An Entrepreneurship-as-practice perspective of next-generation becoming family businesses successors: the role of discursive artefacts

ABSTRACT Family is the most important, yet under researched, dimension in family business research. Following recent calls in Entrepreneurship-as-Practice, we bring a practice-based approach to family business research to understand next generation engagement over extended periods in family life. Drawing on a culinary family business’s three published cookbooks, theorized as ‘discursive artefacts’, we examine how mundane family business practices can enable next generations to become successors. This study contributes to family business research with its re-focus on the family and offers new insights into practice theory-building in the emergent Entrepreneurship-as-Practice. Our findings illustrate how everyday practices in family lives – for example, cooking – can enable next generations’ becoming family business successors, through socializing, bridging, and leading.


Introduction
What I hear,I forget. What I see,I remember. What I do, Family is the defining feature (Chua, Chrisman, and Sharma 1999) and the most under researched area in family business research (Neubaum 2018).A narrow understanding of differences in 'family structures, family functions, family interactions, and family events' (Jaskiewicz and Dyer 2017, 111) can have a detrimental effect on family business research (Aldrich and Cliff 2003).Family activities have a strong impact on the next generation in terms of, for example, establishing rules and exchange systems (Daspit et al. 2016), understanding family business continuity (Konopaski, Jack, and Hamilton 2015), and acquiring key knowledge (Ge and Campopiano 2022;Hamilton 2011).The field, however, has taken a much more business-focused path (James, Jennings, and Breitkreuz 2012), lacking attention to the family (Aldrich et al. 2021;Ge and Campopiano 2022).
The refocus on the family would influence current conversations of the next generation in family business, the most discussed topic in family business research (Daspit et al. 2016).Next generations engage with family business before officially joining it (Cabréra-Suárez, Garcia-Almeida, and De Saa-Perez 2018;Handler 1992;Hatak and Roessl 2015;McMullen and Warnick 2015), influencing their behaviours like commitment (Sharma and Irving 2005) and transgenerational entrepreneurship (Bettinelli et al. 2022;Jaskiewicz, Combs, and Rau 2015;Zellweger et al. 2013).Research proposed that intergenerational and transgenerational engagement at home can have a profound influence on next generation (Magrelli et al. 2022).Their engagement on the family site, however, remains in a black box due to difficulties for researchers to access the family domain.This has resulted in unexplored dynamics of the family's impact on the next generation, in understanding what leads them to become successors.Simply, we still do not know why some next generations become successors.Collectively, scholars have pointed out the need to further understand families and their impact on next generation development in family businesses (Ge and Campopiano 2022;Hamilton 2006;Jaskiewicz and Dyer 2017;Magrelli et al. 2022).
Our research approaches this theoretical gap from a practice theory-informed approach, the Entrepreneurship-as-Practice (EaP) perspective (Gartner et al. 2016;Teague et al. 2021;Thompson et al. 2022).As the most common form of enterprise worldwide, family businesses are particularly suitable to extend intergenerational aspects of entrepreneurship theories (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020), which promises fruitful outcomes in areas such as family entrepreneurship (Ruzzene, Brumana, and Minola 2022).Previous research in family business has pointed out that the next generations develop through immersion in the social practices of the family business (Hamilton 2013), and succession essentially unfolds due to participation in these practices (Haag 2012).Following this, we propose EaP as an ideal theoretical lens for our research in refocusing on the family, as it considers family businesses involving informal, less observed behaviours and interactions between family members in their homes (Aldrich and Cliff 2003;Aldrich et al. 2021;Neubaum 2018) and that everyday life in the family business site also involves many 'unseen patterns' that are hard to capture (Dyer and Dyer 2009, 218).
Our research examines next generation development in family life through an EaP perspective on the practice in the family as an inherent part of succession.Importantly, our research differentiates next generation and successors to include family business socialization prior to the appointment of a successor and initiation of a formal succession process.This research is guided by the question, 'How can mundane family business practices enable next generation to become successors?'While acknowledging that families are heterogeneous (each one comprises different practices), we chose cooking as an illustrative example of practices in family lives (Morgan 1996).In most families, the kitchen is an important site that shapes personal memory as well as familial identity (Meah and Jackson 2016).Food, as a key product of cooking practice, is a central part of human life, forming the earliest memories of intergenerational experiences and communication (Knight, O'Connell, and Brannen 2014;Szatrowski 2014).Research has shown that cooking in adulthood creates nostalgia (Blunt 2003), connects us to our social past (Lu and Fine 1995), and plays a particularly important role in daily practices (Schatzki 2005).
Empirically, we conduct an exploratory single case study (Stake 1995) examining the next generation of a three-generation family business via three cookbooks.Following theoretical sampling (Eisenhardt 1989), we chose a culinary business where the practice of cooking inextricably connects family and business life.Following examples of examining autobiographies in EaP research (reviewed in Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020), we dive deep into the narratives of the family's cooking practices (Gartner 2007;Larty and;Hamilton 2011), which we theorize as 'discursive artefact'.Drawing on these accounts of cooking and their discursive manifestation in the textual material, we illustrate how the next generation family members understand their engagement in cooking as a daily practice both in the family business and in their family life.In particular, we found that cooking enacts the dimensions of socializing, bridging, and leading in the next generation, unintentionally, becoming successors.
Through this research, we make three contributions.First, following the EaP perspective, we link daily practices in families -in this case, cooking -to next generation becoming successors in the family business context.Our research proposes a philosophical shift to understanding the family as composed of practices that happen within it (Bourdieu 1996); thus, 'family' is identifiable by the actions its members engage in (Schatzki 2005).As such, our findings contribute to prior studies' calling for a better understanding of families in family business settings (e.g.Aldrich et al. 2021;Ge and Campopiano 2022).Through the EaP perspective, we contribute to the family business literature by providing nuanced insights into the influences of family practices on the next generation becoming successors.By applying an EaP lens to next generation engagement in family businesses, we shed new light on succession beyond the planning paradigm by capturing how practices in family settings during upbringing serve as informal and indirect successor training (Haag 2012).Our research demonstrates that the unintentionality of practice, an unintended coherence in action (Chia and Holt 2009) emanating from practical coping (Tsoukas 2010), is an important theoretical construct to shed new light on family business succession, which is hitherto overlooked in the literature.
Second, our research extends the family business field methodologically by demonstrating an underexplored way to examine family-related topics using published life stories.We join the discussion about using archival and secondary data in family business research, arguing that this type of data overcomes the difficulties of researching family life (Neubaum 2018) and accessing longitudinal data (Dyer and Dyer 2009 by investigating published life stories (Ge, De Massis, and Kotlar 2022).
Finally, our findings advance the discussion of suitable empirical materials for practice-based theoretical development in entrepreneurship research (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020;Feldman and Orlikowski 2011).Our theorization of 'discursive artefact' provides a vehicle for the study of practices captured in the cookbooks that represent practice in the past, the present, and the future, as well as providing further understanding of materiality in practices (Nicolini 2012;Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012).

