Abstract
Family business succession remains one of the most critical yet under-theorised transitions in entrepreneurship research. While Handler’s (1992) seminal framework highlights the importance of career, identity, and life-stage needs in shaping the successor experience, limited research has explored how these needs unfold in non-Western contexts. This developmental paper extends Handler’s framework by examining the lived experiences of next-generation entrepreneurs in Indian family businesses.
Drawing on an interpretative phenomenological approach, we analyse in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifteen successors actively involved in managing their family firms. Our findings suggest that succession is not merely a structural or planned transition but a deeply personal process shaped by evolving career aspirations, psychosocial identity formation, and life-stage considerations. We identify intrapreneurship as an identity-affirming and emotionally coping mechanism through which successors negotiate autonomy while remaining within the family firm.
The study further reveals the importance of internal and external career experiences in fostering agency and long-term engagement. Additionally, female successors face dual challenges: operating in the founder’s shadow and navigating patriarchal norms embedded within family businesses. Importantly, our findings suggest that succession may follow a cyclical rather than linear life-stage trajectory, challenging the traditional progression assumed in prior models.
By situating succession within India’s culturally distinct and economically significant context, this paper contributes to family business scholarship by reframing succession as a dynamic, identity-driven developmental process and offering new theoretical directions for understanding successor entrepreneurship.