Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

Single family offices (SFOs) manage trillions of dollars worldwide. The enormous value of assets under management highlights their key role as a cohesive wealth management tool globally. Despite the increasing relevance of SFOs, research on SFOs is still in its early stages. Particularly little is known about the capital structure of the firms owned by SFOs. By drawing on a hand-collected sample of 173 SFO-owned firms in the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region, we compare the capital structure of SFO-owned firms with the capital structure of family-owned firms. Our empirical results show that SFO-owned firms display a higher long-term debt ratio than family-owned firms, indicating that SFO-owned firms follow trade-off theory, similar to private equity-owned firms. Additionally, we show that this effect is stronger for SFOs that sold their original family firm. In contrast, family-owned firms tend to be more conservative in their financial decision-making and seem to follow the logic of the pecking order theory.

This paper addresses a question that is fundamental to the domain of family business research yet still inadequately addressed by the field’s predominant theories: Why are some family business systems able to create and sustain the simultaneous health of both the business and the family over generations, whereas many others experience an erosion in the well-being of one sphere relative to the other? Invoking analogical theorizing, we demonstrate the fruitfulness of applying key concepts from biological research on symbiotic relationships between organisms of different species. More specifically, we suggest that the area’s distinction between mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism provides a useful vocabulary for conceptualizing the heterogeneity evident amongst family business systems. By delineating factors that are likely to influence the nature and strength of a family business system’s symbiotic relationship, we hope that our conceptual framework helps guide future research on why, when, and how the interdependence between family and business can range—and sometimes shift—along a continuum from strong mutualism to strong parasitism.

Corruption is an important social and economic problem globally, and family firms are an important source of such corruption that we know too little about. By leveraging insights from the literature on family priorities, governance, and institutional environments, we develop a multi-level model highlighting why some family firms are prone to exhibit corruption in specific contexts. We focus on businesses where close connections between firm and family cause the priorities of the one to affect the other. There, family loyalties, conflicts, ethics, and social aspirations can enhance the willingness to engage in corrupt behavior. Private ownership and secrecy facilitate that behavior, as do tempting contexts with few institutional constraints. We provide examples and propositions for further research.

The behavioral agency model predicts that family firms underinvest in R&D to preserve socioemotional wealth. In transition economies, family firms suffer from institution voids, so political embeddedness helps them do business. In a mixed gamble analysis of publicly listed firms in China, we find that politically embedded family firms are more likely to invest in R&D than those that are not politically embedded. However, this effect is weaker when the firms are in more-competitive industries or regions with higher speed of pro-market reforms. Hence, in regions with higher pro-market reforms speed or in more-competitive industries of China, family firms should be aware that potential financial and SEW gains derived from R&D investment are less dependent on the government and that political embeddedness does not always confer advantages. Family firms need to be strategic in response to institutional changes when implementing nonmarket strategies.

Despite the efforts to contextualize human resource management to family firms, scientific literature addressing this study domain suffers from limited systematization. The article arranges an integrative framework to make sense of the challenges faced by family firms in designing and implementing human resource management practices. Bibliographic coupling was run on an intellectual core of 69 papers to illuminate dominant research streams. Besides, co-citation was executed to determine the conceptual roots nurturing recent scholarly advancements. A dance between formality and informality of human resource management practices characterizes extant research, calling for developments to understand how family firms can deal with it.