Family in family business research
Early studies on family business emphasized how the interplay between family and business systems produces idiosyncratic resources, which differentiates family and nonfamily businesses (Chua, Chrisman, and Sharma 1999;Zellweger et al. 2019).It has been found that families influence their businesses in various ways, including social relationships (Zellweger et al. 2018), socioemotional wealth (Gomez-Mejia et al. 2011), succession (Daspit et al. 2016), goal complications (De Massis et al. 2016), business performance (Gersick and Feliu 2014), and learning (Brinkerink 2018;Hamilton 2011).
Building on the resource-based view, family involvement has been viewed as 'family capital' (defined as 'total owning-family resources composed of human, social, and financial capital' (Danes et al. 2009, 199) or 'familiness' (defined as a 'unique bundle of resources a particular firm has because of the systems interaction between the family, its individual members and the business' (Pearson, Carr, and Shaw 2008, 11).
However, the resource-based view examines the family from an economic perspective, sometimes overlooking important family attributes that are built over time and some of which are not directly related to the business (Dyer and Dyer 2009).This risks an oversimplified understanding of the differences between family and nonfamily businesses (James, Jennings, and Breitkreuz 2012).Due to the interweaving nature of the family and business dual system, some practices within families might seemingly have little to do with business in the short term but have the potential to spill over to business behaviours in the long term.For example, telling ancestors' stories to youngsters might eventually lead to the transmission of transgenerational entrepreneurship (Jaskiewicz, Combs, and Rau 2015), and positive/negative intergenerational relationships might ultimately lead to various types of successor commitments (Magrelli et al. 2020;Sharma and Irving 2005).In addition, the family is too often treated as a stable unit, with the underlying structures, functions, interactions, and events left unseen (Jaskiewicz and Dyer 2017).An outdated conceptualization of family in family business research sacrifices the potential depth of understanding in family business research, e.g. the change from a Western nuclear family to a single-parent family (Aldrich et al. 2021).In sociology, where family is a principal institution, the concept of socialization offers a framework to understand how each individual, born into this world, gradually becomes a self-aware knowledgeable person (Giddens 1993).Becoming a societal member unfolds by learning the culture of one's family during childhood through primary socialization and later, through secondary socialization, adopting rolespecific knowledge in school and work life (Berger and Luckmann 1966).A few scholars have adopted socialization to explore how growing up in a business family affects family business succession as part of daily life, blurring the boundaries between first and secondary socialization (Cosson and Gilding 2021;García-Álvarez, López-Sintas, and Saldãna Gonzalvo 2002;Haag 2012;Iannarelli 1992).
The role of family is particularly salient for family businesses set up by immigrants in their new country (Wong, McReynolds, and Wong 1992).Family and kinship ties have a prominent role through the whole entrepreneurial process from start-up (Abada, Hou, and Lu 2014) to exit (Bird and Wennberg 2016).Interest in the special nature of immigrant and ethnic minority entrepreneurship is growing (see, e.g.Aliaga-Isla and Rialp 2013; Bates, Bradford, and Seamans 2018;Malki, Timur, and Pittino 2022).More nuances are being called for in migrant entrepreneurship, such as distinguishing transnational migrant entrepreneurs, operating between home and host countries, and diaspora entrepreneurs, who are second-or later-generation migrants (Vershinina et al. 2019).Wong et al. 1992) found that Chinese migrants in the San Francisco area can successfully leverage their ethnic resources and kinship relationships to establish family businesses.The same study, however, found that few of those businesses would last beyond the first generation, as pooled resources often go into higher education for the next generation (Wong, McReynolds, and Wong 1992).There are also calls for a better account of the role of women in migrant entrepreneurship (Vershinina et al. 2019).
Collectively, these studies provide resounding support for the idea that the concept of family needs to be further examined (Neubaum 2018).There has been discussion around re-evaluating the family in family business research (Jaskiewicz and Dyer 2017); however, there is no conclusive explanation of what we mean by 'family' that not only explains family embeddedness in a family business but also its ongoing impact (Aldrich and Cliff 2003).To guide our investigation of the family in family business research, we turn to a theoretical lens rooted in sociological research, Entrepreneurship as Practice.

Family and next generation development from an EaP perspective
The significance of the practice-turn in contemporary theory and social sciences is well established (Teague et al. 2021;Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner 2020).The practice perspective sees the social world as comprised of nexuses of practices and material arrangements (Schatzki 2005;Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von Savigny 2001), 'populated by diverse social practices which are carried by agents' (Reckwitz 2002, 256).A central task in understanding any organization, therefore, is identifying 'the actions that compose it' (Schatzki 2005, 476).It is proclaimed that practice theory offers promise for studying entrepreneurship (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020;Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner 2020) and family business (Nordqvist and Melin 2010).
In entrepreneurship research, the contemporary practice perspective strengthens the domain (Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner 2020) by viewing entrepreneurship as a bundle of ways and doings (Gartner et al. 2016), which helps entrepreneurship researchers better understand complex social phenomena and shifts researchers' focus from the individual or the organization to the (re) production and transformation of everyday practice (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020).Entrepreneurship, in this perspective, is 'an enactment of practices, entangled within a broader nexus of practice' (Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner 2020, 250).Moreover, with the 'practice turn', the meaning of language, spoken or written, is derived from 'material connections and references to entanglements among practices in question' (Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner 2020, 251).Simply, a practice perspective on entrepreneurship contributes to knowledge about 'what entrepreneurs "do and say" in specific situations' (Teague et al. 2021, 576).
Collectively, existing research provides a solid foundation for applying a practice perspective to entrepreneurship studies.Family business, therefore, provides an ideal setting for advancing the social connectedness of EaP by bringing in multiple generations (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020).This aligns with Schatzki's 2005 proposal that, for practice research, social arenas are 'collective' in embracing multiple people and 'social' in being common to those people.Therefore, our study regards families as the 'social arenas of action that are pervaded by a space of meaning in whose terms people live, interact, and coexist intelligibly' (Schatzki 2005, 470).
When adopting an EaP lens, a family should not be assumed to be a stable unit but a site where important day-to-day living happens (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011).Thus, family is understood by the activities carried out by members, especially those activities that are embedded and taken for granted within the family (Morgan 2011b;Warde 2005).Therefore, the family should be considered a fluid entity formed by ongoing social practices, within which meaning is constantly reconstructed by people's actions and social materiality (Schatzki 2000).Looking at practices in families advances our understanding of families by emphasizing the 'doing' of families, within which communication is seen as part of the whole practice (Schatzki 1996); for example, as transgenerational entrepreneurship happens through close observation and hands-on practices (Hamilton 2011).Family is 'not a static entity or stable disposition, but rather an ongoing and dynamic production that is recurrently enacted as actors engage the world in practice' (Feldman andOrlikowski 2011, 1243).Family, rather than being a static social structure, is in a cycle of reproduction and reconstruction through mundane and routine practices, including washing, shopping, and cooking (Morgan 2011a).
Moreover, by adopting an EaP lens, the family becomes the site for members' engagement in practices that have an ongoing effect that spans time (across generations) and space (across different sites) (Schatzki 2009).This is inherently intergenerational, emphasizing the process of continuous changes rather than following the life cycle of a particular family member (Hamilton 2013).To date, the understanding of generations and their implication in family business is limited (Magrelli et al. 2022).

Next generation becoming successors in family business
Combining the development in the literature calling for a clearer understanding of family and adopting the lens of EaP, we focus on the phenomenon of the next generation becoming successors in family business.
Succession is considered a defining feature of family business (Chua, Chrisman, and Sharma 1999), the fundamental question for the study of family business (Steier, Chrisman, and Chua 2004), and a vital challenge for family businesses (Daspit et al. 2016).Therefore, next generation engagementparticularly mentoring relationships between incumbents and the next generation -has received increasing attention (De Massis et al. 2016;Distelberg and Schwarz 2015).This involves knowledge construction and management (Cabréra-Suárez, Garcia-Almeida, and De Saa-Perez 2018), social exchanges (Daspit et al. 2016), and managerial role switches (Handler 1990).Murphy and Lambrechts (2015) found in their research that helping out in a family business affects career choices and forms important capabilities for the next generation.However, most of the literature on succession focuses on business practices, leaving practices in the family site largely unexamined (Ge and Campopiano 2022).
It could be argued that a practice-based understanding is particularly significant for the study of the next generation becoming successors in family businesses, where the practice of entrepreneurship is so inextricably linked with practices in families (Hamilton 2013).A practice theory approach supports the assumption that 'the maintenance of practices, and thus the persistence and transformation of social life, [depends on] . . . the transfer of shared embodied know-how' (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von Savigny 2001, 12).Despite the practice-based perspective not yet being widely adopted in investigating the next generation in family business, it is worth noting that scholars have found that sharing stories, which can be perceived as a practice, has an important impact on family dreams (Lansberg 1999), transgenerational entrepreneurship (Jaskiewicz, Combs, and Rau 2015), innovation (Kammerlander et al. 2015), and business continuity (Konopaski, Jack, and Hamilton 2015).Haag (2012) investigated succession in a multigenerational family business in Sweden and revealed that family business succession is enacted through daily encounters between participants, which is more complex than simply carefully planning -rather, this is 'an ongoing practice' (186).
Following prior investigations of family in family business, EaP, and the next generation becoming successors, we propose to investigate the impact of one particular, mundane practice in a familycooking -on the next generation by asking, 'How can mundane family business practices enable next generations to become successors?'

