Strategic and organizational choices in family firms: introducing sense-making.

As heterogeneous organizations, family firms present differences in how they make their strategic and organizational choices. This chapter seeks to establish a framework for investigating the ways in which family firms cope with the challenges of managing strategic and organizational choices by using the sense-making construct. Sense-making facilitates strategic and organizational decision-making during periods of change. Sense-making refers to the extent to which people are effective in integrating challenging/uncertain events into a framework of shared meaning. The authors integrate into this framework the cognitive (firm awareness), psychological (emotions), and behavioral processes (family norms, cognitive conflict, and the family firm’s use of its available knowledge and skills) that family firms develop when framing their strategic and organizational choices. Finally, they propose directions for future research to further develop this framework.