved through a well-structured questionnaire containing a mixture of open- and closed-ended questions. Targeted employees were managers, designers and merchandisers belonging to Generation Y whose total number was sufficient to obtain 50 feedbacks. Six more interviews were conducted with the intention of finding out more about this matter.

The majority of employees in the management positions in the Sri Lankan apparel industry who have regular contact with customers prefer to dress in “smart casual attire”, which means semi-formal clothes. Lack of availability of certain varieties of business attire in Sri Lanka proved to be a major challenge for some employees. Overpriced clothing, less comfortable clothing and lack of the right fabrics and designs were also challenges. These findings highlight the importance of manufacturing a wider variety of business attire using moderately priced but comfortable fabrics to make affordable and good quality products. There is a need to have a persuasive merchandising method to achieve good sales and provide a pleasant shopping experience to the customers.

Sri Lankan workwear retailers as well as apparel designers can benefit from the findings of this research as there is no evidence of any other studies on this subject. Therefore, this will help them to fill the market gap for business attire by addressing these challenges.

Resilience of long-lived family businesses has been widely acknowledged but the mechanisms enabling longevity need to be further investigated. This can be done by examining how narratives about crisis situations are processed in family firms.

Based on narrative interviews, this qualitative study examines how crisis situations have been dealt with and narrated by long-lived German family firms.

Narratives of survival can have a strengthening effect so they become also narratives for survival. The analysis reveals how the constructive management of crises contributes to emotional attachment, identification and commitment and also strengthens resilience and longevity.

The study contributes to narrative identity theory by answering calls for narrative analysis and capturing the influence of narratives on family firms and business families. The discussion of the findings leads to the narrative processing model showing how past crises are processes to gain identity and resilience in the future and how the business family can influence this process.

Islamic banks (IBs) place significant importance on their religious identity, prompting the utilization of impression management (IM) strategies to emphasize such identity. This paper aims to discuss the motivations behind using IM in the creation of religious identity by IBs, and to explore the use of religious symbols and language as a form of religious rhetoric. It is argued that to counteract the threats to their religious identity, IBs use IM techniques, predominantly through the inclusion of religious symbols and rhetoric.

An empirical exploratory study, using content analysis, was conducted on the annual reports of the largest IBs for the year 2022. The analyses involved a total of 39 banks based on a filtered list from The Banker’s Top Islamic Financial Institutions of 2022. A manual content analysis was undertaken to extract religious symbols, images and contents.

The findings reveal the use of IM techniques that emphasize the religious identity of these banks. Notably, IBs consistently reaffirm their commitment to Sharia compliance and disclose their contributions to Zakah. In addition, the analysis reveals the incorporation of Quranic verses, religious iconographic images and other religious rhetoric statements in the annual reports of many IBs.

The analysis concludes that the assertion by IBs that their guiding principles are rooted in Islamic values are supported by the religious terminology and imagery embedded in their annual reports. Alongside mere religious symbolism, the terms and images are integral part of the corporate identity of the Islamic that not only sends persuasive signals to stakeholders but also help build an impression on the activities of the IBs.

IM has been a key objective and strategy of companies. This study aimed at exploring whether and how IBs used religious symbolism as an integral part of IM and corporate identity.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon by analysing management academic literature on the issue. Stemming from the most current data on immigration and from the awareness that entrepreneurship is a viable instrument of immigrant (women) integration and inclusion, this chapter analyses the most updated management results on the issue. The analysis is mainly centred on works published after 2019, and some interesting insights emerge. Among them, we can refer to the awareness that research on immigrant women entrepreneurship is still in its infancy. Although, indeed, immigrant entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs have been analysed considerably by researchers, it has been mainly in isolation. Therefore, room for investigating still exists, and this chapter uncovers some possible future research avenues. Moreover, by reviewing the selected papers, it clearly emerges that not all immigrant women entrepreneurs are alike; different targets (that is, different ethnicities) must be addressed differently by policy makers when policy measurements are identified. In other words, generic programmes aimed at increasing entrepreneurship among immigrant women cannot necessarily be successful.

This article explains the causal mechanism supporting sustainable longevity by analysing the last three generations of one of the oldest family firms in Latin America.

An explanatory single-case qualitative research based on critical realism explores why and how this family firm has been able to maintain its multigenerational longevity.

Los Lingues's evolutionary strategy, driven by transgenerational entrepreneurship under effectuation, has supported this family firm's sustainable longevity. Its effectual logic emerged mainly from the richness of the firm's historical resources embedded in its identity, knowledge and social capital and priority to preserve socioemotional wealth.