Research design and case selection
We conducted an exploratory case study (Stake 1995) to analyse our case through rich empirical accounts of cooking written in three cookbooks.These cookbooks go beyond food recipes to include rich illustrations of stories, anecdotes, historical accounts, and family photos.Our research provides a novel way to study the next generation through a practice theory lens.Informed by the nature of qualitative research, we use social actors' meaning-making artefacts to understand and analyse their behaviours and purpose (Fletcher, De Massis, and Nordqvist 2016).
Using theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss 1967), we chose Sweet Mandarin as our case due to its unusual relevance to our research aims and wealth of data access (Eisenhardt and Graebner 2007).First, Sweet Mandarin is a culinary business, which provides a theoretically extreme example of a strong linkage between cooking as a practice in both the family and business systems.Simply, there is significant synergy between the researched phenomenon, the business case, and the data used for the research.Second, our case embraces the call for acknowledgement of business families and their trans-generational entrepreneurship without the restriction to one business unit (Zellweger, Nason, and Nordqvist 2012).The fourth generation, against their parents' will (by quitting their white-collar jobs in law, accounting, and engineering), starts Sweet Mandarin anew using three prior generations' recipes pursuing their family legacy in the culinary business.This case, therefore, has a strong emphasis on the family practice's (i.e.cooking) unintentional influence on the next generation.Finally, the secondary data (in the form of accounts of cooking practices written in the cookbooks) provide a detailed and longitudinal record of the family members' accounts of cooking together that spans more than 30 years -from the next generation's childhood to eight years after they set up their family business.Next generation engagement starts from birth if primary socialization is considered and continues through the life cycle of families, of which a researcher can only observe a fraction in real time (Haag 2012).This type of data is often hard to acquire and provides interesting insights into family dynamics (Neubaum 2018).Furthermore, entrepreneurship is not confined in time and space to standard work hours and business facilities, meaning that practice researchers need innovative methods to capture both detailed practices and wider nets of practicearrangement bundles (Cyron 2022).The unique practice of cooking and the features of cookbooks allow great insight into the family business next generation from a very young age.

Case description
In 2004, three sisters -Helen, Lisa, and Janet Tse -started Sweet Mandarin in Manchester, United Kingdom (UK).However, the Tse family's culinary business roots date back to 1925, when their greatgrandfather Leung migrated his family from Guangzhou to the UK, with their livelihood dependent on home-recipe soy sauce.This legacy is continued by their grandmother, Lily, who started her Chinese restaurant in Liverpool, UK, as an immigrant from Hong Kong, China.As a typical immigrant family, Lily (grandmother, first generation) and Mabel (mother, second generation) are a Chinese restaurant and a takeaway owner, respectively.With the intention of the family integrating into UK society, Mabel raised four children who entered respected white-collar trades: Lisa was an accountant for a multinational firm in London; Helen was a law graduate from Cambridge and a partner in a law firm; Janet was an engineer; and James is an IT specialist.To Mabel's surprise, Lisa, Helen, and Janet decided to quit their jobs to start their own restaurant business in 2004.
In 2009, Sweet Mandarin gained national fame as the winner of Best Chinese Restaurant on Gordon Ramsay's popular show, The F Word. Subsequently, the sisters won £50,000 on the show Dragon's Den in 2012 and launched their own range of Chinese sauces.In 2013, they were invited to join Prime Minister David Cameron on a visit to China and even exported their sauces to China.Between 2014 and 2016, the sisters wrote a collection of three cookbooks, pairing accounts of cooking together as a family along with the recipes.The cookbooks are prestigious in their own right: one was nominated for the Gourmand Awards (akin to the Oscars for cookbooks), while the other two were New York Times Bestsellers (See also in Ge, De Massis, and Kotlar 2022).

Data collection and use of stories
To gain an in-depth understanding of the influence of cooking (and related practices) on the next generation, we focused our coding on cookbooks.These books include detailed instructions and family stories paired with most of the recipes, which are treated as collections of narratives of daily family life.Thus, we collected 544 pages of stories, pictures, and recipes (see Table 1).These accounts provide detailed insight into the three sisters' reflections on their engagement in cooking practice.
In their review, Champenois et al. (2020) highlighted the need to embrace creative methodologies that facilitate the study of EaP, and scholars adopting a practice-theory lens have reported the benefit of a narrative approach (Brown and Thompson 2013;De La Ville and Mounoud 2010).It is widely recognized that narratives can allow researchers to gain insights into the everyday aspects of entrepreneurship (which are (co-)constructed through language) from the different perspectives of the individuals investigated (Gartner 2007;Nordqvist, Hall, and Melin 2009;Steyaert 1997).
This stream of research also points to the need to examine narratives (Gartner 2007) via various resources -through conversations; written in corporate histories, annual reports, or biographies; and presented on websites (Hjorth and Steyaert 2004) -which allows us to look at reality as socially constructed (Dawson and Hjorth 2012).Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner (2020) further argued that 'discursive-material practices carry meaning and intentionality onto the scene of action and provide participants with ways of influencing each other and the situation' (250), viewing language (as a form of narrative and discourse) as a way of acting upon or intervening in practices.This coincides with family business research that acknowledges how language and narratives help to create connections between the family and business systems and between generations (Hamilton, Cruz, and Jack 2017), make sense of succession processes (Dalpiaz, Tracey, and Phillips 2014), and explore underlying themes, such as gender dynamics (Hamilton 2006).
Following Ge et al. 2022), we regard cookbooks as collections of the next generation's life stories, which allow us to stay close to 'what happens' in the field (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020, 291), in our case, for 30 years of the next generation becoming process.Therefore, our units of analysis are the accounts of cooking written in the cookbooks.We treat these accounts as a distinctive source that represents retrospective sense-giving to past events, containing rich context 'for the study of subjectivity, meaning, motivation and individual agency' (Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett 2012, 76).These books give detailed accounts of the intersection between the next generation's family life and their cooking practice, representing 'storylike constructions containing description, interpretation, emotion, expectations, and related material' (Harvey 1995, 3).
Therefore, our observations are not of the family cooking together per se but of their accounts of cooking together written in the cookbooks.We are interested in researching family practices by examining their discursive manifestation in the textual material.This suggests an inductive coding process rather than an observation of the creation of the textual material itself, as one of the discussions that focuses on applying practice theory lies in the methodology used (Gherardi 2012).The study is informed by the narrative turn and relies on what Vaara et al. (2016) described as an approach that focuses on narrative representations and the use of narratives as empirical data to access phenomena that exist independently of the narratives themselves.

Data analysis
To ensure a systematic and rigorous approach to data analysis, we took inspiration from Gioia et al. (2013) and organized the data into first-order concepts through open coding, synthesized it into second-order themes, and eventually abstracted it into aggregate dimensions.
The preliminary theorization started with open coding of the stories in the cookbooks.We started with selecting stories that reflect the family lives.Through this process, we eliminated stories that are purely descriptions of the dishes or have no relationship with our research phenomenon of interestnext generation development in family businesses.We then coded independently and exchanged our coding to cross-check the accuracy of coding themes.For example, in our first-order concepts, we followed suggestions to understand the context particularities (historical, social, and cultural) of the case (Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett 2012).As a result, we coded for 'learning about Chinese traditions'.We also specifically looked for insights related to the next generation's becoming successors, as well as how they participated in the cooking practice.For example, for first-order concepts such as 'cooking is part of personal life', we coded for emotions that occurred repeatedly, which provided initial ideas for coding.This resulted in many different first-order concepts that gave the initial understanding of the importance of the cooking practice to the next generation.Following Gioia et al. (2013), these were eventually reduced, through clustering, into the 20 first-order concepts depicted in Figure 1.We specifically coded verbs and actions to reflect the ethos of the practice-based perspective.
Upon scrutinizing the first-order concepts by reflecting on the important question of 'What's going on here' (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton 2013, 20), we identified several recurring themes, which then allowed us to progress to the eight second-order themes (see Figure 1).For example, cooking in the family provided the channel for the next generation to learn about their origins in terms of both social conventions and traditions.As a result, these formed the theme of 'learning about culture'.After the second-order themes were coded, we performed several rounds of discussion and rereading of the EaP literature as well as the family business literature.Interestingly, we found that in different stages of life, cooking was spoken of with different emphases.For example, cooking was regarded as a family duty when the next generation family members were young, as this practice resulted in a form of obligation to work at a young age, in contrast to peers who could play after school.Increasing with age, the cooking practice started to become relevant to business, as 'connecting family to business' and further 'continuing the family legacy'.This led us to reconsider the research question and the becoming process.Through reiterations between literature and data, taking specifically the EaP perspective, we focused on identifying the dimensions that advance the theorization of the themes to understand the next generation becoming successors through cooking practice.
Following Strauss and Corbin (1998), we focused on understanding the process through the themes, paying specific attention to the implied consequences of stories that assisted the next generation and strengthened their linkage to their family businesses through cooking practices.Our data consistently showed that the meaning of cooking as a family practice for the next generation evolved over time and bears more meaning.Eventually, the stories of the next generation leading the family business, which can be considered the traditional sense of succession in family business literature, finalized the meaning of cooking for their development as 'leading'.For example, the sisters' dedication to continuing the family legacy is coded through 'We vow to continue the family culinary journey through the . . .restaurant, cookery school and range of . . .sauces (Tse and Tse 2014, preface)'.As a result, through our unit of analysis -the stories of the cooking practice -we observe the change in the next generation's participation and thus their enabled becoming (of successors).We derive three aggregate dimensions through the stories: socializing, bridging, and leading.Our data structure is presented below in Figure 1, showing the steps from our 20 firstorder concepts to eight second-order themes and three aggregate dimensions.To further illustrate the emerging model, Table 2 provides supplementary data for each second-order theme.The final step of our analysis is the building of a theoretical model that contributes both original, revelatory insights and scientific usefulness (Corley and Gioia 2011).Following our ontological view on practice theory (see Chia and Holt 2006;Tsoukas and Chia 2002), we demonstrate the relationship between the themes through a practice model (Figure 2, in the discussion section), showing the dynamic interrelationship among the themes and dimensions, emphasizing the arrows, to set the data structure of Figure 1 into motion (Nag, Corley, and Gioia 2007).

