Our social legacy will go on: Understanding outcomes of family SME succession through engaged Buddhism
研究了越南12家佛教家族企业，发现佛教的非执着和无常原则促使企业主将继任视为社会遗产的延续而非生物或物质遗产，从而选择非亲属作为继承人。
Family business succession has been typically understood as a function of safeguarding a biological, social or material legacy for future generations. While existing scholarship has suggested that family business succession to non-kin warrants further exploration, few have identified religion as an influential factor in such a process. In this study, we offer a counterintuitive illustration to existing explanations of kin succession in family businesses influenced by the role of religion. Our study of 12 Buddhist family businesses in Vietnam shows a connection between non-kin succession and Buddhist philosophy. In particular, we find that the Buddhist principles of non-attachment and impermanence were instrumental in influencing how incumbents rejected succession as a biological and material legacy process. In contrast, family businesses conceived succession as the continuance of a social legacy, whereby those who were best-placed to carry on the social legacy were selected as successors. We offer an inductive conceptual model that connects Buddhist principles to the foregrounding of a social legacy and our paper concludes with implications and opportunities for further research.