Despite the major contribution of family business to the health and well-being of the economy, and the lessons that can be learned from survival and growth over many generations and through multiple external crises, family business is often overlooked in business and management debates, including the insights it can bring to policy. Likewise, the ways in which natural systems underpin all forms of business are not usually to the fore. Participants in our two-day seminar were drawn from sustainability and natural science backgrounds, as well as those specialising in family business, gender and leadership in organisations, and the dynamics of work. Academics, policy-makers and family business practitioners brought their perspectives to the conversation and a series of themes emerged from the discussions. Firstly, resilience has both positive and negative connotations. A negative aspect of resilience, for example, is the persistent gender norms that identify men and women as more or less suitable for different roles, establishing unequal power relations that may prove difficult to change. Such norms prevent businesses making use of all the talent available to them, negatively affecting their ability to respond to adversity. Family businesses, with their entwined family and business relationships, can therefore offer a rich site for understanding complex power relations and how they can be mobilised to develop organisational resilience. These challenges, in particular, were articulated by gender experts from Lancaster (Professor Ellie Hamilton), Nottingham Business School (Professor Sue Marlow) and Dublin City University (Professor MauraMcAdam). Secondly, insights from the natural science participants emphasised the underpinning role of nature for all organisations, even if that contribution is sometimes forgotten or not obvious. This means that organising for resilience must take account of the social-ecological system dynamics and address the climate emergency and the race to net-zero. The contribution from Professor Henrik Österblom (the Science Director of the StockholmResilience Centre) drew out the implications of the Anthropocene (a time where human activity drives global environmental changes, causing ‘earth systems’ to fail and leading to e.g. climate change and biodiversity loss) for organisational theorising. In a similar manner, and drawing from his time working in business, Duncan Pollard (an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business) articulated the distinctive roles that absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacity plays in ensuring ecological resilience. Thirdly, seminar participants found that they shared a conceptual framework as the notion of ‘stewardship’ was explored. Stewardship is often used to describe entrepreneurial stewardship, as well as corporate biosphere 12 |
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