Findings
In the following sections, we discuss each aggregate dimension using quotations to demonstrate how the cooking practice, which crosses the boundary between the family and the business, enables the next generation becoming successors.

Socializing
We have termed the first role of cooking practice in the next generation becoming successors -socializing.This is when the next generation engages in daily cooking and the bundle of associated practices -mixing family life with cooking, marking family times, learning about culture, and learning life lessons.This shows the inclusiveness (Haag 2012) of cooking practice in a family where all members from different generations are involved in the family business through cooking, which is part of the daily practice that they do together due to being members of the family.Cooking, from their accounts, forms an important and inseparable part of their life, which is naturally inseparable from their business.

Mixing family life with cooking
As cooking is an integral part of family and business life, the next generation is involved in the practice from an early age.As a result, cooking is a central theme of life for the next generation.When recalling their childhood, Helen and Lisa described, Like our parents and their parents, [cooking] was a way of life and we simply didn't know any different.All I knew was that we lived over the shop, ate from the shop and worked in the shop (Tse and Tse 2014, 27).Cooking became so embedded in their life that during difficult times, 'all our worries and frustrations seemed to evaporate when we grabbed a "chicken and mushroom pie" Chinese-style' (Tse 2015, 56).As part of their life, the next generation was also told stories of the past by the previous generations in the form of food and cooking.Through numerous memorable moments of the past, ranging from the difficult immigration journey to being isolated in the British community, the Tse family's stories are interwoven with food and cooking.This makes cooking inseparable from any mention of the family life of previous generations.

Marking family time
Due to the interweaving of cooking with family life, cooking also bookmarked family times for the next generation.There are many memories of the family spending time together making food: 'I remember making these with my mum when I was growing up -laughing about the big feast we would be enjoying the next day -such sweet memories' (Tse and Tse

Themes
Representative first-order data Mixing family life with cooking My twin sister Lisa, younger sister Janet, younger brother Jimmy and I grew up in the family food business and lived above the shop.(Tse and Tse 2014, 27) Lily was especially proud of the fact that even though belly is a cheap cut of meat her cooking method transformed it into food fit for a king.She was certainly right.I can still remember our whoops of delight and utter satisfaction as we bit into the crispy crackling.(Tse and Tse 2014, 88) Our entire family wears glasses and our mother still shakes her head and says we are wasted one of us should have been an optician and we would have saved a tonne of money!She did try though, bless her, to make dishes using carrots including this dim sum.Carrots would help us see better and even help us see in the dark!Our brother hearing that carrots gave super powers in the form of night vision ate as many as he could one dinner until our father piped up that he was turning a visibly bright shade of orange.Our brother stopped midway through his final carrot and ran to the bathroom to inspect whether he had indeed gone a shade of orange.We still chuckle when we make this dim sum and eat them together.(Tse 2015, 106) Marking family times These are one of my favourite desserts.When we were growing up they were a little treat when we had been good.When Dad was buying the stock for the shop, we waited patiently in the car and honked the horn when we saw a traffic warden.To reward us, Dad always bought us one of these and I have continued to buy them ever since.(Tse and Tse 2016, 144) I first came across langoustines when Dad brought a bucket load of them home from the fish market.As children we used to call them 'baby lobsters' and thought they were a great novelty with their individual antennae, little claws and pincers.I remember how we used to charge around the kitchen play-fighting with them -that is, until Dad told us off for messing around and confiscated our live weapons.(Tse and Tse 2014, 120) My strongest childhood memories are of playing a game with my sisters in the kitchen where we would dare each other to run to the kitchen counter, which was head and shoulders taller than us, and stretch out a fat hand to reach for the plate of freshly baked almond cookies.The prize was sweet, but if Mum caught us we'd forfeit dessert and treats for a week for being disobedient and greedy.The rule was that we had to wait until after dinner to enjoy an almond cookie, but for me that was torture and it was worth the risk to acquire one commando-style.(Tse 2015, 129) Learning about culture When my grandmother used to visit from Hong Kong around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival, she'd take it upon herself to make as many zongzi as possible, getting all of us involved in the assembly line.One of us would be in charge of scooping the rice, another the fillings, and my grandmother completed the task by binding them tightly so the filling wouldn't fall out when boiling them up.I remember one year we had a bit of a competition and ended up making so many we were still eating them at Christmas!(Tse and Tse 2016, 58) Our mum believes that soups are the key to staying healthy.Although they were born into Cantonese families in Hong Kong and moved to the United Kingdom at a young age, our parents made sure that the tradition of soups was one distinct aspect of Chinese food culture that they instilled in us.A bowl of nourishing Chinese soup conjures up the same comfort as, and even nostalgia for, childhood times eating the family's homemade soups.(Tse and Tse 2016, 16) Just like the 1.3 billion Chinese people living in China, our mum believes that noodles represent longevity and should therefore never be cut -otherwise you cut short your own life.While life might have been tough for Mabel, growing up in the only Chinese family in Middleton, and the only Chinese girl at school, she was determined to have a long life -so she never cut her noodles!(Tse and Tse 2016, 148)

