Principal speaker
Professor Mary Barrett
Abstract: In this seminar, Mary traces the development and subsequent application of the Four Ls concept, which she and a colleague first proposed early in her academic career as an outcome of some qualitative research in family business. The ‘Four Ls’ refer to the sequence of learning stages they found potential leaders of family firms go through: Learning business, Learning our business, learning to Lead our business and learning to Let go of our business. They constitute a typology which responds to and reflects the unique nature of the family business context, where some irreducible management paradoxes arise from combining ‘family’ with ‘business’. Over about 15 years the Four Ls have been picked up and applied in different ways: by members of family firms as a way of making sense of their experiences, in the family business professional development context, in specialist family business courses in universities, and by academic researchers into family business as the field of family business becomes more paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense.
By tracing how the Four Ls have been used to throw light on a variety of family business problems, Professor Barrett will show how they exemplify some of the less commonly appreciated applications of qualitative case-based research.
Speaker: Mary is a Professor of Management at the School of Management and Marketing at the University of Wollongong where she teaches management to undergraduate and postgraduate students, especially general management, a range of human resource management topics, and business communication.
Mary’s research interests and publications focus on family business, gender issues in management and entrepreneurship, and communication issues at work.
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RSVP on or before Thursday 14 August 2014 , by email wow@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 07 3735 3714