BUSI 815 Week 3 Narrative Assignment Example

Restorying a Takeover: A Narrative Research Design for Second-Generation Family Business Owners

Introduction

The literature review for this course found that family business succession has been studied mostly through surveys and conceptual models, and that little is known about how successors themselves experience taking over. This assignment considers how narrative research could address that gap. Creswell and Poth (2018) describe narrative research as the study of the lives of individuals as told through their own stories, in which the researcher collects stories, often restories them in a meaningful sequence, and writes about the experience in collaboration with participants. Succession is a story by nature. It has a beginning, often in childhood, turning points such as the day a parent first leaves a successor in charge, and an ending that may still be unwritten. A narrative study would keep those stories whole rather than breaking them into themes.

Narrative Research Questions

Narrative questions ask how people tell and make sense of their experience over time. This design poses one central question: How do two siblings who took over their father's machining company tell the story of becoming its owners? Three subquestions follow from the literature. How do they describe the turning points at which authority and responsibility shifted from their father to them? How do they account for their reasons for joining and staying in the business, and do those reasons change as the story unfolds? How do their two tellings of the same succession differ, and what do the differences reveal about each sibling's place in the family and the firm? The subquestions draw on the review's themes of role adjustment, commitment and the founder-successor relationship, but they are phrased openly so the participants' stories, not the literature, set the terms.

Choosing a Type of Narrative Study

Creswell and Poth (2018) distinguish types of narrative study by their analytic strategy and by their form, including biographical studies, autoethnography, life histories and oral histories. This design uses a biographical approach, in which the researcher writes and records the experiences of other people's lives, focused on the life story of the takeover rather than on the whole life. The participants will be two siblings, a brother and sister in their forties who took over their father's 60-employee precision machining company three years ago. Studying two siblings who lived through the same succession allows the study to show how one event becomes two stories. Riessman (2008) emphasizes that narrative analysis attends not only to what is told but to how and why it is told, and two tellings of one takeover make that attention possible.

Collecting Stories

Data collection will rely on three long interviews with each sibling over four months. The first will invite each to tell the story of how they came to lead the company, with as little interruption as possible. The second will return to turning points the first identified, asking for detail about particular days, conversations and decisions. The third will share the researcher's emerging retelling with the participant for correction and response. Artifacts will supplement the interviews: letters between the father and his children, photographs of the shop across decades, the company's first price lists and the signed buy-sell agreement. Creswell and Poth (2018) note that narrative researchers gather many forms of information to build a full picture of participants' lives, and artifacts can prompt memories interviews alone would miss. The father, now retired, will be invited to a single interview, with his consent, to provide context, though the study's focus remains the successors' stories.

Restorying the Accounts

Analysis will follow the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space set out by Clandinin and Connelly (2000). The first dimension is interaction, both personal, the participant's feelings and hopes, and social, the people around them. The second is continuity: the past, present and future the story moves across. The third is situation, the places where the story occurs, here the shop floor, the family home and the bank where the buy-sell agreement was signed. Each sibling's transcripts will be coded for these elements and for plot: setting, characters, problems, actions and resolution. The researcher will then rewrite each account in chronological order, preserving the participant's own phrases where possible.

A short composite excerpt shows the result. The brother's first interview moved back and forth across 30 years, but restoried in sequence it reads: At 14, he swept floors on Saturdays and learned to read a micrometer from the shop foreman, not his father. At 26, after an engineering degree, he returned to run quality control and found that his father checked his inspection reports each night. At 38, when his father had a heart attack, he ran the shop alone for six weeks and discovered that customers called him first. He described that period as the moment he stopped being "the boss's son" and became the person the shop relied on. In the restoried version, the turning point is not the signing of the agreement but the six weeks no one planned. His sister's story, by contrast, turned on the day she presented a financial plan to the bank, a scene her brother never mentioned.

Challenges and Ethical Questions

Creswell and Poth (2018) identify several challenges in narrative research: the researcher must gather extensive information about participants, understand the context of their lives and collaborate with them in telling the story, while remaining aware of whose story is being told. Family stories intensify those challenges. Each sibling's account includes their father and the other sibling, who may object to how they appear. The design addresses this by having each participant review their own restoried account, by changing identifying details of the company and by removing material that concerns a third party without that person's consent. The researcher's own background, growing up in a family firm, must also be acknowledged, since it may shape which turning points seem important. Beginning with the first conversation, the researcher will write short memos recording the researcher's reactions to each story, especially moments of identification with a participant, so that those reactions can be examined rather than silently built into the retelling. Credibility will be supported by the participants' review of their restoried accounts and by comparing interview claims with the dated artifacts.

Fit for a DBA Dissertation

Narrative research offers a depth no survey can match, and it could reveal aspects of succession, such as unplanned turning points, that the literature's stage models overlook. Its limits are equally clear. Two participants cannot support claims about successors in general, and business readers may expect findings that apply beyond a single family. For a DBA dissertation, narrative could serve well as a first study or as one component of a larger design, but the problem's practical aims may be better served by approaches that compare several cases or seek a shared essence of the experience, which the remaining assignments will consider. Even if the dissertation adopts another approach, the narrative exercise is useful preparation, because it trains the researcher to listen for sequence and turning points that a thematic analysis might flatten. A later case study or phenomenological design could include one long narrative interview with each participant for exactly that reason.

References

Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass.

Creswell, J. W., & Poth, C. N. (2018). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. SAGE Publications.