BUSI 815 Week 8 Qualitative Data Analysis Assignment Example

From Transcript to Themes: A Qualitative Analysis of Three Successor Interviews on Earning Authority in Family Firms

The Data

This analysis uses three semi-structured interviews with second-generation successors, conducted for the Interview Transcript Assignment and transcribed verbatim. Participant A, 41, has run the machining business her father started, now about 60 people, for three years. Participant B, 38, took over his mother's commercial bakery, which employs 140 people, two years ago. Participant C, 46, has led his father's 35-employee plastics molding firm for four years. Interviews lasted 62, 80 and 71 minutes and were guided by one opening question, "Tell me how you came to lead the company," followed by prompts about specific moments. Transcripts totaled about 31,000 words. Names, places and identifying details have been changed. The analysis was guided by the research question developed in the literature review: what is it like, for a child running a small manufacturer founded by a parent, to receive that parent's authority? Each transcript was read with that question in mind, though coding remained open to topics participants raised themselves, such as Participant B's account of the firm's relationship with its union.

Procedure

Analysis followed the data analysis spiral Creswell and Poth (2018) describe, in which the researcher moves in analytic circles rather than in a fixed linear sequence. Transcripts were first organized into files and read in full twice without coding, with memos recorded in the margins on first impressions. A memo after the first reading of Participant A noted that she referred to her father by name, not as "Dad," every time she described a decision, a habit that seemed to mark a boundary between family and firm.

Initial coding then proceeded line by line, using short labels drawn as closely as possible from participants' own words. The three transcripts produced 21 initial codes, among them "using Dad's name," "the floor testing me," "the bank called me," "the fire," "keeping his desk" and "my own way." Codes were compared across transcripts, and those with similar meanings were grouped into seven categories. The categories were then examined for their relationships, and three themes were developed that together describe how participants experienced the movement of authority. Throughout, memos recorded decisions about merging, splitting or renaming codes, forming an audit trail. Yin (2018) emphasizes that a report should allow readers to follow the chain of evidence from data to conclusion, and the codebook below is designed to do that.

Codebook

Table 1 presents the three themes with their categories, definitions and an example quotation for each.

The first theme gathers three categories that describe the early period after the formal transfer. The second gathers categories about a turning point. The third describes how recognition arrived from outside the firm and was then carried inside.

Findings

Theme 1: Borrowing the Founder's Name

All three participants described an early period in which their authority depended on their parent's name. Participant A said she would tell machinists that her father agreed with a decision "even when we hadn't talked," because "they would take it from him and not from me." Participant C described letting his father announce a price increase he had designed. The category of private disagreement captures what made this period painful: participants often disagreed with their parents but could not say so publicly without weakening the authority they were borrowing.

Theme 2: The Unplanned Test

Two participants identified a single unplanned event as the moment their authority changed. For Participant B, it was an oven line failure in the middle of the night, when her mother could not be reached and she decided to reroute production to a second line and call in a maintenance contractor. "The next morning nobody asked what my mother thought," she said. For Participant A, it was a fire in a grinding cell. Neither participant chose the moment that changed everything; it arrived as an emergency and passed as a test. Both described being watched as they decided, and both described the decision as acting alone for the first time.

Theme 3: Recognition from Outside

The third theme concerns how outsiders' recognition preceded and helped produce insiders' acceptance. Participant C described the day his father's longtime banker called him rather than his father about a credit line. Participant A described a major customer who began sending engineering changes to her directly. In each case, participants said, employees noticed and began to treat the outsider's choice as a signal.

A Negative Case

Participant C did not describe an unplanned test. His father retired on a planned date, left the building and declined to take calls about the business. C's account moved directly from borrowing his father's name to recognition from the bank, with no crisis between. This case suggests that the unplanned test may matter mainly when the founder remains present or available, and that a clean exit can do the work a crisis does in other firms. Rather than dropping the theme, the analysis revises it: the test appears to be one route to earned authority, not the only one.

Relating the Themes to the Literature

The themes both confirm and extend the succession research reviewed earlier in the course. For Handler (1990), succession is a slow exchange of roles, the founder giving ground as the successor takes it, and the theme of borrowing the founder's name fits the middle stages of that model, when the successor acts as a manager while the parent still holds symbolic authority. What the model does not describe is how the adjustment completes. These interviews suggest an answer: authority shifts not only through the parent's gradual withdrawal but through events and outside recognition that the family does not control. The theme of recognition from outside also fits the argument that a firm's edge lies in what its founder knows (Cabrera-Suárez et al., 2001), since customers and lenders appear to grant recognition once successors show command of the relational knowledge those outsiders once associated with the founder. These links are tentative, but they give the dissertation specific propositions to examine.

Trustworthiness and Limitations

Several strategies Creswell and Poth (2018) describe support the analysis. Codes stayed close to participants' language, memos formed an audit trail, and the negative case was reported and used to refine a theme. Member checking will be completed by sending each participant a summary of the themes. The researcher's background in a family firm made the theme of borrowed authority especially familiar, and a memo was written to examine whether that familiarity led to over-coding; a second reading of the transcripts found the category supported in all three. The main limitation is the small number of interviews, which allows the themes to be treated only as tentative patterns to be explored in the dissertation.

Conclusion

The analysis suggests that successors in these firms experienced authority as moving from a borrowed name, through an unplanned test or a clean exit, to recognition that began outside the firm. These tentative themes connect the course's methods to the dissertation: they will inform the propositions and interview protocol for a multiple-case study, and the negative case points to the founder's mode of exit as a variable worth selecting cases on.

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.