Entrepreneurial Families and Cultural Heritage: Sustaining Collective Memory in Family Business Foundations

This paper investigates how family business foundations’ activities influence the creation, preservation, and transfer of cultural heritage. While prior family business research highlighted the importance of rhetorically manipulating history to balance change and continuity in family firms, less attention was given to how entrepreneurial families’ maintain their cultural heritage, embedded in memory cues, like material artifacts, ultimately feeding the family’s collective memory and sustaining it as a mnemonic community. To uncover the mnemonic practices through which entrepreneurial families preserve and transmit their cultural heritage across generations, we investigate the uses of history in six projects across three family business foundations. In contrast to prior research, we observe that family business foundations push entrepreneurial families’ collective memory beyond the family business system, stretching the boundaries of the mnemonic community. Finally, we develop a model that links family business foundations, collective memory and the mnemonic practices that allow transgenerational cultural heritage transmission.