Strategy, ownership, governance, and socio-psychological perspectives on family businesses from around the world (original) (raw)
Related papers
A different perspective on defining family firms: The ownership construct revisited
2011
Our paper contributes to the question: "How can we define a family firm?" We argue that the roots of this question can be found in the ownership of the firm, which in this case is a family. We argue for an approach that emphasizes its psychological dimension, that is, the feeling of ownership, as crucial for our understanding of family businesses. Moreover, we stress that ownership behaviors are key indicators for family involvement. Our level of analysis is the individuals that own and manage the firm, more specific, their legal ownership combined with their experienced feelings of ownership and their consequential ownership behaviors. Lastly, we discuss how this psychological dimension of ownership relates to agency theory and the RBV in family firms.
Understanding the Family Firm - A New Framework for Theory and Research
2003
A new theoretical synthesis is presented drawing upon biosocial, psychological and organizational concepts. It argues that family firms can avoid the agency problems and moral hazards attributed to them and outperform non-family businesses. They can do this by securing strong and adaptable cultures through mastery over the special challenges that confront them. The key to this, that the paper elaborates, is the family system and how it shapes leadership choices in ownership, governance and succession.
Family firm research: sketching a research field
International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 2011
Due to the importance of family firms for the economy, researchers have begun to embrace family firms as a research object. This article seeks to summarise and to structure family firm research based on an extensive survey of the literature. Important research foundations such as the definition of family firms, a theoretical foundation in the resource based view and in entrepreneurship and research topics such as performance differences of family firms, their goal structure, psychological ownership and business succession are outlined and discussed.
Embeddedness Perspectives of Economic Action Within Family Firms
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2009
Family firms are embedded in social structures that differ substantially from those of nonfamily firms. While these social structures can be sources of strength, they can also lead to dysfunctional consequences. The four papers and three commentaries contained in this special issue on theories of family enterprise deal with the various positive and negative aspects of family involvement in a firm. The purpose of this introduction is to attempt to establish linkages between these papers and to provide further insights on their contributions to knowledge and the directions that future research might take to build upon them.
2019
The role of family values is considered here as one potential contributor to heterogeneity. The pursuit of profit as an end goal may be key for many family businesses, but there are well-documented cases of businesses where corporate citizenship and philanthropy are integral to the business model. Earlier work has highlighted that where one family has a predominant level of control in a business, their family values may assume greater importance and thereby be more likely to influence strategy. Within this chapter, we propose that the concentration of family values that occurs when one family has a predominant level of control within the business may be a key contributor to the development of financial and non-financial dynamics, representing one way in which strategy is developed and implemented.
2019
Family businesses are and have been vital in the European's socioeconomic contexts. Notwithstanding their relevance and growing interest in academy, as well as in the institutional rationale, the study of family businesses is still a field that lacks autonomy and finds itself embedded in ambiguities, paradoxes and inconsistencies. This lack of systematisation not only compromises the process of data collection and research and consequently a better understanding of this phenomenon. In this article, our purpose is to discuss the constructs of family firm and family business. Based on the assumption that family firms are usually conceptualised as owned, totally or partially, by members of a family and are potentially intergenerational systems, with a perimeter of variable geometry, but usually rooted in a location, we aim to discuss the concept of family and distinguish between the constructs of family firm and family business. Methodologically we carried out a literature analysis...