The paradox of resilience and change: imprinting processes in Permasteelisa Spa

Abstract

Recently there has been a growing interest in management and entrepreneurship research on the determinants of firm persistence and resilience. The concept of imprinting has often been related to the topic, as an explanation to why firms survive and successfully grow thanks to replication over time of founders’ mindset and way of acting, even after their departure. By now researchers have centred their attention around the content of the imprinting process -such as organizational characteristics, business procedures – without entering into the details of the processes and mechanisms that characterize the transmission of the imprinted elements (Immelmann, 1975; Stinchcombe, 1965). Moreover, a somewhat static definition of imprinting posits that it is a process that happens once and for all –namely at the outset of a firm– while many evidence point towards the fact that firms, when exposed to periods of environmental turbulence, are often re-imprinted: they find ways to answer uncertainties and often elaborate “recipes” that are passed on the organization. By carrying an empirical investigation on an existing multinational firm operating as a world-leader in the business of architectural envelopes and internal systems the study tries to identify its distinctive characteristics and cognitive frames, objects of imprinting processes. A conceptual and analytical framework is used to conduct a qualitative research on the processes underlying the persistence of founders’ way of interpreting the business. The study then focuses on the new cognitive frames imprinted by the new management teams during two consequent sensitive periods and on the instruments and processes entailed in their replication and persistence.