BUSI 815 Week 5 Case Study Assignment Example

Three Firms, One Question: A Multiple-Case Study Design for Successor Legitimacy in Family Manufacturing Firms

Why a Case Study

The earlier assignments in this course examined successors' experience through narrative and phenomenology. A case study shifts the focus from the successor's inner experience to the succession as an event within an organization and its relationships. The research question for this design is: How do sons and daughters who inherit small family manufacturers come to be accepted as leaders by employees, customers and lenders? Yin (2018) identifies three conditions that favor a case study: the research question asks how or why, the researcher has little or no control over behavioral events, and the focus is on a contemporary phenomenon in its real-world context. All three hold. The question asks how, the researcher cannot influence a family's succession, and legitimacy cannot be separated from the firm, its people and its market. Creswell and Poth (2018) frame the approach in similar terms, as the close study of a bounded system across time, drawing on many kinds of information.

Defining and Bounding the Case

Yin (2018) emphasizes that defining the case is among the most important design decisions. Here, the case is the succession of leadership from a founder to a child in a single family-owned manufacturing firm with 20 to 300 employees. The case is bounded in time by the five years from two years before the formal transfer to three years after it, and in scope by the firm's internal relationships and its main external relationships. The design is embedded rather than holistic: within each case, three subunits will be examined, employees, key customers and the firm's primary lender, because legitimacy may be granted by each group at different times and for different reasons.

Case Selection and Design

The study will use a multiple-case design with three cases. Yin (2018) describes multiple cases as following replication logic, with cases chosen either to predict similar results (literal replication) or contrasting results for anticipated reasons (theoretical replication). This design uses theoretical replication. The three firms will differ in how the founder exited: complete retirement on a planned date, a gradual phase-out over several years, and an abrupt exit forced by illness. In the account Handler (1990) gives of succession, the parent steps back by degrees while the child steps forward, and the two roles must be renegotiated at every stage, so the manner of the founder's exit should affect how and when others accept the successor. Firms will be identified through a regional manufacturers' association and screened by telephone for fit with the criteria and willingness to provide access.

Propositions

Yin (2018) recommends that explanatory and descriptive case studies state propositions that direct attention to what should be examined. Two propositions guide this study. First, drawing on Handler (1990), successors will gain legitimacy with employees more slowly when founders remain physically present in the firm after the formal transfer, because employees will continue to treat the founder as the source of authority. Second, drawing on the knowledge-based view of succession (Cabrera-Suárez et al., 2001), successors will gain legitimacy with customers and lenders when they demonstrate command of the tacit knowledge, technical and relational, that those groups previously associated with the founder. A rival proposition will also be examined: that legitimacy depends mainly on the firm's financial performance after the transfer, regardless of how the founder exited.

Sources of Evidence

Yin (2018) describes six common sources of evidence, and this design plans to use all six. Documents will include board minutes, internal announcements and correspondence about the transfer. Archival records will include sales by customer and credit agreements over the five-year window. Interviews will be conducted with the successor, the founder where possible, six to eight employees across levels, three key customers and the lender's relationship manager. Direct observation will include management meetings and the shop floor during two site visits. Participant observation is limited to informal conversation during visits. Physical artifacts, such as which office the founder still occupies and whose signature appears on purchase orders, may reveal how authority is displayed. A case study protocol will standardize these procedures across firms. It will contain an overview of the study and its propositions, the field procedures for gaining access and scheduling visits, the questions the researcher must answer in each case, written as reminders to the researcher rather than as an interview script, and an outline of the case report. Yin (2018) treats the protocol as a major tactic for reliability, and in a multiple-case study it also keeps the three cases comparable, so that differences in findings reflect differences in the firms rather than in how they were studied. A pilot case, a fourth firm that meets the criteria but is not part of the study, will be used to refine the protocol and interview questions before the main data collection begins.

Analysis

Analysis will begin within each case, organizing evidence by subunit and by time, and will then compare cases. Pattern matching will compare the observed timing and sources of legitimacy with the patterns predicted by the propositions and the rival explanation. Cross-case synthesis will then examine whether the differences among the three cases follow the founders' modes of exit, as theoretical replication predicts. If legitimacy arrives fastest where the founder left completely, and slowest where the founder lingered, the cases will have replicated the theory rather than merely illustrated it. A case study database will hold all evidence separately from the case reports.

Ethics and the Researcher's Role

Family firms are small worlds, and the study's embedded design asks employees, customers and a lender to talk about the family's leadership. Confidentiality is therefore the central ethical concern. Firms and participants will be given pseudonyms, identifying details will be altered in reports, and no participant's statements will be shared with the family. Employees will be interviewed off site or in private rooms, and their participation will be voluntary and unknown to their employer where they prefer. Because the researcher grew up in a family firm, memos written after each visit will record moments of identification with the successor or the founder, so that these reactions can be checked against the evidence. No data will be gathered until Liberty's Institutional Review Board has approved the protocol and each firm has signed a site agreement.

Quality of the Design

Table 1 applies the four tests set out by Yin (2018) to the design.

Conclusion

A multiple-case study suits a question about how successors gain legitimacy, because legitimacy is granted by people and institutions in a real organizational context. The design defines the case precisely, selects three firms to test whether the founder's exit shapes acceptance, states propositions and a rival, draws on six sources of evidence and builds quality into each step. Among the approaches considered in this course so far, it offers the clearest path to findings that family firms and their advisers could use when planning a founder's exit.

References

Cabrera-Suárez, K., De Saá-Pérez, P., & García-Almeida, D. (2001). The succession process from a resource- and knowledge-based view of the family firm. Family Business Review, 14(1), 37-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.2001.00037.x

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

Handler, W. C. (1990). Succession in family firms: A mutual role adjustment between entrepreneur and next-generation family members. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 15(1), 37-52. https://doi.org/10.1177/104225879001500105

Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). SAGE Publications.