Reasons, Opportunities and Methods for a Visual Analysis of Organizational Tensions in Family Business

This chapter examines the potential of visuals as a manifestation of organizational beliefs and values, and of visual analysis as a novel and promising methodological approach to exploring how the tensions among such beliefs and values are managed by firms. The idiosyncratic features of family firms and, in particular, the complexity associated with the intersection of the family and the business systems that characterize them, make family firms a fertile ground for such an investigation. The authors offer a comprehensive description of the methodological paradigm of visual analysis. They conclude by illustrating how visual analysis unfolds when applied to examples of Italian family business websites, so as to describe the method and its potential for contributions to the family business research field.