La dinamica reputazionale nel Family Business. Analisi teoriche e prospettive strategiche nello studio della reputazione dell’impresa familiare

In terms of output of the process of socialisation for the construction of shared opinions and social consensus, Corporate Reputation, based on a close network of information exchanges is in effect, the product of a process of attribution of sense to a firm’s action on a social level nurtured, shared and socialised in terms of consensus. The parties concerned, in relation to direct experience with the firm or in conformity with information and value signals received/transmitted, by means of official channels and informal relational networks, attribute significance to the organization’s message, its visual and symbolic identity, culture and image held in the marketplace. This dynamic process of sensemaking seeing as it occurs over time, has retrospective collective consistency, referring as it does, to past events. In sum, potential processes of sensemaking can be put in place by addressing attention to future business opportunities as a decisional platform for orienting strategic choice. In recent years, since financial out-puts are thought to be directly affected by Corporate Reputation, its management as a capital has largely been discussed. Reputation the formation of which takes quite long time could be a major factor in gaining competitive advantage as a core-strategic resource. Due to its complex dynamics, reputation, the cumulative result of the previous and past economic behaviors of corporate, has become the initial focus of most disciplines. Hence, the contributions coming from different disciplines (communication, psychology, sociology, economics, organization studies, management) give signals of enriching debates on defining and measuring Corporate Reputation. Although there is a heightened interest in the concept of Corporate Reputation, only a limited number of studies have been done in the family businesses literature. Family businesses are the most common form of the business organizations in the world and are estimated to account for 65 % to 90 % of all business in various nations. Specially, it can be seen that family businesses compromise a great part of small and medium size companies in the world. Their life stories, structural characteristics, strategic orientations and cultural traits are interesting case studies for practitioners and scholars. Family businesses literature has developed late as a relative within the management literature. Some researchers have indicated that the interest of this field began in 1970s. However, researches increased more systematically in the second part of the1980s and 1990s. Recent scholarly contributions made an important study on the subject of family businesses and analyzed the articles that were published in Family Business Review. In this study, the researchers found a high fragmentation because of the different paradigms on the family businesses literature. They specially have emphasized that the new research topics such as strategic management, conflict management, innovation, internationalization are important like succession topic. However, the number of studies directly focusing on reputation is very limited for these businesses, despite the opinion that there is a close relationship between the continuity of family business and its Corporate Reputation. In studies regarding family businesses, two dimensions gain importance: the family and the business. Especially business dimension which contains strategies is deeply affected by family values, business style and vision of the company. This characteristic can transform into an advantage or disadvantage for the success and continuity of the company. It should especially be emphasized that when the aims of family and the market expectations aren’t overlapped, this situation definitely can be a problem for the business. However, statistics show that only one-third of the family businesses can be carried over the second generation and a few companies can survive through the third generation. In polarizing corporate behavior dynamics between “knowing how to” (‘being good’ in reputational terms) and “letting others know” (‘being known’), the latter seems to assume more relevance. Consequently, reputation can be defined even in function of the particular dimension of “prominence”, or in other words, with reference to the extent to which an organization is both acknowledged collectively and is distinguished at firm level, in a competitive context. Communication as a vector for activating cooperation becomes an essential element of the creating of organizational settings in which reputational expectations are generated. In shaping corporate reputation, communication is given the key role of divulging input for decision making processes and diffusion of results not to mention the transfer to the outside of a firm’s intrinsic values. Added to these elements is the role played by the process of the nurturing sense making in prospect, in terms of expected future reputation. In this vision, corporate reputation is people-dependent, “viewed differently by different stakeholder groups”. In this study corporate reputation has been discussed in terms of family businesses. In particular, this research examines the relationship between reputation and communication; in the first and second part, the traditional conception of reputation described in the literature are analysed according to their strengths and limitations. In the third part, we examine the important dimensions of a family business and we have highlighted the advantages of the family business ( strengths and weaknesses). Lastly, in the fourth part, some research questions that aimed to explore the meaning of reputation concept for family businesses have been suggested; case studies are used to learn more about the trajectories of this firms and the managerial and communication implication of this study are discusses. [edited by Author]