Martin Schulz

Family business is an important and prevalent type of organization. The intertwined relationship between business and family has deep implications for the success of the family business and the welfare of the business family. In this dissertation, I aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of that relationship by using a dynamic approach to study how family businesses evolve and how they impact the family. I focus on opportunity entrepreneurship and study its antecedents and outcomes. I study (1) the factors that shape the path of individuals into opportunity entrepreneurship, and (2) the implications of the business for the entrepreneur and for other members of the family as it evolves into a business family. I develop an unfolding model of entrepreneurship that captures the impact of business involvement of family members on their psychological and financial wellbeing. My core thesis is that the involvement of family members in a family business has important consequences for the business family. I formulate hypotheses about four forms of involvement: (1) direct involvement through self-employment, (2) indirect involvement through living with a self-employed relative, (3) direct and dependent involvement through working for a relative, and (4) family-level involvement in terms of the proportion and intensity of family members work in the business. Moreover, I argue that the effects of these forms of business involvement are moderated by the household roles that family members play. I explore empirically how these forms of involvement coupled with household roles affect family members' psychological wellbeing (life satisfaction) and financial wellbeing (income). I use a comprehensive large panel dataset from Germany that spans over 28 years and use fixed effect models. I find that family business involvement has positive effects for the entrepreneur, while it has negative effects for the other members of the family. Family-level business involvement has overall negative effects. I also find that the effect of business involvement on family member's wellbeing is not moderated by gender, nor is it moderated by household roles. Overall, the findings support my unfolding model of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a mixed blessing in terms of the wellbeing of family members.

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The primary goal of this study is to explore the effects of rule networks on rule change. Organizational rules are often interdependent with other rules that govern related subtasks, workflows, actors, and organizational subunits. Therefore, rules shape the context for the use of related rules, and they can impede or intensify the change of related rules. Even though prior research has suggested that organizational rules are interdependent and can affect each other, the relationship between rule interdependence and rule change has not been systematically studied so far. This study is the first attempt to explore this relationship directly and empirically. I focus on rule interdependencies that have been articulated and formalized as citation ties between rules. Citation ties link interdependent rules together into directed rule networks. I adopt an ego network approach and examine how shifts of characteristics of individual rules’ inbound citation networks affect their revisions. I argue that when rules are cited by other rules, they become exposed to the experiences arising from citing rules’ contexts. Because different rules serve different roles, those experiences can be incongruous to the experiences in their own contexts. This can produce tensions, which I refer to as rule strain, for the cited rules. Rule strain produces change impulses that intensify rule revisions. Shifts in rule networks can shape the exposure of individual rules to rule strain and thereby affect their revision rates. I identified four important dimensions of exposure and developed hypotheses of their effects on rule change: network exposure (presence of an inbound network), exposure intensity (network size), exposure nonredundancy (network density) and exposure newness (occurrence of network change events, i.e., arrival of new ties, revisions of citing rules). I test my hypotheses with data extracted from the archives of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) of a Canadian regional healthcare organization, spanning the years from 1989 to 2010. I find strong evidence that rule networks affect rule change. Becoming cited by others significantly increases individual rules’ rate of revision. Moreover, I also find significant effects of network density and occurrence of network change events, but no systematic effect of network size.

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