Building an Outward-Oriented Social Family Legacy: Rhetorical History in Family Business Foundations

Abstract

Scholars have recently paid growing attention to the transfer of family legacies across generations, but existing work has been mainly focused on an inward-oriented, intra-family, perspective. In this article, we seek to understand how family firms engage in rhetorical history to transfer their social family legacy to external stakeholders, what we call “outward-oriented social legacy.” By carrying out a 12-months field study in three Italian family business foundations, our findings unveil three distinctive narrative practices— founder foreshadowing, emplacing the legacy within the broader community, and weaving family history with macro—history—that contribute to transferring outward-oriented social legacies.