This study integrates socioemotional wealth and effectuation theory to explain a family firm's ability to survive through generations and sustain longevity. The study demonstrates the relevance of effectual logic in the entrepreneurial dynamics of a multigenerational family firm. Effectual logic drives the firm evolution and adaptation for sustainable longevity.

This study aims to examine member attachment in hybrid identity organizations (HIOs), assessing the distinct effects of identification with respect to two elements (normative and utilitarian) of a hybrid’s identity. Specifically, the author explored how such dual identifications influence commitment and exit/voice/loyalty.

To distinguish the effects of the two identities, the author used the mechanism of identity congruence – the gap between identity perceptions and expectations – as an analog of identification. The models of identity gap, commitment and exit/voice/loyalty were examined via a survey of agricultural cooperative members.

Both the social and economic forms of identity gap were significantly related to commitment and exit/voice/loyalty. In addition, commitment mediated the relationship between identity gap and exit/voice/loyalty.

The results demonstrate the distinctive effects of the dual identities and reinforce the importance of delineating such differences when examining identification in hybrid organizations.

Managers should recognize the duality inherent in hybrid organizational identification and understand the potential for different outcomes stemming from the separate identities.

This study represents the first quantitative examination of an integrated model of dual identification and commitment in HIOs. It is also unique in exploring the exit/voice/loyalty framework as a consequent of identification.

The aim of this study is to explore how women in Sri Lanka cultivate entrepreneurial personae to navigate the various gendered roles they situationally enact, as they attempt to secure legitimacy and acceptance and overcome their otherness. Drawing on Goffman's theorisation of symbolic interaction, this study investigates how gender informs the performance of entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka. In this way, the study engages with the challenges women in the Global South navigate while undertaking entrepreneurship, and it contributes to the critical entrepreneurship literature on the intertwined nature of gender and entrepreneurship.

Following feminist standpoint epistemology (FSE), this qualitative study focuses on women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka by examining the performance of entrepreneurship through 44 life history interviews (LHIs) and 40 Field Observations conducted over a seven-month period.

The findings reveal that women carefully cultivate entrepreneurial personae by striking a balance between entrepreneurial ideals and patriarchal social expectations around womanhood. The findings of the study present how the entrepreneurial personae are constructed by way of appearance, mannerism and setting, which presents opportunities for future research to explore the dramaturgical aspect of gender and entrepreneurship.

This study contributes to the growing body of feminist research surrounding women entrepreneurs, by drawing on insights from the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs in the Global South. This study also expands Goffman's theorisation of audience segregation and shows that a subject's understanding of the audience shapes their personae. A further contribution of this research is how space becomes an extension of the personae at play.

This study aims to examine the impact of communication style focusing on the family business brand’s roots and virtues on inferences of manipulative intent and willingness to pay a price premium, applying the persuasion knowledge model.

This study collects data involving 337 participants from France and applies partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that communication style plays an important role in inferences of manipulative intent: focusing on the family business brand’s virtues has a positive effect while focusing on the family business brand’s roots has a nonsignificant effect. In turn, inferences of manipulative intent have a negative and significant effect on willingness to pay a price premium. Furthermore, age does not moderate the effect of communication style focusing on the family restaurant brand’s roots and inferences of manipulative intent but positively moderates the effect of communication style focusing on the family restaurant brand’s virtues on inferences of manipulative intent.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to try to unpack the differing effects of communication styles in the context of family business brands. In this vein, it has insightful theoretical and managerial implications for family business brands.

This paper aims to examine how organisational values affect diversity in terms of different competencies in rural family Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Recruiting a diverse workforce in rural family SMEs can be particularly difficult due to the prevalence of internal family values and the lack of available local specialised competencies. A deficiency of diversity in employment and competence acquisition and development can create problems, as it often prevents rural family SMEs from recruiting employees with a wide variety of qualifications and skills.

The study takes on a multi-case method of Swedish rural family SMEs, applying a qualitative content analysis approach. In total, 20 in-depth structured interviews are conducted with rural family SME owners and 2 industries were investigated and compared – the tourism and the manufacturing industries.

Rural family SMEs lack long-term employment strategies, and competence diversity does not appear to be a priority for rural family SMEs, as they often have prematurely decided who they will hire rather than what competencies are needed for their long-term business development. It is more important to keep the team of employees tight and the family spirit present than to include competence diversity and mixed qualifications in the employment acquisition and development.

Contrary to prior research, our findings indicate that rural family SMEs apply short-term competence diversity strategies rather than long-term prospects regarding competence acquisition and management, due to their family values and rural setting, which strictly narrows the selection of employees and competencies. Also, a general reluctance towards competence diversity is identified, which originates from the very same family values and rural context.