Shifting the Meaning of Firm Ownership: Recent Transformations of Ownership Succession in German Mittelstand
MPIfG Lecture
- Date: Jan 13, 2021
- Time: 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Isabell Stamm
- Technische Universität Berlin
- Sign Up: info@mpifg.de
If current reports and forecasts on succession in
Germany are to be believed, we are currently experiencing a wave of
succession in German Mittelstand. This wave is further characterized by a
shift in both
the legitimacy of the targeted subjects and the institutionalized rules
of succession: Contrary to the usual stereotypes, until recently the
dominant mode of transfer was family internal succession, whereas
only now the majority of company owners are considering selling the
company to employees, external private individuals, investors or other
companies. In her presentation, Isabell Stamm focuses on the conditions
of this shift in a complex blend of aging owners, progressing
individualization, a good economic development and low interest rates in
recent years, as well as an expansion of the M+A market towards the SME
segment.
In doing so, she lays out in what ways the understanding of firm
ownership and the associated rules of property transfer are shifting.
Doing so, she decodes the meaning of firm ownership as embedded and
dynamic
link between owning groups and firms thereby providing a dual
perspective on the social structuring and hermeneutics in the process of
owning a firm.
Isabell Stamm
is head of the research group “Entrepreneurial Group Dynamics” at the
Technische Universität Berlin since 2017.
Previously she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University
of California Berkeley. Her research focuses on a sociological
perspective of entrepreneurship including the particularities of
entrepreneurial
families, collective engagement in entrepreneurship, trajectories of
entrepreneurial groups as well as variations of entrepreneurial groups.
She is recipient of a Freigeist-Fellowship, her work on entrepreneurial
legacies has been distinguished with the FBR best paper award and she
has recently received her faculties outstanding teaching award. She is
speaker of the DGS standing working group “The work of self-employed”
and
member of the “IfM Roundtable Mittelstand”.
Selected Publications
- Stamm, Isabell. 2020. "Groups Matter: Social Embeddedness of Entrepreneurial Activity." In Handbook of Economic Sociology in the 21st Century: New Theoretical Ap-proaches , Empirical Studies and Developments, edited by Andrea Maurer. Springer Nature. (forthcoming)
- Stamm, Isabell; Allan Discua Cruz, and Ludovic Cailleut. 2019. "Entrepreneurial Groups: Definition, Forms and Historic Change." Historical Social Research 44 (4): 7–41.
- Barbera, Francesco, Isabell Stamm, and Rocki DeWitt. 2018. "The Development of an Entrepreneurial Legacy: Exploring the Role of Anticipated Futures in Transgenerational Entrepreneurship." Family Business Review 31 (3): 352–78.
- Stamm, Isabell. 2016. "Coordination Tasks and Modes of Linked Lives in Entrepreneurial Families." Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (4): 939–56.
- Stamm, Isabell. 2020. "Groups Matter: Social Embeddedness of Entrepreneurial Activity." In Handbook of Economic Sociology in the 21st Century: New Theoretical Ap-proaches , Empirical Studies and Developments, edited by Andrea Maurer. Springer Nature. (forthcoming)