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The question of crisis resistance and resilience of long-lived family businesses became particularly volatile with the beginning of the Corona crisis. In this context the project “Narratives of Survival” was launched focusing on the prevailing narratives to find out how crisis situations have been dealt with and narrated by long-lived German family firms.

Based on narrative interviews, the empirical study of transgenerational entrepreneurship was first approached in an open-ended manner. The interview guideline addresses different types of crises and asks about resources, insights, regulations and explanations for the longevity of the family businesses.

In the qualitative content analysis, 12 guiding narratives were pointed out, providing information about the self-narratives of these entrepreneurial families which revolve around the three themes of self-image, familiarity and strategy.

This study provides information about the secrets of longevity of four very old family firms. The narratives revealed that strengthening the identity of the entrepreneurial family and employees of the family business as well as generating a shared reality, supports constructive handling of challenges and crises. This study contributes to theory by answering calls for narrative analysis in family firms and to practice by showing what younger companies can learn from long-lived family businesses.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Family businesses are able to survive external pressures and crises when they adopt key narratives of survival.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

This paper seeks to compare different national PR histories in order to unfold the degree of abstract reflection in PR history writing. It aims to provide some suggestions for a future PR historiography, based on this comparison.

The paper compares British, German, and US American PR historiography. The study is based on a comparison of 36 PR histories. A triple matrix of theoretization is used in order to differentiate the histories.

Within the comparison American PR historiography accounts for 24 public relations history approaches, whereas Great Britain (1) and Germany (11) offer fewer histories. However, this richness in quantity does not lead to theoretical diversification. Owing to the paradigmatic obligation to a progressivist understanding, American PR historiography actually entails only one theoretic approach, while its German equivalent includes three different theoretic approaches and British PR historiography – being at its start – at least contains one explicitly non‐progressivist, methodologically well‐informed, fact‐oriented example. Paradoxically, the prevailing American PR historiography, on the one hand, conceptualizes PR as a modern phenomenon but, on the other hand, claims even ancient beginnings.

The corpus of analysis contains only studies that attempt to supply an encompassing overview of (national) PR history.

Public relations managers may use these findings to achieve a more nuanced critical understanding of the history of their occupation, and thereby reflect on its current state, which may lead to intensified ethical endeavours.

The paper presents a pioneer systematic comparison of the three national PR histories, which may lead to enhanced national and general PR historiography. Another value is the establishment of a theoretically informed comparative measuring instrument, which (in future) can also be applied in order to compare and improve other national PR historiographies.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area.

The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward.

The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history.

The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.