Mona Ericson – författare

This insightful and innovative book proposes a new theory of socio-material weaving for studying and understanding family business. It dissolves the family business into activities, constituted of the sociality of human interactions and relations and interwoven with materials that extend in both a bodily-lived and spatial existential sense.Building on hermeneutic phenomenology, Mona Ericson explores a new approach to the field, which shifts focus away from entitized conceptions of family business contexts. Building on a ‘being-in-the-world’ understanding, the book emphasizes human entwinement with activities in amongst materials. Chapters draw insights from research on the social and the material, exploring the field through five unique stories that illustrate the intertwinement of family business activities and materials associated with buildings and land. Taking a critical stance towards systems-oriented family business research, Ericson weaves together the social and the material in association with narrative truth.An innovative and imaginative exploration of an established field of study, this book is crucial reading for scholars, researchers and graduate students of family business, opening up new ways of approaching the field in scholarly work. It will also benefit practitioners through practical insights into the challenges family business owners face when establishing and managing business activities.

This book takes up the challenge of promoting a new understanding of growth and how in business it occurs longitudinally. It offers an alternative and supplementary view that is insightful, reflective and provocative. Mona Ericson looks at business growth in relation to developmental growth, which is in turn connected to the dimension of learning. She describes developmental growth as being exposed by, and manifested in, complex, interconnected human activities that reflect social practice in terms of encounters between people. Extending the process-oriented growth literature that focuses on linear explanation of development and change, the thrust of the argument is that growth is 'lived' and cannot be considered an 'object' that presides over the individual. The concept of business growth as 'lived' growth is explored via a musical metaphor. The fugue is used to capture the dynamics inherent in business growth, asserting itself in themes that constitute multifaceted, interwoven activities affording dynamically varying movements.Underpinning this new approach to business growth with examples from a global company that provides complete packaging solutions, Mona Ericson's unique book will provide a fascinating read for those with an interest in strategy, organization, strategic change, management, growth and international business.

Mona Ericson conceptualizes business growth using a participatory narrative approach, adopting story-like representations of growth activity. This approach emphasizes the use of description, conceptualization, knowledge sharing and interpretation. It connects the subject and the researcher allowing the latter to better understand the actual practice of growing a business, while also extending the study to the novice and general reader alike.The book aims to open up previously marginalized perspectives in research on growth through this incoporation of storytelling-one of the most fundamental features of human life. Thus, the concepts of business growth and entrepreneurial activity described in this book are brought to life for the student, scholar and reader in a way that more conventional analyses cannot achieve. The author also uses the concept of `plot' as a means to interconnect practitioners' growth-related activities and concomitant changes. The firm becomes a living and evolving concept rather than a singular unit to be studied. A Narrative Approach to Business Growth offers a detailed study that illustrates the value of this increasingly important approach to the study of business growth.The rich, empirically oriented material in this book allows the reader to make sense of, learn about and vicariously experience a variety of growth activities and their dynamic relationships. Scholars and students of business growth, entrepreneurship and strategy will find this book compelling and eye-opening.