Intergenerational Transmission

There has been recent and rapid growth in management and organizational research dedicated to the phenomenon of intergenerational transmission—the process through which organizations and other social systems reproduce and reconstitute themselves across long periods of time. This growth has resulted in several different research communities dedicated to understanding how organizational life transcends the involvement, tenure, and lifetimes of individuals. Yet, while assumptions about the nature of intergenerational transmission processes are coherent within research communities, such assumptions also diverge widely across such communities, resulting in contradictions and conceptual challenges. In this manuscript we identify four latent conceptualizations of the process of intergenerational transmission: taken-for-granted persistence, effortful maintenance, incremental adaptation, and discontinuous reinvention. We theorize that these processes represent different modes of what we term sociotemporal transcendence—different ways through which organizational life extends through time beyond the involvement or lifetimes of individuals. Based on these insights, we identify future research directions for a transcendence-based view of organizational life.