Yoshiko Zoet-Suzuki, Elvin Zoet, Jean-Luc Moriceau. The enchanted inheritance: traces of the family business founders. AEI 2025 : 14ème congrès de l’Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat et de l’Innovation. “L’entrepreneuriat face aux transitions”, Jun 2025, Aix-en-Provence, France.

When we inherit a family business, we inherit much more than the ownership of the business. The legacy is not limited to the responsibility of running the business but also includes the ghostly presence of the person or persons who passed it on, in the form of traces that permeate the present. These traces are not so much imprints that determine possible paths, as the remaining material, immaterial and emotional presence of the past. We use autoethnographic accounts to explore complexities and contradictions experienced as a family business successor. This ghostly presence appears in manifold forms, it calls for respect and working through, and as an additional affective grammar that complements and sometimes thwarts the logic of business.