Internationalization Of Family Firms Research Articles

Institutional effects on family business internationalization: a systematic review

Abstract Family firms play a vital role in the global business landscape, significantly impacting their home countries GDP. These firms diverge from non-family counterparts in their internationalization strategies, yet they stand to gain substantial benefits from international expansion. Beyond economic considerations, family resources and values introduce non-economic factors that challenge traditional economic theories. This study leverages an institutional approach to illuminate the multifaceted influences shaping family firms’ internationalization, encompassing positive and adverse dynamics. The integration of institutional theory marks a recent shift in understanding family firm internationalization, encompassing institutional and economic geography perspectives. To foster discourse and guide future research, this paper systematically reviews peer-reviewed articles covering over a decade, from 2010 to 2023. It identifies formal and informal institutional elements, alongside economic geography factors, that either facilitate or impede family firms’ internationalization. This review underscores existing knowledge gaps at the nexus of institutional theory, economic geography, internationalization, and family business studies. Notably, the systematic literature review uncovered a limited corpus of only 41 articles, indicating the need for more research exploring the synergy between economic geography and institutional factors in the context of diverse internationalization strategies. Furthermore, the review highlights the underexplored terrain within social institutions and economic geography, revealing a notable gap in the extant research.

Does Concentrated Shareholding Impact Family Firm Internationalisation?

This article investigates whether increase in concentrated shareholding impacts the internationalisation of family firms. Based on a multi-theoretic approach and using zero inflated beta model on a panel data set covering 307 largest Indian listed companies, we observe that concentrated ownership, adverse employee relations and business group affiliation discourage internationalisation. But as family shareholding exceeds 50%, concentrated ownership has an indirect positive balancing impact on internationalisation. Besides, status as a family firm has a significant favourable impact on internationalisation and it moderates the impact of concentrated ownership, adverse employee relations and group affiliation on internationalisation.

To export or to FDI? A configurational approach to family firm internationalization

Using socioemotional wealth, this study advances our understanding of the various internationalization strategies family businesses adopt by exploring the governance and resource configurations that exist when family firms pursue distinct internationalization strategies. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (FsQCA) on a sample of 775 Colombian family firms, our findings reveal a distinct set of resource and governance configurations that are present when family firms engage in less risky internationalization strategies such as exports, or in more risky internationalization strategies such as foreign direct investments (FDIs). The paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications.

Family firms in the maelstrom of international market entry and innovation – Can socio-emotional wealth (SEW) and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) be reconciled?

AbstractI examine the relationship between the internationalisation of family firms and innovation. After the review of the relevant literature, I group together the narrow research topics addressed in the literature, which largely confirm the positive relationship between the two categories. Moreover, I demonstrate a theoretical framework which, according to the literature, can be implemented to put socio-emotional welfare and entrepreneurial orientation, which are restraining the internationalisation of family firms, on a common path, so that they can contribute to enhancing the innovative and international performance of family firms in a mutually supportive way.

Family firm internationalization and top management team collaboration: Roles, emotional attachment, and risk perceptions

This study examines how collaboration within top management teams (TMTs) composed of family owner-managers (FOMs) and nonfamily managers (NFMs) influences internationalization decisions. Based on a qualitative multi-case study, we identify four roles taken by TMT members: drivers (typically FOMs), experts (both FOMs and NFMs), boundary spanners (typically NFMs), and administrators (typically NFMs). We theorize how congruence regarding roles, emotional attachment, and risk perception fosters internationalization decisions, whereas frictions arise in case of incongruence and hinder decision-making. The study contributes to research on family firm internationalization and to emerging research on TMT structure.

Values and Internationalization of Family Firms: Insights From the Wine Industry

Values and Internationalization of Family Firms: Insights From the Wine Industry

How Founder CEOs Influence Family Firm Internationalization: The Family Identification Effect

How Founder CEOs Influence Family Firm Internationalization: The Family Identification Effect

Born to Rebel? How Family Chairmen’s Birth Order Affect Family Firm Internationalization

Born to Rebel? How Family Chairmen’s Birth Order Affect Family Firm Internationalization

Fight or flight? Understanding family firm internationalization when the rules of the game change

Building on the mixed gamble perspective, we examine family versus nonfamily firms’ propensity to increase or decrease their internationalization in response to different sources of risk. Our framework explains how a firm's mixed gamble calculus of internationalization can change as it adjusts to business, industry, and institutional circumstances. Using an unbalanced panel of 1031 publicly traded firms from 11 European countries over a 15-year period, our study offers unique insight on why firms, depending on their degree of family ownership, calculate the mixed gamble of internationalization differently and why they vary in their decisions to expand or withdraw from internationalization. Our study makes an important step toward a better understanding of internationalization strategy in family firms, clarifying the mechanisms behind whether they choose to protect and ‘fight’ for their domestic market thereby reducing their internationalization scale or prefer to escape from the uncertainty and turbulence and ‘flee’ toward international markets.

