Geography of institutional change. A comparative analysis of family firm succession in Baden-Württemberg and the Basque Country

社会制度日益被认为是经济发展的重要因素。然而，各地的制度各不相同，所谓的“好制度”很难模仿或传播到其他地方。由于这个原因，制度研究和经济地理学都面临着理解社会制度的产生和转变的挑战。这种内在的过程性在变化的情况下可以得到最好的研究，这就是为什么本研究计划将重点放在家族企业的企业继承上。在整个欧洲，企业继承状况日益对区域嵌入式家族企业的长期连续性构成挑战，它既是企业间互动的分析单元，也是制度变革的触发因素。因此，本研究的目标有两个：第一，将企业继承的不同形式和过程解释为区域特定制度差异的影响；第二，企业继承后制度变化机制的资格。对区域特定制度效应的解释需要进行比较分析，而对制度变化机制进行明确的过程分析则是必要的。因此，研究设计包括巴登-符腾堡州和西班牙巴斯克地区的区域比较，这两个非常成功和创新的地区以（中小型）家族企业为特征。通过采用为期三年的定性面板方法，重点关注继任者，但也考虑到前任，员工和相关公司，本研究计划将对制度变革机制的资格进行明确的过程分析。这一建议的总体目标是促进制度变化的地理，并提高我们对不同区域发展的理解，以减少监管（政策）和企业行为之间的差异。

Social institutions have increasingly become recognized as important factors of economic development. However, institutions vary across regions, and allegedly "good institutions" are hard to imitate or transmit to other locations. For this reason, both institutional research and economic geography face the challenge of understanding the generation and transformation of social institutions. This inherent processuality can best be studied in situations of change, which is why this research proposal focuses on enterprise succession in family firms. The situation of enterprise succession, increasingly posing a challenge to the long-term continuity of regionally embedded family businesses all over Europe, serves as both the unit of analysis and the trigger of institutional change in inter-firm interactions. Consequently, this proposal pursues two objectives: First, explaining different forms and courses of enterprise succession as effects of regionally specific institutional differences and second, the qualification of the mechanisms of institutional change posterior to an enterprise succession. Whereas the explanation of regionally specific institutional effects requires a comparative analysis, an explicit process analysis is needed for qualifying the mechanisms of institutional change. Hence, the research design includes a regional comparison between Baden-Württemberg and the Spanish Basque Country, two highly successful and innovative regions characterized by (small and medium-sized) family businesses. By adopting a qualitative panel approach over a period of three years focusing on successors, but also taking into account predecessors, employees and related companies, this research proposal will use explicit process analysis for the qualification of mechanisms of institutional change. The general objective of this proposal is to contribute to a geography of institutional change, and to improve our understanding of differential regional development in order to reduce discrepancies between regulation (policy) and the behaviour of enterprises.