Themes
Representative first-order data

Learning life lessons
We grew up in a poor household, but that didn't stop my grandmother from telling us to dream big.If I wanted to eat lobster, she told me to close my eyes and imagine the next bite I was taking was lobster.That was a wonderful leap of imagination and I'll always be grateful for her teaching and discipline.(Tse and Tse 2016, 23) I had a childhood friend whose mum made the most amazing steamed sponge cake.I remember how we would count down the minutes together before we could lift the lid -it was forbidden, absolutely strictly forbidden to open the steamer before the time was up!That is the trick, to wait, and your patience will be rewarded.(Tse 2015, 137) When my family and I returned to Guangzhou to rediscover our ancestral roots, we got off the train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou and a swarm of motorbikes surrounded us.They were actually taxis, but we didn't know that, and they persisted in hassling us.Dad decided to avoid the confrontation and ushered us all into a restaurant.My mum really wanted to eat jie chang fen, which literally translated means pigs' intestines, although there are no intestines in the dish; they are nicknamed that because at first glance the chang fen look like pigs' intestines.She called out to the waiter, 'Do you have any jie chang fen?' The waiter sniggered and said, 'We've got the_jie(indicating our mum), but not chang fen'.We were all shocked at this rude response, so we upped and left.Mum was a bit despondent at the events of her first half hour in Guangzhou.Dad cheered her up.A few streets away, over a long, crumbling bridge, there was a nice little street cafe and they served chang fen, so we sat there and ate.There were no fluorescent lights in this area and no hordes of motorbikes or traffic polluting the air.It was peaceful.
However, as we sat in the open-front cafe, a storm cloud appeared, the heavens opened and sheets of rain poured down.Had we brought the rain from Manchester?
Did bad things happen in threes?Mum shook her head, 'Sometimes you've just got to roll with the punches, kids.Now pass me the chilli sauce.I'm going to make my portion of chang fen extra spicy.I think I'm going to need the va va voom!' (Tse and Tse 2016, 90) Connecting family to business As we stepped into the house where our grandmother was born we saw on the wall a black and white photo, which had weathered in the sun.The resemblance of the lady in the photo to our grandmother was startling.It was our grandmother's mother!The man in the photo was our grandmother's father, who looked like our mother with high cheekbones and beautiful eyes.The bridge in the village still stood, but the lake where the fish used to swim had dried up years ago.We went to the temple, a Chinese tradition, to light a joss stick for our ancestors as a sign of respect.In the temple, a very frail elderly lady no taller than 4 foot came out and clasped Lily's hands with tears in her eyes.It was Lily's youngest sister, Mui.Our grandmother had not seen her sister for over forty years.Later in the day, we sat down with Mui to enjoy a delicious vegetarian dish of mixed mushrooms with sugar snap peas from Mu i's nursery and baby sweetcorn and spring onions from her balcony.Cooking on a wok that must have been twice her size, Mui first fried the garlic and then tossed in the vegetables.Holding the wok with two hands, she deftly poured the delicious medley of vegetables into a bowl with accuracy borne from years of experience.Together, over that simple dish, we celebrated life that day.(Tse and Tse 2014, 138) Our grandmother told me she created sweet chilli sauce by pure accident one day when she grabbed the sugar instead of the salt.She was working for a British family in Hong Kong back in the 1950s at the time and was summoned to the dining room afterwards, where the head of the household informed her that the sauce was sweet not salty, as instructed.'I thought that was the end of me', she said.Surprisingly for Lily, he was impressed and wanted to know its name.She replied, in surprise 'Sweet?Chilli?'And the head of the household answered 'Very well, Lily, get us some more of this sweet chilli'.We followed our grandmother's recipe to make our own Sweet Mandarin Sweet Chilli Dipping Sauce, and we think the fact that it is a bestseller is 'due to our use of fresh chillies.It's a family favourite and hopefully will become one of yours too.(Tse and Tse 2014, 61)Our grandmother came to the UK in the 1950s.The ship took 35 days to sail from Hong Kong to Liverpool, taking in Singapore, Penang, Ceylon, Bombay, the Suez Canal, Gibraltar and Southampton along the way.It was on this journey that Lily perfected her green curry recipe, which wooed the local community in Manchester on her arrival.Elements of the dish were learnt in Singapore, where Lily stopped off to visit her sister (who had relocated there with her husband) and the secret blend of spices was perfected in Bombay.Today green curry is a firm favourite of the family, especially on cold days when the heat of the dish helps to warm you up.Any leftover curry paste can be spooned into a jam jar and stored in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.(Tse and Tse 2014, 147) (Continued)

Themes
Representative first-order data Learning about the business I always enjoyed family dinners, when I was growing up, not only for the good hearty food but also for the stories and running commentaries about the business and day-to-day life.(Tse and Tse 2014, 86) I remember watching our parents and grandmother pick their fish and how they would comment if one was not fresh.Their tenacity to instinctively know which was the freshest fish always amazed me.(Tse and Tse 2014, 106) These spring roll pancakes are traditionally enjoyed as a delicacy for breakfast.This version is made with XO sauce to give the pancakes a bit of a kick.XO is an acronym, which stands for extra old cognac -even though there isn't any cognac in it.When I asked my father why would a sauce be named after XO cognac but not have any cognac in it, his response was one word: 'status'.Indeed, XO sauce is expensive and was introduced to Hong Kong in the 1980s to the upper echelons of society who enjoyed cognac.Vogue China once called it the 'caviar of the East' and if there is one thing that you should try it's this spicy, dried scallop sauce packed with umami flavours.XO sauce certainly makes these spring onion pancakes extra indulgent and delicious.(Tse 2015, 112) Continuing the family legacy These recipes originated from my grandmother, my mother, my twin sister Lisa and me: three generations of independent Chinese women: whose lives take in Guangzhou in southern China in the 1920s, colonial Hong Kong in the 1930s, the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and a changing England from the 1950s to the present day.The times we have lived in have been unpredictable, but a love of food and a talent for cooking has pulled each generation through the most devastating upheaval. . . .When we built our restaurant, Sweet Mandarin, we became the third generation of women restauranteurs and the fourth generation to make a living from our sauces.We are honoured to share the family stories behind the recipes. . . .Here is our family album, where food, anecdotes and family folklore combine to be our heirloom.(Tse and Tse 2014, 6) A family reunion in Hong Kong in 2002 exposed a huge divide between our two cultures and countries -and yet it was this visit that inspired my sister and I return to our roots and open our Sweet Mandarin restaurant.From the outset, the differences were apparent for all to see.Our family stood in a line on the pavement, openmouthed and out of place.Our aunty took us to Ladies' Market, where they sold ladies' clothes, but I felt enormous next to the people around me -like Gulliver, surrounded by the tiny inhabitants of a Far Eastern Lilliput.It was clear that while we were ethnically Chinese, we dressed and looked totally different from the native Hong Kong people.In my dismay at not being able to shop for clothes, my attention turned to food and I soon discovered rows of hawker stalls selling skewered meats.I made a beeline for the beef skewers and, as I raised the meat to my lips, all the anxiety I initially felt about our cultural differences disappeared.
My raison d'etre was the food; here I had found a Tittle piece of the jigsaw.My goal in Hong Kong became clear -I was here to rediscover my roots, learn the culinary delights of the locals and bring them home to share with my customers.(Tse and Tse 2016, 105)Mum told me this dish would be our inheritance, the living part of our family tree, and she taught me how to make it as part of my birthright.(Tse and Tse 2014, 118) Making personal marks While I love the flavours of Peking Duck, it is very difficult to recreate in the home kitchen which is what inspired me to create this dish.This is a unique family roast comprised of a quail in a chicken in a duck stuffed with a mix of Chinese mushrooms, chestnuts, Chinese sausage and sticky rice.We invented it as an alternative Christmas dinner, Chinese-style and it came about because my sister Janet wanted quail, Lisa wanted duck and I wanted chicken.So we thought, why not put them all together?It started off as a bit of challenge, and a bit tongue in cheek, but the end product was such a hit we now enjoy it at other times of the year too.For Christmas, we used a whole duck, a whole chicken, and a whole quail.However, I have adapted our family recipe for two people rather than for a family of six.(Tse and Tse 2014, 57) We are dedicated to making the dining experience inclusive to all and in particular to those who have allergies.We cater for the 'free-from' markets with our glutenfree, dairy-free, nut-free range of Sweet Mandarin dipping sauces and our gluten-free menus at our Sweet Mandarin restaurant.To continue this, we've made suggestions for how to tailor the recipes if you follow a gluten-free or dairy-free diet.(Tse and Tse 2014, 6) -All of our recipes have been tested at the Sweet Mandarin Cookery School, where we run courses, and some have also been tried out elsewhere -including on Gordon Ramsay's Aga, in the Iron Chef Kitchen Stadium and even on a camp stove in rural China -so we are confident you will be able to recreate these dishes in your home kitchen.(Tse and Tse 2014, 6) 2016, 157).The kitchen is a unique site for the next generation, where they spend much time together socializing: If Dad's at home he's always in the kitchen.It's his favourite place.We've always spent a lot of time there, cooking, eating and talking.Everything in our family revolved around food.Dad works very long hours, slogging hard at the woks, often hidden in billowing smoke, but these spareribs are an easy dish because once they're being steamed, he's hands free.With this dish, he's relaxed, and it reminds me of those good times with my dad.(Tse and Tse 2016, 34) For the next generations in the Tse family, days of the week are not just remembered as inschool times, but in terms of what's cooked in the kitchen: 'As a child I always remember Tuesday being soup day.My mum would fill a big, silver saucepan (industrial sized) with over 50 spareribs to make the ultimate stock, which was rich with flavour' (Tse and Tse 2014, 27).Food goes beyond fulfilling essential needs, comprising a 'delicious' memory.In their words 'It seemed as if schoolwork and life's other little frustrations all seemed to evaporate as we sat down to enjoy it' (Tse and Tse 2014, 118).

