Literature,Fiction,and the Family Business

Introduction

In recent years, scholars have intensified the calls for more interdisciplinary approaches toward understanding the motivations, activities, processes, and behaviors of family businesses. Most family business scholars tend to draw upon insights from the management and economics disciplines for both theoretical and methodological guidance in their research (Neubaum, 2018; Payne, 2018; Sharma, 2004). However, the relevance for family business studies of disciplines such as psychology (e.g., Kammerlander & Breugst, 2019; Pieper, 2010; Strike et al., 2018), family sciences (e.g., Combs et al., 2020; Jaskiewicz et al., 2017), history (Colli, 2012; Hjorth & Dawson, 2016), and anthropology (Stewart, 2003) has also been emphasized:

For while founding our perspectives on established literature is a good practice, we also need to broaden our perspectives to seek out new ways of “seeing” and theorizing. (Payne, 2018, p. 173)

Our purpose is to contribute to the discussion about the relevance of interdisciplinary approaches by highlighting the value of the perspective of humanities and in particular literature and literary studies to family business research. We focus on the role of literary fiction that we typically find in novels, plays, and poetry. ¹ In the humanities, literature and literary studies are a key discipline (Klarer, 2013), and as we shall see, the role and value of literary studies and literary fiction have already attracted attention in the broader discipline of management and organization.

We focus on two ways in which literary fiction can help us to understand family businesses. ² First, in keeping with Rhodes and Brown (2005, p. 469) who suggest that “explicitly fictional stories can be regarded as appropriate empirical material for organizational research,” we posit that texts produced through literary fiction can help us capture important family business phenomenon that may be difficult to access through other forms of empirical material. The encounter between concepts and theories from the family business literature and fiction can enhance and give new meanings to these concepts and theories, but this encounter can also give birth to new concepts and theories. Furthermore, drawing on fiction can expand our methodological repertoire in family business research. For instance, N. Phillips (1995) argued that “by allowing us to discuss the subjective dimension of organization, narrative fiction works as a useful counterpoint to the traditional objectifying methods—both qualitative and quantitative—commonly used in the study of organization” (p. 629). Fiction can also give scholars access to “reasoning, dialogue, motivations and action as they unfold in a way that is accessible and immediate” (Boland, 1994, p. 122). Interestingly, many works of fiction take place in a context where the intersection of family and business represents a key ingredient in the plot of these narratives (e.g., Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).

Second, we consider the notion of “fiction” as such and the value that literary fiction may play in increasing our understanding of human, social, and organizational development. This is a strength of the humanities that we can bring into family business research. Humanities can help us better capture and account for the role of human, emotional, cultural, and relational experiences that make up the everyday life of family businesses and that constitute the essence of the priorities, interests, and values that guide their people’s decisions and choices.

Thus, focusing on the literary, we believe that we can draw on fiction to strengthen the connections among the study of family businesses as a scholarly endeavor, the subjective experiences of those working in and living in those organizations (Holt & Zundel, 2018; Savage et al., 2018), and those studying and supporting them. For instance, based on a study of Jorge Luis Borge’s writings, De Cock (2000, p. 597) argues that the literary can “inspire and instill a sense of humility in organizational scholars.” A humility that may trigger us to create texts that “value imagination and enthusiasm over analysis and dry knowledge” (Rhodes & Brown, 2005, p. 472). Furthermore, creating visions of how people and organizations associated with family businesses may evolve in the future can be understood as engaging in the literary by creating fiction through creative imagination. For example, Gartner (2007, p. 624) suggests, “The narrative of entrepreneurship is the generation of hypotheses of how the world might be: how the future might look and act.” Novels may suggest “what is possible” and enable readers to “examine meaning, rather than truths, existence as opposed to reality” (Milan Kundera, as cited in Tierney, 2004, p. 162).

In line with what scholars of the humanities have long argued, literature and literary studies allow us see holistic and multifaceted depictions of human and organizational affairs since artists and fiction writers are often concerned with the complex, the open, and the ambiguous rather than the reductive, the simplified, and the closed of many scholarly writers (Watson, 2011). From psychology research we also know that literary fiction and novels can improve our ability to understand the mental states of other humans, that is, our empathy. This is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies in general (Kidd & Castano, 2013) as well as our research endeavors.

We suggest that drawing on literature and fiction expressed in various narrative forms may deeply engage us as family business scholars to see our research topics from new perspectives, and to embrace new ways of interpreting and making sense of the observations we generate in our business research. Literary fiction provides additional points of contact to the everyday world of people engaged in and around family businesses and offers complementary ways of understanding subjective and experiential meanings of family businesses. As such, borrowing from literary studies “can assist us in our efforts to produce more interesting and readable accounts of organizations” (Rhodes & Brown, 2005, p. 483).

