Abstract
There is a widely accepted belief in the academic literature that the continuance of an entrepreneurial family’s legacy is vital for value creation across generations. Legacies are known to serve as motivation and endowment for generation-spanning entrepreneurial undertakings. However, our current knowledge about this crucial construct is fragmented when it comes to the individual actors involved in its creation and shaping, their agency and behavior in building and transmitting it, as well as why we perceive legacy as such an enduring phenomenon. Embracing process logic in the structure of my dissertation, I attempt to answer questions of how legacy emerges, how it is transmitted, and how it endures. Accordingly, I conduct a case study to develop grounded models of legacy-building, highlighting the temporal nature of a founder’s agency in generative concerns that are enacted through participatory exchanges. Conceptualizing intergenerational exchanges as micro-mechanisms of legacy transmission and respective transmission outcomes, I blend life-stage theory and social exchange theory. I propose that such mechanisms and their outcomes are conducive and/or detrimental to legacy. Through a visual discourse analysis of an historical case and its archival material, I establish aesthetic legacy as the recognizable form of artifacts that enduringly connects the activity of individual and/or collective actors to the identity of an organization. Overall, I contribute to the literature on legacy, entrepreneurship, and organization studies by introducing legacies of family firms as a concept that connects generations and inspires entrepreneurial undertaking in families. I stress the temporal dimension of legacy’s iterative nature and the engagement of multiple levels. I highlight the aesthetic dimensions and modalities that commonly contribute to its development that pervades space, matter, and time.