Desire-belief-opportunity Framework and A Typology of Family Firms Evidenced in Internationalization

Abstract

To disentangle the inconsistent predictions derived from the socioemotional wealth construct (SEW), the study proposes a typology of family firms (FFs) referring to the desire-belief-opportunity (DBO) framework in the sociology literature. Specifically, the three ideal types of FFs including born-family firms (BFFs), acquired-family firms (AFFs), and born-again-family firms (BAFFs) are defined and theorized with propositions related to their internationalization behaviors, which constitute the most representative risky decisions. Both theoretical arguments and case illustrations have preliminarily corroborated the distinctiveness among those FFs categorized by the family legacy and governance dimensions such that the different beliefs and available opportunity set would trigger different internationalization actions along with the intention, scale, and scope dimensions. This theoretical framework should enrich the conceptualization of SEW by introducing heterogeneous dynamics that originate from their configuration pathways while presenting a further extension of the family legacy concept. It thus offers a new wrench to reconcile the inconsistent predictions of SEW in family business literature from a micro-foundation perspective particularly. In addition to the advantage of capturing the equifinality and thus opening a new avenue for empirical examinations, the typology has urged integration of multiple perspectives that go beyond SEW and thus added new ingredients to the agency theory as well.