Learning about culture
As British-born Chinese, the next generation is embedded in both social worlds: a Chinese one at home and a British one outside the home.While there are different challenges for different worlds, the next generation also found it difficult to understand their 'belongings'.To resolve this issue, the family made peace with their different origins through a combination of Western and Eastern food.On the one hand, food acts as a channel for them to have a glimpse of their Chinese traditions as well as Chinese social conventions -for example, noodles are never to be cut short, and rice should never be wasted: "Rice is the staple diet of the Chinese and the custom greeting is 'Have you eaten rice yet?' rather than 'How are you' Our grandmother always said that we had to finish our rice, otherwise the man we'd marry would be spotty.She also told us that rice represented a victory for the nation and that every grain was precious, even more so than gold -as gold could not be eaten . . .In China, the rural class was at the whim of bad harvests, famine, and shortages of rice.Her mother sacrificed her bowl of rice so that our grandmother could eat".(Tse and Tse 2014, 148) On the other hand, cooking also allowed the family to be 'accepted' into the local community and started their journey to settle down in the West.Simply, Lily's initial job as a house servant in the kitchen afforded the family the opportunity to move to the UK.In the family's memory, Lily's brave behaviour in working her own way up was always spoken highly of.Dedications to Lily were found throughout the cookbooks.For example, the nationally renowned Sweet Chilly Sauce was thought to have started with Lily's innocent mistake of using sugar instead of salt.When the whole family set up the restaurant in Middleton where no one had tasted Chinese food before, it was noted that 'after a while their tempting dishes started to woo the residents and business soon picked up' (Tse and Tse 2014, 152).For Chinese, 'love' is not a common word in speech; rather, it is expressed through behaviour.When connecting with family members, people show love through affective behaviours and the willingness to take responsibility.Dishes are no longer simply the outcome of cooking or means of living but expressions of affection and care.Recalling stories about 'Dad's Chinese-Fried Rice', they said joyfully 'this is our dad's favourite dish.We make it for him on Father's Day, but the rest of the year he makes it for himself!' (Tse and Tse 2014, 73).

Learning life lessons
Despite the previous generations being less educated due to social conditions, they used their most familiar practice -cooking -to teach their children important life lessons.When faced with behavioural issues, the parents and grandmother made sure that it was clear what behaviour was considered good or bad and with clear demonstrations using their best expertise -food.We found multiple life lessons coming through their accounts from both good stories as well as bad stories.These stories are touching with a strong nostalgia flavour of their past family lives, with different members of the family.For example, the sisters described how they learnt not to make shortcuts in life through their favourite breakfast, egg custard (Tse and Tse 2016, 156).The family had various upsetting challenges, which also served as important learning points, celebrated with food: Our grandmother once surprised me when she started speaking Japanese to the fishmonger ordering her king prawns.She picked up the language during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during the Second World War and felt that the Japanese language and food were great positives she was able to take from an unpleasant experience.(Tse and Tse 2014, 158) From these four themes, it emerged that cooking acted as a socialization tool for the next generation with/within their family.Cooking was important for their development, as (1) it is where the knowhow is embedded, and (2) it carries emotional weight, allowing the next generation to be involved and part of the family through the practice.

Bridging
Cooking works as a bridge to pass on knowledge that enables the next generation to form their understanding of both the family and the business.For the Tse family, as cooking plays a major role in their family life, the connections between different generations and businesses are expressed through cooking.

Connecting family to business
Cooking and particular dishes mark the past through stories of previous generations to the start of the family's entrepreneurial journey.In their stories, great-grandfather, for example, was always referred to as the first entrepreneur of the family who started the soy sauce business in Hong Kong.Following his footsteps, Lily was entrepreneurial and started her own business in the UK.This is linked to Mabel, who owned her own shop and raised the next generation through hard work and, of course, lots of cooking.The more complicated family stories about immigration and the difficulties of work are linked to cooking.This forms another important sign of the interrelatedness between the Tse sisters' family life and cooking business, as demonstrated by the following extract: Our mum, Mabel, remarked that she lost her childhood innocence when she arrived in England in 1959.Her mum, Lily, had left her and her brother Arthur in Hong Kong for three years while Lily carved out her business in the UK.When Lily brought Mabel, aged 9, and Arthur, aged 12, to England, Mabel hated the country immediately, and she hated Lily for bringing her there.Mabel missed the sunshine, her friends, the food and most of all her grandma who had become like a surrogate mum.Mabel arrived on a dark winter afternoon and remembered shivering in the street while Lily unloaded the bags.Residents came out of their houses and, standing on the doorsteps with their arms folded, they tutted and whispered to one another: 'First one Chinese, now two more.It is a bloody infestation!What is the world coming to?Did we fight a war for this?' Mum had no experience of racism, and, young as she was, she understood the sentiment as surely as if her new neighbours had punched her in the face.However, it was through this dish that the animosity between mother and daughter melted away.As the chicken was stir-fried and the rice wine was added, mum was instantly transported back to Hong Kong, and she picked up her chopsticks with relish.This was her comfort food.We cooked this dish for Gordon Ramsay on the F Word and it won us the title of Best Local Chinese Restaurant in the UK.We dedicated the award to our mum.(Tse and Tse 2014, 78) At the same time, as cooking is so intertwined with family life, it forms the ways that the next generation knows their family members from the past.Instead of having nicknames for people, cookbooks include recipes that are 'signature dishes' associated with family members' characters and entrepreneurial behaviours: This dish is dedicated to my great grandfather, Leung, who manufactured soy sauce and whose favourite fish was salmon.Although I never met this formidable man, it was his endeavours that inspired me to launch our sauce business and keep the family dream alive.We make this dish every year in memory of my great-grandfather during the spring Qingming festival, when we head to the burial ground with incense, paper money and food offerings to appease our hungry ancestors and give them currency in the afterlife.(Tse and Tse 2014, 111) Precious moments that form the family members' iconic memories are also preserved and passed on in the form of stories about cooking.Cooking plays a vital role in preserving these memories, as it carries stories through time and generations.For example, in describing their parents' proposal, the Tse sisters position the signature dish, Fillet Steak in Black Pepper sauce, as the 'winning move': Our mum met Eric, our dad, back in the 1970s.When she saw him at the airport for the first time with his shaggy hair and thick black glasses it was love at first sight.However, Eric had to go on proposing for weeks afterwards before she could take him seriously.It was only when Eric made this dish for Mum -the Fillet Steak in Black Pepper sauce, using the choicest steak he could afford, that she said yes. (Tse and Tse 2014, 104)

Learning about the business
Living in a family that works in the culinary business, knowledge of the business is inevitably passed on through cooking.For example, Helen and Lisa recall shopping for ingredients not just for dinner but also on many occasions for their business.During these grocery trips, they gained an understanding of good and bad ingredients for cooking: When we used to go to the Chinese supermarket with our grandmother, she always used to tell us to pick the dark red peppers, not the light red ones, as they contained more vitamins and goodness (Tse 2015, 107).From meat to vegetables to cookeries, family always talked about the tricks in the trade, which were collected in the cookbooks.
While cooking is the practice carried out in this case, it embeds the way they do things in their family and thereby bridges the way they do business as well.To make this more salient, the family was never physically far away from the business, further interweaving the two.Sharing their lives with the business required the sisters to 'work in the family takeaway and . . .[they] could cook the entire menu aged 11' (Tse and Tse 2014, 54).To them, it is normal to have important lessons, from cooking, that they keep in mind for the business: Our parents married in Bury in 1975 in a small traditional ceremony followed by a wedding banquet of huge proportions.Mum said that practically all the Chinese who were in Britain were invited -much to the horror of Dad, who had to foot the bill!The first course was Chinese and Sweetcorn Soup.However, it turned out the guests couldn't eat it because the chef had been too enthusiastic with the salt -apparently he had never cooked for so many people in his life and ended up using a ladleful instead of a tablespoonful!. . .To this day, they still talk about that salty soup and often remind me to watch the salt when teaching this dish . . .(Tse and Tse 2014, 22) These stories, fondly, explained the linkage between the family and business.Through their recalling of the family members and seamless connection to their daily business, the practice shows its' enabling on the next generation, making them feel the business is naturally part of their life.

Leading
The next generation begins to lead the cooking practices as well as their family business, which occurs due to their life stage as well as their ability to influence the business and innovate.In doing so, they continue the family legacy in the trade and introduce personal features to the practice of cooking in their family business.

