Family bricolage in family-managed agribusinesses
Samuel Wayne Appleton, Diane HoltPurpose
This study explores bricolage in mature, multigenerational family-managed agribusinesses and develops family bricolage to explain how family managers reproduce, regulate or reject inherited ways of making do.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a qualitative, abductive design based on 42 interviews with 29 participants from 26 family-managed agribusinesses, and one with a farming support organisation, in England, analysed iteratively alongside secondary evidence.
Findings
Family bricolage is a family-embedded process in which accumulated stories, knowledge, experience and intergenerational relationships shape how family managers recognize, mobilize and recombine resources at hand. It comprises family symbolic resources, family resourcefulness and family tinkering. Senior members regulate successors' tinkering, and negative cases show that inherited bricolage may be rejected when it inhibits renewal or professionalization.
Research limitations/implications
The context-specific findings are not statistically generalizable. Future research should compare industries and resource conditions and develop and validate measures of the three dimensions.
Practical implications
Family managers can use narratives, tacit knowledge and existing resources to address constraints, but should reassess inherited practices when self-reliance discourages external expertise or tinkering consumes resources without producing dependable, scalable solutions. Succession offers a natural point for this reassessment.
Social implications
Family bricolage may support continuity and adaptation in resource-constrained rural settings while enabling successors to reconsider inherited practices that inhibit renewal.
Originality/value
The study challenges the view that firms outgrow bricolage by showing how it is reproduced, regulated or rejected across generations in mature family firms. Family bricolage is conceptualized as an enabling and constraining process rather than a uniformly beneficial resource.