Family firms and sensegiving in a global crisis: Nudging toward a sunspot
研究家族企业如何通过向股东传递积极叙事，在金融危机中构建自我强化的乐观预期，从而展现韧性，对理解企业危机沟通有启示。
Many firms are resilient when facing critical external events such as pandemics or major economic crises. However, little is known about how and why this resilience develops. In this article, we focus on firms with strong socioemotional traits: family firms. Combining rational expectations equilibrium (REE) and socioemotional wealth (SEW) theories, we argue that family firms uniquely distill positive narratives to promote sunspots—or cycles of self-reinforcing, positive expectations—in the face of adversity. We use a novel human–artificial intelligence hybrid approach to test our sensegiving argument. We apply supervised machine learning sentiment analysis to a matched sample of letters to shareholders from 72 family and nonfamily firms during an unprecedented three-year period of difficulty and uncertainty: the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. We discuss how this study on the communication-related foundations of family firms’ resilience adds to our understanding of this phenomenon.