BUSI 815 Week 4 Phenomenology Assignment Example

The Lived Experience of Taking Over: A Transcendental Phenomenological Design for Family Business Successors

Introduction

The narrative design proposed in Module/Week 3 kept two siblings' succession stories whole and attended to their differences. Phenomenology asks a different question. Creswell and Poth (2018) describe a phenomenological study as one that describes the common meaning for several individuals of their lived experiences of a concept or phenomenon, reducing individual experiences to a description of the universal essence. Applied to family business succession, the question becomes: what is it like to take over the leadership of a parent's firm, and what is common to that experience across successors? The answer could help families and advisers prepare successors by describing what the transition actually feels like from the inside, something the survey literature on succession has not provided.

Choosing an Approach

Creswell and Poth (2018) describe two main approaches. Hermeneutic phenomenology, associated with van Manen (2016), treats research as an interpretive activity in which the researcher reflects on essential themes and writes about the experience, mediating between participants' meanings and their own. Transcendental phenomenology, associated with Moustakas (1994), places more emphasis on describing participants' experiences and less on the researcher's interpretation, and asks the researcher to set aside, as far as possible, their own experience through a process called epoche or bracketing. This design adopts Moustakas's approach for two reasons. First, its systematic procedures suit a doctoral researcher new to phenomenology. Second, the researcher's own history in a family firm is strong enough that a deliberate effort to set it aside seems safer than an interpretive approach that would draw on it.

Research Questions

Phenomenological questions ask what an experience is like and how it is lived, without presupposing an answer. The central question for this design is: What is the lived experience of second-generation owners who have taken over leadership of a parent's manufacturing firm? Two subquestions follow Moustakas's distinction between what was experienced and how. What do successors describe as the defining moments and feelings of taking over? In what settings, relationships and conditions do they describe those moments occurring? The questions deliberately avoid the vocabulary of the succession literature, such as stages, commitment or knowledge transfer, so that participants are not steered toward the concepts the researcher already knows. If those concepts appear in the essence, it will be because participants described them in their own terms.

The Phenomenon and the Participants

The phenomenon is the experience of taking over leadership of a family manufacturing firm from a parent. Participants must meet three criteria: they hold the top leadership position in a U.S. manufacturing firm with between 20 and 500 employees; the position passed to them from a parent; and the transfer occurred within the past five years, so that the experience is recent enough to describe in detail. Ten participants will be recruited through regional manufacturers' associations and family business centers at two universities, a number within the range Creswell and Poth (2018) describe as common for phenomenological studies. Variation in industry, firm size and gender will be sought within the criteria, since an essence that holds across such variation is more credible.

Bracketing and Data Collection

Before the first interview, the researcher will write a full description of their own experience of growing up in and working in a family firm, including a failed attempt to take over a role in it. Moustakas (1994) describes this epoche as a way of seeing the phenomenon freshly, though Creswell and Poth (2018) note that complete bracketing is rarely achieved. The written account will be revisited throughout the study to notice where the researcher's experience may be shaping questions or interpretations.

Each participant will be interviewed once for 60 to 90 minutes, in person at their firm where possible, with a brief follow-up to review the description of their experience. Moustakas (1994) recommends that such interviews rest on two broad questions, adapted here as follows: What have you experienced in taking over leadership of your parent's company? What contexts or situations have influenced or affected that experience? Prompts will ask for specific moments, such as the first decision made alone or the first time an employee came to the participant rather than the parent.

Analysis

Analysis will follow the steps Moustakas (1994) describes and Creswell and Poth (2018) summarize. First, the researcher will read each transcript in full and list every statement relevant to the experience, treating each as having equal worth, a step called horizontalization. Second, overlapping and repetitive statements will be removed and the remaining ones grouped into clusters of meaning, or themes. Third, a textural description will state what participants experienced, using their words. Fourth, a structural description will state how they experienced it, in what settings and conditions. Finally, a composite description will combine the two into the essence of the experience. Table 1 shows how four composite statements from different participants begin to form a cluster.

The two emerging clusters suggest a possible essence in which succession is experienced less as receiving a role than as being gradually granted authority by others while remaining loyal to a parent who is still present. The textural description would say what changed; the structural description would show that it changed through other people's recognition. Whether that holds across all ten participants is what the full analysis would test.

Trustworthiness will rest on several strategies Creswell and Poth (2018) describe. Each participant will review the textural description drawn from their interview and confirm or correct it, a form of member checking. A peer reviewer, a faculty member experienced in phenomenology, will examine the clusters of meaning against a sample of transcripts. The researcher's written epoche and memos will form an audit trail showing how analytic decisions were made. Rich, thick description, with participants' own words throughout the composite description, will let readers judge whether the essence fits successors they know.

Challenges

Creswell and Poth (2018) note several challenges in phenomenology: the researcher needs a solid grounding in its philosophical assumptions, participants must be carefully chosen so that all have experienced the phenomenon, and bracketing personal experience may be difficult. For this study, the third challenge is the greatest. The design's response, a written epoche revisited throughout and participant review of their descriptions, reduces but cannot remove the influence of the researcher's history. A further challenge is practical: business readers may find a description of essence less useful than recommendations. The dissertation would therefore need to translate the essence into implications for preparing successors, such as deliberate moments in which a parent publicly transfers authority, while staying faithful to what participants described.

Conclusion

A transcendental phenomenological design would describe what is common in successors' experience of taking over a parent's firm, complementing the narrative design's attention to individual stories. Its strength is a rigorous, systematic path from participants' statements to an essence that could inform how families plan transitions. Its demands, especially bracketing and careful selection, are significant but manageable within a DBA timeline.

References

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

Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods. SAGE Publications.

van Manen, M. (2016). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (2nd ed.). Routledge.