Living the Handover: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Socioemotional Wealth in Family Business Succession in Gresik, East Java

Abstract

Purpose: This study explores how members of small family firms in Gresik Regency, East Java, personally live through and make sense of intergenerational succession, with particular attention to the way socioemotional wealth (SEW) shapes the transfer of ownership, authority, and meaning between generations.

Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts a qualitative design grounded in phenomenological inquiry. Six informants, three incumbent owners and three next-generation successors of family businesses in Gresik were selected through purposive sampling and engaged in repeated in-depth interviews. Data were interpreted thematically following an interpretative phenomenological logic that privileges first-person meaning.

Findings: Four constitutive themes were identified: succession experienced as amanah, a morally and religiously charged trust rather than a mere transfer of assets; the coexistence of deep emotional ownership with a felt pressure to professionalise; succession lived as a slow, relational apprenticeship rather than a single legal event; and renewal within continuity, whereby successors innovate precisely in order to protect the family identity. Across the themes, SEW works at once as a source of commitment and as a brake on change.

Practical implications: Incumbents are encouraged to voice tacit expectations early, to formalise gradual handover mechanisms, and to frame successor-led innovation as an extension of family identity rather than a betrayal of it. Regional business development actors may design succession support that speaks to the moral and emotional not only the technical dimensions of continuity.

Originality/value: The paper provides a contextually grounded, first-person account of family business succession in a santri-influenced Indonesian regency, extending SEW theory beyond its predominantly Western and quantitative base and answering calls for interpretive work close to lived experience.

Paper type: empirical