Longitudinal Family Business Research – Review of the Literature

Purpose: Cross-sectional research methods are not able to grasp the special characteristics and unique operation modes of family businesses. The aim of the study is to map the type of topics examined and methodologies used in longitudinal empirical studies in family business research. The study examines the topics and methodologies covered in the literature and the advantages and challenges of each methodological approach. Design/methodology/approach: We conducted a literature review and drew conclusions based on a detailed analysis of 99 articles. The paper presents the distribution of topics, the applied methodology, and evaluates quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings: Within seven topics identified, most studies were published on family business governance, operation, succession, and the internationalization of family firms. The majority of longitudinal family business research is based on quantitative methodologies, but the proportion of studies using qualitative approaches is also gaining momentum, while the use of mixed-method approaches is negligible. Limitations: We collected the data from the Web of Science database and our study may reflect the limitations of this database. Two of our researchers conducted the article selection process manually and, despite the greatest care, it is possible that valuable articles were left out of the analysis. Due to the applied selection and analysis methods, the comparability of our results with more comprehensive literature reviews on family businesses is limited. The results relate to longitudinal, empirical research papers only. The time span covered by our research is narrow, there are more comprehensive and up-to-date literature reviews available. Originality/value: The study contributes to longitudinal family business research.

Business families do it differently! Navigating cycles and waves of family firm internationalization

PurposeThis paper aims at extending the debate on family firm internationalization by identifying cycles and waves of their internationalization processes with a specific focus on de-internationalization and re-internationalization.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on the Uppsala model and the resource-based view, this study analyzes the cycles and waves of internationalization of 26 German family firms in the Chinese market. Semi-structured interviews with top managers of the selected case firms were conducted, and secondary sources were used to triangulate the collected data.FindingsThe findings highlight the heterogeneity of family firm internationalization processes. Indeed, some family firms follow the sequential approach of the Uppsala model, while others choose to de-internationalize and then re-internationalize their activities. Their cycles and waves of internationalization can be explained by internal and external triggers.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the family firm internationalization literature by investigating how family firm characteristics and environmental factors shape internationalization, de-internationalization and re-internationalization paths. The novel findings enrich theoretical assumptions on family firm internationalization and highlight their varying internationalization processes, which can be explained by firm-specific characteristics, notably their unique family resources and socioemotional wealth, and contextual factors.

Impact of TMT structural power asymmetry on family firm internationalization

We examine the impact of the top management team’s (TMT) structural power asymmetry on a family firm’s degree of internationalization. Structural power is the administrative power drawn from formal positions and is different from ownership power. We argue that family identity creates a faultline between the family and non-family managers in the family firm’s TMT. This faultline gets strengthened when the family managers skew ‘structural power’ toward themselves (termed as ‘family structural power concentration’), leading to poor team integration and cooperation among family and non-family managers. Resultantly, family firms are unable to leverage the knowledge, expertise, and network of the non-family managers in the firm’s TMT for the firm’s internationalization attempts. We hypothesize a negative relationship between ‘family structural power concentration’ and the ‘firm’s degree of internationalization’. Further, we argue that this relationship is moderated by environmental dynamism and competitive intensity. Our findings have implications for research and practice.

Entrepreneurship in family firms: an updated bibliometric overview

Research on entrepreneurship in family firms has grown exponentially over the past two decades. Due to the various theoretical perspectives and contexts found here however, this body of research remains fragmented, with a unified understanding of the current state of knowledge and the opportunities for future research in the field continuing to lack. In this study, we address this gap by conducting an updated bibliometric analysis of the research on entrepreneurship in family firms. Here we integrate two different bibliometric methods to provide a more comprehensive picture of the field, unveiling its intellectual foundations and current research discourses and how these two are related. To do this, we first conduct a co-citation analysis clustering the intellectual foundations of the research on entrepreneurship in family firms. Second, a bibliographic coupling of recent publications from 2010 to 2021 provides a transparent structure of current research discourses. Third, analyzing which intellectual foundations are primarily cited in each current research stream unveils the dominant theoretical paradigms in the current state of research. Analyzing 570 published studies, we identified four intellectual foundations of entrepreneurship in family firms: socioemotional wealth (SEW), entrepreneurial orientation, family-embedded resources, and agency theory. The current research can be clustered into seven main discourses: entrepreneurial motivation, gender and success, entrepreneurial orientation, individual and firm-level characteristics, the family embedded network, family firm internationalization, and family heterogeneity. An integrative network diagram provides an overview of the research field’s development while also identifying the gaps to be addressed by future research.