Next, we briefly share some insights regarding what literary fiction can offer business and management researchers in a general theoretical and methodological sense. We then mention a number of central themes in family business research that may be particularly relevant to study from the perspective of literature and fiction and illustrate each of the themes with examples. We conclude with some reflections regarding future research directions.

What Literary Fiction Can Offer

In the broader management and organization literature, it is since long established that literary fiction can serve as a basis for the development of scholarly knowledge (e.g., Czarniawska 1999; Czarniawska-Joerges & Guillet de Monthoux 1994; De Cock & Land, 2006; Kennedy & Lawton, 1992; N. Phillips, 1995; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Savage et al., 2018; Waldo 1968). Narratives of literary fiction are processes of creating realities that are relational in nature, that is, they are stories that are formed and represent a plot or an idea in interaction with certain historical, political, and cultural contexts (Czarniawska, 1999; Negash, 2004). In “realistic” literary fiction, the author seeks to create narratives that are believable in the sense that they resemble people, events, situations, and processes in real life. ³ The realistic novel, for instance, often appears to be a mirror reflecting reality through detailing context, motivation, and temporality in order to explore human conditions (Bowers, 2004, in M. Phillips & Knowles, 2012, p. 422). Realistic fiction about organizations such as family businesses tend to depict settings that are rich in relationships, emotions, morality, and choices that aim to mirror what goes on in real life. These narrative fictions also tend to consider the different contexts in which the organizations are embedded. Czarniawska (1999) points out that authors of realistic fiction, such as novels, historically played a role that resembled the role of social scientists in that the fiction writer’s purpose was to carefully examine and understand social problems and phenomena and describe these for the reader with the aim to increase knowledge and awareness. “Novels, like research, are usually inspired by a quest for insight and knowledge. A work of art can be very personal in tone, but still have an objective quality” (Czarniawska-Joerges & Guillet de Monthoux 1994, p. 9). Or as literary critic James Wood puts it, “Of course fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and it isn’t difficult to hold together these possibilities” (p. xix)

An example of an early realist novel that takes place in family business context, is The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howell (1885/1983). By studying, from a historical perspective, the growth and change in the family business offered in this novel, we can learn a great deal about the meanings and challenges of being a family business owner and entrepreneur in the mid-1800s, including the motivations, identity, anxieties, joys, and moral dilemmas facing the main character Silas Lapham and his family. We can also use the narrative in the novel to compare how things may have changed or not changed, relative to today. In this way, a realistic novel not only is a source of information but can also be a source of new meanings and inspiration to think differently about our contemporary world:

Perhaps one of the most important lessons about management that we might learn from novels is how these everyday ways of thinking and talking—of defining our identity as persons, of locating ourselves in a moral economy, of moving between a home life and office life, of being seen as rational—is historically bound and contingent. By reading good fiction, we can open ourselves to view the origins of these familiar realities and can also open ourselves to the possibility for changing them. (Boland, 1994, p. 136)

The interest in literary fiction for expanding our understanding of family business phenomena is, however, not only in its potential correspondence with reality (De Cock & Land, 2006), but as literary theorist Wolfgang Iser (1989) suggests, novels can also be seen as human beings’ extensions of themselves and as ways of world making: “The fictionality of literature is not identical to the results it creates but is rather a modus operandi that manifests itself in distinguishable acts. These acts are marked by the fact that they are boundary-crossings” (p. 23). This means that fiction can also be of interest when it does not necessarily make a claim to mirror or imitate reality but rather suggests alternative plots, accounts, and representations, which may go against dominant ideas and beliefs in contemporary society and business.

An example of this is the Swedish novel It’s Acceptable! (Det går an! 1838) by Carl Johan Love Almqvist. The novel depicts the relationship between main characters Sara Videbeck, a glazier’s daughter, and her fiancé Albert who fall in love in the early 19th century in an era of the guild system that constrains Sara’s right to take over her father’s business, and inequalities between men and women. The novelist uses fiction to depict a vision of a society where women could own businesses and daughters could take over the guild from their fathers and enter into a flexible marriage arrangement allowing them to build entrepreneurial careers based on the family’s business. It’s Acceptable! combines a realistic account set in a particular time and space with a visionary, for the time perceived, utopian picture of family business life.

This example suggests that novels can also generate new understandings of important family business phenomena by building alternative realities that may seem more or less “realistic” or “utopian” (cf. Czarniawska, 1999; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004). From this perspective, the fictional text can be said to have “anthropological implications” (Iser, 1989), which means that fiction and function are interlinked. Fiction is, as Gartner (2007) notes, about narrative understandings or entrepreneurship, as an “As-If, indicating hypothetical presuppositions” (Iser, 1989, p. 269).