Continuing the family legacy
For Helen and Lisa, cooking has been, and is, part of their family life, interwoven with business.Cooking is embedded in the hardship, history, prosperity, and rebirth of their family as well as their business.They are convinced that simply continuing to cook is not enough -a business is needed.They want to re-establish the family business and leave their white-collar professions, much against their parents' wishes.However, for them [Lisa, Helen, and Janet], 'It was up to my sisters and me to reestablish my grandmother's dream' (Tse and Tse 2014, 6).The urge to continue this family journey of '10,000 miles' rests on their shoulders: 'We vow to continue the family culinary journey through the . . .restaurant, cookery school and range of . . .sauces' (Tse and Tse 2014, preface).

Making personal marks
Helen and Lisa also made changes to existing practices and modified the ways of cooking.For example, recognizing the health benefits, they suggest panfrying or steaming dumplings rather than cooking their grandmother's deep-fried version.They also create new recipes and add personal touches to cooking: I [Helen] love learning about new foods and never grow tired of fusing ingredients from different cuisines, so when I got back to Sweet Mandarin I started experimenting with this new flavour.I discovered that truffle goes wonderfully with king prawns and lobster, hence the invention of this dish, which makes a wonderful, indulgent treat for a special occasion.(Tse and Tse 2015, 98) They are also keen to achieve external recognition.In contrast to the previous generations, who kept their heads down and were satisfied with a solid customer base, Helen and Lisa always seek external recognition, maintaining a high profile.This is clearly shown in their participation in various TV programmes 1 and the management of different social media accounts.We, the readers, are reminded of the stories where they took the business to the next level through various stories.For example, We cooked this dish for the final of Gordon Ramsay's F Word Best Local Chinese Restaurant in the UK in 2009.I finished service at Sweet Mandarin at midnight and after just two hours of sleep we were picked up by a black shiny car and driven to a secret destination in London.(Tse and Tse 2014, 45) As a result of various activities and high publicity, the family culinary business achieved national and even international recognition that was never achieved by the previous generations.

Discussion
This study aimed to explore how next generations become successors through the enactment of mundane family business practices.This section discusses the dynamic relationship between the components of the findings (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton 2013), leading to our theoretical model of next generations becoming successors (Figure 2).In our case of a culinary business, we choose the practice of cooking to represent a practice that transcends the family and business sites providing time and space arrangements (Schatzki 2009) to dwell with family.Cooking has been previously used as an example when discussing practice theory by Schatzki (2005) and by Hui, Schatzki, and Shove (2016).In our study, we found that cooking -as a mundane, everyday practice that happens in the culinary family business -has socializing, bridging, and leading effects on the next generation becoming successors.We illustrate this in Figure 2, depicting the components of the practices as well as the dynamic relation between these aggregate dimensions identified in our findings.Our practice model demonstrates our ontological view of 'becoming' and a dwelling mode of engagement, a constituent of practice philosophy (Chia and Holt 2006;Tsoukas and Chia 2002).'becoming', in contrast to 'being', represents an understanding of the world as in flux, continually in the process of becoming where dwelling denotes everyday practical coping and local adaptation as the natural engagement with that world (Chia and Holt 2009).A becoming ontology implies that social reality is produced by practices (Orlikowski 2010), with no separation between individual and society but an inevitable entwinement where 'context and contextualized entity constitute one another' (Schatzki 2005, 468).Hence, the model presented is, by necessity, a still image but depicts a practicearrangement bundle in constant flux.
At the family site, family practices (e.g.cooking) carry socialization between generations in a way that prepares the next generation to continue the family's culture, history, and values (Berger and Luckmann 1966;Giddens 1993).Through practices such as cooking, the children learn the ways of the family, even if these lessons are largely embedded in practical everyday matters without an intentional plan to develop successors (Haag 2012).Since doing business is part of a business family's way of being, practicing together contributes to the next generation becoming successors as they dwell with everyday practical coping (Chia and Holt 2009;Tsoukas 2010).Practices belonging to the business site provide the next generation with an arena to continue the family legacy.It simultaneously allows the next generation to make their own mark, becoming leaders.Through the practice of family members (e.g.cooking), the family and business sites are bridged together into a family business site, carried by family members that transpire in the social site of which they are an inherent part.By using round forms and circular flows in the figure, we want to convey how family and business sites have meshed into an overall practice-arrangement bundle in constant flux with no separate entities (Schatzki 2002(Schatzki , 2005)).According to becoming ontology, social reality is produced by practices (Orlikowski 2010).The practices, which in our case is cooking, can enable socializing, bridging, and leading and, are the central producers of the social reality in the process where next generation family members are becoming successors.Our model illustrates an explanation for how a next generation member can become a successor through the silent efficacy of indirect action (Chia and Holt 2009).We thereby illustrate informal, indirect, and unintentional paths to becoming a family business successor.
In the following sections, we discuss our theoretical contributions to family business as well as EaP research.

Cooking and next generation becoming successors
First, our research sheds light on the black box of the process of the next generation becoming successors in family businesses.Different from traditional succession work that considers business sphere participation (e.g.De Massis, Chua and Chrisman 2008;Handler 1992), we found that the next generations' experiences in enacting practices in the family evolve over time.In other words, they are constantly becoming successors.Additionally, our case brought in an interesting twist, as the parents are not intentionally nurturing them into successors, nor do they want the next generation to be in the culinary trade (for a traditional understanding of Asian/Chinese parents' control over children in family business succession, see Huang et al. 2020).In the next generation's stories, through participating in cooking throughout their childhood (socializing and bridging), they took it upon themselves to carry on the family legacy in the culinary business (leading).From a practice perspective, cooking in this family business is a carrier for multiple intergenerational exchanges (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020), in which mundanity constitutes multiple agencies and meanings (Nicolini 2011).Cooking as a mundane daily practice (Schatzki 1996), eventually, and unintentionally for all parties, led the next generation to become successors in this case.This leads us to a reflective form of theorizing aiming to bring awareness to indirect and unintentional habits and to propose new ways of seeing than those routinely followed (Shotter and Tsoukas 2011).Therefore, we argue that the unintentionality revealed in the case demonstrates our first theoretical contribution to the researched phenomenon by explaining how a next generation family member can become a successor through practical coping without an intention for it to be so.
Second, we enrich the understanding of family in family business research by introducing the practice-based perspective and examining everyday practices in family business.From this perspective, families are not static entities but are characterized by fluidity through the practices carried out by the family (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von Savigny 2001).We therefore argue that to advance the understanding of how family impacts business, family business research needs to consider family practices (Morgan 2011b) beyond the conventional boundaries of the family and business systems.Through our examination of cooking as an example of a common practice in families, we found that family practices can have important implications for next generation development in socializing, bridging, and leading.Namely, the transfer of unintended and indirect succession learning takes place when families practice (e.g.cook) together.The family here becomes a site where many practices unfold, allowing reconsideration of what forms a family (Aldrich and Cliff 2003;Aldrich et al. 2021).By investigating the next generation's accounts of their shared cooking practice, we observed and explained the dimension of their development that is related to their involvement in cooking.While much of the family business succession literature primarily looks at business-related variables, such as goals and strategies (e.g.Le Breton-Miller, Miller, and Steier 2004;Sharma, Chrisman, and Chua 2003), our research sheds light on informal practices in families that can have enduring effects enabling the next generation becoming successors.
Combined, our findings shed light on the call for inter/trans generational understanding in the family business field (Magrelli et al. 2022) by showing that succession is not performed through rational planning but is an ongoing process that involves multiple generations (Haag 2012).In particular, we found that family practices transcend generations in overlapping socializing, bridging, and leading stages.Our research thereby unpacks the underlying mechanisms in different generations' overlapping life cycles (Davis, Hampton, and Lansberg 1997) through an EaP lens (exemplified by three generations: Gen n, Lily; Gen n + 1, Mabel; and Gen n + 2, Lisa and Helen).As we show in Figure 3, these can be all closely enmeshed, where the practice is the carrier for these generations.Actions of generations are, therefore, 'property of the practice' (Schatzki 2002, 80).Following a practice ontology, practices are the 'social arenas of action that are pervaded by a space of meaning in whose terms people live, interact, and coexist intelligibly' (Schatzki 2005, 470).The model, thereby, visualizes how different generations' experiences co-exist in the same practice(s) and the potential impact of inter-and trans-generations in the process.Through the EaP lens, we provide new explanations to central family research topics, e.g.transgenerational entrepreneurship (Jaskiewicz, Combs, and Rau 2015) and knowledge construction (Ge and Campopiano 2022).
In addition, we add to the discussion around the methodological diversity of family business research, especially that of qualitative research.We advance the field by demonstrating the use of autobiographical texts in the form of cookbooks as sources of secondary data.Through this unique data set, we gain access to narratives of a 30-year period of the next generation's life and their way to 'do and say' in specific situations (Teague et al. 2021, 576), which has been argued as particularly difficult for transgenerational family business research (Neubaum 2018).Families and family businesses are known to produce autobiographical texts, which are found to be useful for legitimation (e.g.Dalpiaz, Tracey, and Phillips 2014) and legacy (Sasaki, Ravasi, and Micelotta 2019).As a result, our research exemplifies and advances the use of such secondary data for research on generationalrelated topics.

