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The purpose of the this paper is to understand what is the approach adopted by accountants when they provide advisory services to family businesses (FBs) involved in a succession process.

Data for this study were collected through a questionnaire survey involving 175 Italian certified accountants. They answered questions about their experience, attitudes, behaviors and opinions toward FB succession.

Accountants are mostly concerned with technical elements and solutions (hard issues) and are less careful about relations and communication between family members (soft issues). They also underestimate the relevance of the ability to empathize with the FB owner and other family members. Despite the literature recommendations to collaborate with other advisors from a variety of backgrounds, most of the accountants work on their own or with other experts on hard issues (notaries, lawyers and bank operators). All these aspects may cause a discrepancy between FBs’ expectations and accountant’s professional practice.

Results are mainly descriptive and are limited to the perceptions and experiences of accountants interviewed.

This study offers some guidance for the accountant’s professional practice. Even if accountant’s technical skills are undoubtedly essential when addressing the main hard issues posed by succession, soft issues often represent the real problem to be managed or the most complicated one. Accountants should help less aware entrepreneurs to acquire a better knowledge of succession and to adopt a holistic approach, integrating every dimension and perspective involved. This means that succession should be tackled through an interdisciplinary approach.

The research on the role of external subjects in family succession examines, above all, the perspective of the FB. This study offers an alternative approach, adopting the accountant’s perspective to analyze his/her role and experience in the management of succession.

This paper aims to further the understanding of women entrepreneurs' multiple identities by exploring how they interact throughout women's life cycles.

This article combines a case study and a narrative analysis to investigate the experience of a woman who founded a business and retired after passing it on to her son. Data were collected by combining two different methods: biographical interview and follow-up interviews or conversations.

Findings show that interactions between a woman entrepreneur's multiple identities may evolve through two main processes of change: transformation and fading. In the transformation process, adverse interactions between identities turn into synergistic and fruitful relationships. In the fading process, conflicts between identities gradually disappear, giving way to peaceful coexistence. Women's agency proves paramount in making these processes possible and helping her achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

In prior studies, women entrepreneurs have mostly been observed at a specific time or stage in their life and entrepreneurial experience. This paper responds to the call for the adoption of a dynamic perspective in the analysis of interactions among a woman entrepreneur's multiple identities so as to show how they may evolve during her entrepreneurial experience.