Drawing on Literary fiction for Family Business Research

Assuming that most readers of this essay are likely to be well-versed in both quantitative and qualitative methods from the social sciences for studying family businesses, we can safely note that the study of literature has not often been identified as a methodology or source of data for research ⁴ on family businesses. While the use of narratives and narrative analysis (cf. Dawson & Hjorth, 2012; Hamilton, 2006; Hamilton et al., 2017) has found a place in family business studies, these efforts do not explore fiction or literature (for exceptions, see Hjorth & Dawson, 2016; Kjellander et al., 2012). And, while narrative analysis in organizational studies draws from similar intellectual resources, for example, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Claude Levi Straus, Kate Millett, Paul Ricouer, Elaine Showalter, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (apologies if your favorite literary philosopher or critic is not listed), the approaches used in the study of literature in the field of literary studies offer a broader array of methods and formats than those utilized in literary studies in organizational and management scholarship. Rather than suggesting a particular method (or methods) for exploring literature and fiction for family business studies, we point to a variety of overviews of the field of literary studies that offer pathways into the methodologies and approaches common to this scholarship (cf., Bennett & Royle, 2016; Guerin, 2005; Klarer, 2013). It would seem appropriate, at this juncture, to see what family business scholars bring forth from the cacophony of methods, forms, and works of fiction that are available.

However, we will single out one particular way for using literature as applied scholarly practice that could be useful for constructing a body of knowledge that can generate theory, insights, understanding, and knowledge both for scholars and in practice that is found in narrative medicine (Charon, 2017). We look to the approaches taken in the narrative medicine field primarily because both medicine and family business involve theory as well as practice. We strive, in both fields, to put ideas to use. What is, therefore, most engaging in the narrative medicine field are the ways that literature is put to use in the practice of medicine (cf., Charon, 2017; Charon & Wyer, 2008; Harter & Bochner, 2009). Charon (2017) points out that literary studies and particularly the method of “close reading” (pp. 157-179; Felski, 2011, p. 52; Iser, 1978) can offer a form of disciplinary rigor for paying attention to the ambiguous, relational, and intersubjective processes inherent in everyday life (and specifically in the experience of illness) through the use of novels and other forms of literary fiction. The methods of narrative medicine improve the practice of medicine by improving care and saving lives (Eisenberg et al., 2006).

Based on our understanding of and review of the practice of narrative medicine, we suggest that the methods employed not only support understandings of concepts such as values, emotions, relations, and identity but also could be used to explore issues such as crisis and decline, entrepreneurship, and strategic renewal as well as institutional changes. In the following, we highlight a few works of fiction that showcase the richness of descriptions and representations that might provide insights into a variety of family business topics. Our intention is to imply that these works of fiction are but a few of the rich sources of insights that are available to study.

Conclusion

As two scholars who have invested much of our lives in qualitative and quantitative methodologies that are primarily in the positivist “scientific” tradition, we are sensitive to concerns that a focus on literature and fiction in family business scholarship is not seen as conventional “science.” And that a drift toward the humanities and the approach to “science” inherent therein will fail to generate an accumulation of knowledge and insights of the kind of “science” that we are used to can afford. We suggest that, historically, if one were to recognize European traditions, there have been two approaches to knowledge, Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences) and Geisterwissenschaften (sciences of the human). The natural sciences are nomothetic: based on general laws that can be tested, verified through replication, and can be predictive. Yet, in the study of families, we are in humanity, where events are idiographic, not universal, and these events can never be replicated (or predicted) in the same ways as the natural sciences. A drift toward the humanities is not a rejection of science and scientific ways but a recognition that there are different ways of understanding.

We circle back to the epigraph that began this essay: “Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost” (James, 1948, p. 390). The intention of using literature and fiction in family business studies is to expand our ability to see more of the details, the complexities, and the richness of families and their businesses, and, through this greater depth and scope of vision, generate insights and understandings that will be valuable to all those who are a part of the family business community (e.g., scholars, families, employees of family businesses, advisors, etc.). There is much that we can learn from literature, and we identify with Czarniawska’s (2009) exhortation: “The point is not that organization researchers are to become literary critics, but that they may learn to do their job better from literary critics and theorists” (p. 368).

Finally, as we write this, it should not go unnoticed that much of the world is currently in the throes of the “coronavirus” (covid-19), and as scientists and scholars looking for insights into ways to “manage” (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011) and deal with this catastrophe, there is literature that mirrors similarities to our current experiences. Not only is Camus’s The Plague worth reading for an insightful exploration of how and why individuals respond to an epidemic, we can also look to one of the earliest novels ever written, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, to understand how the crisis of disease is responded to. Fiction is relevant to the circumstances we find ourselves in.