Ownership, governance, and internationalization in family firms: a replication and extension

In one of the most influential studies on family firm internationalization, Sciascia et al. (2012) advance a curvilinear relationship between family ownership and firm internationalization. We replicate their study adopting a three-step approach. First, we use the same measures on a different sample to test the generalizability of their findings. Second, we change the independent variable and hypothesize a negative relationship between family involvement in the board of directors and firm internationalization. Third, we introduce and measure the moderating role of firm age and firm size in this relationship. Our study advances the family firm internationalization literature both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, we show that it is not so much family ownership per se, but the influence the family obtains through board directorship that affects the family firm internationalization strategy. In addition, we show that this effect is moderated by firm age and size. Methodologically, our study is an important step forward toward increasingly transparent and replicable family business research.

Multinational family firms’ internationalization depth and breadth following the global financial crisis

This study examines how large family firms react to a macroeconomic shock in terms of their internationalization depth and breadth. Building on new internalization theory and acknowledging the dysfunctional manifestations of bifurcation bias in large family-owned MNEs, we argue that an unexpected shock induces family firms to recombine their family firm-specific resources with their thus far underutilized or unequally treated nonfamily resources. This recombination allows most family firms to economize on bifurcation bias and leverage their resources as firm-specific advantages (FSAs) resulting in an increased depth and breadth of internationalization post shock (while some of them may continue to suffer from bifurcation bias). Testing our theory on a panel dataset incorporating large family-owned (compared to nonfamily-owned) MNEs headquartered in Germany before and after the global financial crisis lends support to our theory. We discuss how our study contributes to new internalization theory, to the broader IB literature on MNEs’ unexpected shock response, and to family firm internationalization research.

Familiness and internationalisation of family firms: a resource-based view

Familiness and internationalisation of family firms: a resource-based view

International opportunity perspective on internationalisation of family firms in developing countries

International opportunity perspective on internationalisation of family firms in developing countries

The role of generations in family firms’ internationalization: Systematic literature review

The purpose of this study is to summarize the existing knowledge on the role of generations in the internationalization of family businesses and to outline promising future research directions in the field. The search for relevant papers was conducted in two major databases — Web of Science and EBSCO. The final sample consists of 51 articles published from 2000 to 2021. The articles were grouped into 5 major clusters, according to the research focus. Every cluster revealed several further research directions. Also there has been found an important research gap in the application of the theory of generations to the family business internationalization research. The main implication of this research is that the investigation of the topics identified in this paper would enrich and deepen our knowledge about family business internationalization in a systematic manner.The main limitation of this research is that the role of generations is considered only in the process of internationalization. Family business owners can use the results of this research when planning to launch their businesses on international markets. The process of internationalization of family firms is complex and multifaceted since these firms are unique and significantly differ from non-family firms. Thus, the understanding of how this process is influenced by the involvement of family members from different generations would help to advance the existing knowledge on the topic.

Internationalization and Family Firms: The Influence of Family Involvement on Exports

Family firms show specific behavior in their internationalization because of the affective ties derived from the family’s influence in the business. The desire to achieve business and family objectives determines the strategic decision making of family members in governance and management, affecting the internationalization strategy. This research intends to determine the factors related to family influence in the internationalization of family firms. Thus, using a sample of 254 Spanish small- and medium-sized family firms, we analyze how family-related factors affect exports. The results confirm that family ownership and the generation in charge of the firm have positive effects on the export intensity of family firms. However, the results are not conclusive when assessing the relationship between family involvement in the board of directors and exports.

Familiness and Its Role in the Internationalization of Family Firms

کسب‌وکارهای خانوادگی و بین‌المللی­‌شدن آن‌ها توجه روزافزونی را به خود جلب کرده است. در طی سال‌ها پژوهشگران سعی کرده‌اند ویژگی‌های مختلف شرکت‌های خانوادگی را که به موفقیت آن‌ها در بازارهای بین‌المللی کمک می‌کنند، شناسایی کنند. در این پژوهش بر خانواده‌گرایی تمرکز شده و بررسی می­‌شود که چگونه خانواده­‌گرایی در فرایند بین‌المللی‌­شدن کسب‌وکارهای خانوادگی نقش ایفا می‌کند. خانواده‌­گرایی به شایستگی‌ها و قابلیت‌هایی اطلاق می‌شود که در شرکت‌های خانوادگی، به­دلیل تعامل بین خانواده و کسب‌وکار، ایجاد می‌شود. برای پاسخ به این سؤال از روش پژوهش کیفی و مصاحبه‌های نیمه‌­ساختاریافته برای جمع‌آوری داده از هفت کسب‌وکار خانوادگی که وارد بازارهای بین‌المللی شده‌­اند، استفاده شده است. بر اساس نظریه سرمایه اجتماعی، یافته‌ها پژوهش نشان می‌دهد که چگونه ماهیت روابط خانوادگی از منظر جنبه‌های مختلف ابعاد شناختی، ارتباطی و ساختاری بین‌المللی­‌شدن شرکت‌های خانوادگی از بازارهای نوظهور را تسهیل می‌کنند.