Assessing Espoused Goals in Private Family Firms Using Content Analysis

Understanding how private family firms gauge performance is of great interest to family business scholars. Unfortunately, finding comparable data to understand differences in the performance of such firms is challenging. This study draws from the organizational identity literature to show how privat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFamily business review Vol. 25; no. 3; pp. 298 - 317
Main Authors McKenny, Aaron F., Short, Jeremy C., Zachary, Miles A., Payne, G.Tyge
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2012
Subjects
content analysis
identity
narrative
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Summary:Understanding how private family firms gauge performance is of great interest to family business scholars. Unfortunately, finding comparable data to understand differences in the performance of such firms is challenging. This study draws from the organizational identity literature to show how private family firms communicate different goals in publicly available organizational narratives. The authors illustrate a process using content analysis that allows family business scholars to create a comparative data set that captures both normative and utilitarian goals using website and press release narratives from a sample of Australian firms.
ISSN:0894-4865
1741-6248
DOI:10.1177/0894486511420422