Entrepreneurship as practice
Building on the existing EaP research, we respond to calls for diverse methodologies to be employed to study entrepreneurship as a collective activity undertaken by multiple people and involving multiple sites of entrepreneurship-related practices (Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020).In this study, we use the interwoven sites of family and business to generate insights into aspects of family business revealed in an examination of the 'nexus' of practice (Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2016) between and across generations.The practice lens is particularly suitable to grapple with family business topics that, to a large extent, are informal and unplanned due to its ability to connect mundane, micro activities with business outcomes (Nordqvist and Melin 2010).The development of the next generation and the impact on their entrepreneurship-related practice can contribute to central topics in the family business literature, including transgenerational entrepreneurship, succession, entrepreneurial learning, and entrepreneurial legacy.

Discursive artefacts
We contribute by developing the concept of 'discursive artefacts' in practice-based research.We concur with scholars stressing that a 'full account of an organization must also consider its material arrangements, the ways humans, artefacts, organisms, and things are ordered in it' (Schatzki 2005, 478), and that entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that is discursive and rich in stories (Dawson and Hjorth 2012;Gartner 2007;Hamilton 2013).Our findings unpacked the meaning and (un)intentionality of the 'discursive-material practices' (Thompson, Verduijn, and Gartner 2020, 250).Specifically, we found that the discursive artefacts regarding the everyday mundane practice in family lives, e.g.cooking, in a family business have extended meanings (namely, developing the next generation) beyond the purpose of the practice itself (namely, providing food and livelihood) and the economic purpose from the business site (Berglund and Glaser 2022).
Practices are often observed as they happen and are thus normally studied through ethnographical research with extensive (and, oftentimes, longitudinal) fieldwork (Langley and Abdallah 2011).However, the power of narratives and stories is rigorously unleashed in our data as an interplay of various mediums -oral, textual, and visual (Boje 2008;Vaara 2010).As a result, we identified cookbooks as a form of discursive artefact of cooking practice in family business.We found that there are two types of artefacts when 'speaking of' practices: artefacts in practice (for example recipes, ingredients, and cookery), defined as 'devises' or 'resources' (Shove 2016, 156); and discursive artefacts of practice.We define discursive artefacts as recorded/written stories of mundane family practices (e.g.cooking/eating/shopping) produced by the family and deployed in different forms of media, e.g.autobiographies and biographies, letters, diaries, and video recordings.Simply, they are discursive forms of practices.Through our analysis, we found that these discursive artefacts are an inseparable part that interwove family and business.They are captured and communicated as meaningful practices to intervene and act upon the social world in several ways.These discursive practices could be purposeful in their intention to intermingle various artefacts (e.g.cookbooks and YouTube videos) with human actions within the family and the business.
Practice theorists would agree that activity is embodied and that nexuses of practices are mediated by artefacts and objects, but what is less clear is the nature of that embodiment (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von Savigny 2001).Following Vaara and Whittington (2012), our research findings support that these discursive artefacts are more than intermediaries of human action because their agency can extend beyond the practices they describe.We found that discursive artefacts are particularly powerful for the next generation to become successors through socializing, bridging, and leading.As a result, discursive artefacts stand alone as a distinctive form of practice within the bundle of interwoven activities organized around shared understandings of cooking practice in the family business.They are nostalgic in tone and refer within and across generations and move between cultures, resonating with the 'teleoaffective structure' (Schatzki 2002, 80) of the practice of cooking for the next generation.
Finally, the discursive artefact is part of the 'becoming' in practice theory.We argue that different from the practices that are embedded in family lives (Schatzki 1996), the writing and recording of them could be at a later stage with the reflective process, giving this a temporal and performative element.Our case illustrates how discursive artefact can offer a reflective break to consider and collect discursively the practices of the 'dwelling' itself (Chia and Holt 2006).Scholars using an ethnographic research method would have discursive artefacts closer to the happening of the practices (e.g.Hill 2022).However, as discussed before, this type of data is rare and difficult to acquire, especially given the time span required to observe multigenerational transitions in family businesses.While in this research, we treat the texts as artefacts for analysis (Vaara, Sonenshein, and Boje 2016), our focus is on the contents of the stories and on analysing the impact of such embeddedness in practice on the next generation becoming family business successors.The discursive artefacts' performative impact can go beyond the aforementioned reflectiveness and emotional impact.Following a critical lens, for example, scholars pointed out that their rhetorical nature could deliver a strategic purpose (e.g.Ge et al. 2022), warranting an in-depth exploration of the time and purpose of publication.Collectively, the representation and communicative features give our theorization of discursive artefact a performative role, forming part of the 'becoming' of the practices.

Practical implications
Through this research, we identified important practical implications for family business owners to take into consideration for the next generation.We found that family life serves as a great early socialization site where the next generation develops and engages with family businesses.As a result, we suggest that there is a clear advantage for family members to do mundane family practices together, e.g.cooking, and involve the potential successors in the family business from an early age.By being part of the family business, the next generation might become more willing and committed successors.Specifically, the involvement of the next generation should not be viewed as restricted to business activities or the business site.Mundane family practices that happen in family sites are also important for next generation development.

Limitations and future research directions
First, our research uses cooking as an illustrative example of a practice through which the next generation develops.However, we need to emphasize that we acknowledge the heterogeneity of families; specifically, from a practice-based perspective, families are composed of different practices.While cooking exemplifies our research and allows in-depth illustration of the theorization through a practice-based perspective, we acknowledge that there is a limitation in the practices that are covered by our research.We encourage scholars to conduct further research to unpack other practices in family businesses, especially those performed in family sites.
Second, our research advocates a methodological advancement by relying solely on documentation.While it is suitable for this research project, we highlight that some topics following the EaP perspective (e.g. the 'real-time doings and sayings of practitioners involved in entrepreneurship', Champenois, Lefebvre, and Ronteau 2020, 281) would also benefit from a wider variety of methods including but not limited to ethnography and interviews.When access is possible, for example, interviews with business partners or employees who had worked with the family business for a long time would provide particular insights.
Moreover, our research scratched the surface of the concept discursive artefacts, especially in the different ways they (may) influence practices.We propose that their effects could ripple beyond connecting the constellations of cooking and culture with other practices, developing their own agency (Vaara and Whittington 2012).We have seen in other research that cookbooks are discursive artefacts that can embody cooking know-how and family (hi)stories but can also go beyond family business to influence broader audiences (Ge et al. 2022).According to practice philosophy, actors and agencies are products of their practices (Orlikowski 2010).These discursive artefacts are therefore not just a representation of the cooking practice but an active, ongoing practice of the family business.Discursive activities of this nature are commonly found in family business alongside other objects that intervene within the business (e.g. in identity creation and communication, branding, and customer satisfaction [Konopaski, Jack, and Hamilton 2015]).Therefore, these discursive artefacts deserve a nuanced analysis of their place in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of social life.We encourage future research to further develop the construct of 'discursive artefacts' by unpacking how 'Material objects, or the nonhuman, affect the production of practices' (Teague et al. 2021, 571).Moreover, as the concept of discursive artefact can be seen as embodying intra-inter-and transgenerational implications, we can see how further research could contribute to the recent calls for understanding generations as a constitutive part of family business and as a social category with shared experiences open to interpretation (Magrelli et al. 2022).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Practice model of next generation becoming successors.

Table 1 .
Data details.Stories behind cooking the family recipes, folk tales and family tales of traditional Chinese recipes, and stories of recipes taught in their cooking school.With photo demonstrations of dishes and cooking together in practices.Stories of Tse family's dim sum recipes and traditional Chinese recipes.Records of the Tse sisters' effort to learn Dim Sum from a Dim Sum master.With photo demonstrations of dishes and cooking together in practices.

Table 2 .
Representative data supporting the second-order themes.