Appropriability against retention: how knowledge protection choices co-vary with internal knowledge redundancy in family firms

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explain why owner-managers of family firms adopt protection strategies that increase their exposure to knowledge loss. It compares concealment-based and codification-based protection in two Nigerian family-owned food firms to specify how protection choice co-varies with the internal redundancy on which continuity depends. Design/methodology/approach A comparative two-case design uses polar-type sampling. The data set comprises two semi-structured owner-manager interviews of 60 and 80 min, 16 pages of field notes and four organisational documents, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Internal redundancy is defined operationally, for both cases, as the count of persons able to reproduce the firm’s core output without its holder, plus retrievable artefacts carrying it. Findings Both owners protect the same class of knowledge by opposite means. Case A withholds it from written form, restricts access by production stage and operates a coded vocabulary sustained by the proprietor’s position as a linguistic outsider, while Case B externalises it into documents governed by contract and monitoring. The comparison isolates a coupling invisible to single-case designs: concealment suppresses the redundancy that protects the firm against losing what it conceals. The coupling is contingent, binding where core knowledge is held personally and treated as indivisible. Originality/value The study specifies an inverse coupling between appropriability and retention that the two literatures treat separately; states the conditions under which it holds; and links it to the knowledge-hiding literature, which attributes the same internal distribution to interpersonal motive. It also identifies proprietor linguistic asymmetry as a protection resource absent from monolingual settings.