How family events affect the ownership transfer and justice construction process in business-owning families

The proposed fellowship programme is intended to significantly increase my academic career prospects by establishing an academic publication track record and by building my networks across a range of academic and non-academic audiences. First, the fellowship will allow me to capitalise on my past work experience as a research specialist working in the post-compulsory education, skills and business support sector. Secondly, it will provide me with the opportunity to disseminate my thesis findings to enhance our collective understanding of business-owning families, and how they make sense of issues of fairness in the transfer of ownership from one family generation to the next. I do not plan to conduct further research during the fellowship, instead I will be refining draft papers and developing papers from my research. These will be presented and submitted to international academic conferences and top-ranked journals, as shown within the communications plan and project milestones. This activity is essential for my future employability within the UK academic sector.

Throughout the duration of the fellowship I will be improving my employability skills by being the lead on the co-authoring of papers. This will allow me to develop the tacit knowledge and skills by learning through close working with leading scholars in my field, such as my proposed mentor Professor Nicholas O'Regan. I will also improve my ability to transition to an academic researcher and teacher by identifying and drawing together family and business scholars within Aston University to shed new light on how we can collectively pool expertise to enhance future understanding of business-owning families.

Importantly, I will use the fellowship to engage with policy and practitioners engaging with business-owning families, to work with them to more effectively support such families to successfully transfer their ownership between family members and across family generations. Specifically, I will be organising working meetings to share knowledge and co-create better support frameworks. This will involve participants from family-business specific organisations and general business support organisations.

Finally, I will take full advantage of the training opportunities that are available by Aston University's Learning and Development Centre and specific training organised by bodies such as the ESRC, British Academy of Management (BAM) and others to support the delivery of this project and launch my academic career. This fellowship will enable me to capitalise on my professional and academic research career to date, through establishing a publication and impact track record that is essential to compete in the highly competitive academic world.