Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice

It is generally accepted that a family's involvement in the business makes the family business unique; but the literature continues to have difficulty defining the family business. We argue for a distinction between theoretical and operational definitions. A theoretical definition must identify the esence that distinguishes the family business from other businesses. It is the standard against which operational definitions must be measured. We propose a theoretical definition based on behavior as the essence of a family business. Our conceptual analysis shows that most of the operational definitions based on the components of family involvement overlap with our theoretical definition. Our empirical results suggest, however, that the components of family involvement typically used in operational definitions are weak predictors of intentions and, therefore, are not always reliable for distinguishing family businesses from non-family ones.

The appropriate resources are necessary but insufficient to achieve a competitive advantage. Resources must also be managed effectively. Herein, we develop a resource management process model composed of three components that can lead to a competitive advantage. These components include the resource inventory (evaluating, adding, and shedding), resource bundling, and resource leveraging. We examine resource management in family firms and thus explore the unique characteristics of five resources and attributes of family firms that provide potential advantages over nonfamily firms. The resources are human capital, social capital, patient capital, survivability capital, along with the governance structure attribute.

Research articles on women's entrepreneurship reveal, in spite of intentions to the contrary and in spite of inconclusive research results, a tendency to recreate the idea of women as being secondary to men and of women's businesses being of less significance or, at best, as being a complement. Based on a discourse analysis, this article discusses what research practices cause these results. It suggests new research directions that do not reproduce women's subordination but capture more and richer aspects of women's entrepreneurship.

Recent attempts to identify the basis of family–controlled firms’ competitive advantage have drawn upon the resource–based view of the firm. This article supplements these efforts and advances the argument that family–controlled firms’ competitive advantage arises from their system of corporate governance. Systems of corporate governance embody incentives, authority patterns, and norms of legitimation that generate particular organizational propensities to create competitive advantages and disadvantages. For comparative purposes, the characteristics of managerial, alliance, and family governance are reviewed. The impact of a family's control rights over a firm's assets generates three dominant propensities (parsimony, personalism, and particularism). These propensities give advantages in scarce environments, facilitate the creation and utilization of social capital, and engender opportunistic investment processes. The experience of family–controlled firms in emerging markets is drawn upon to illustrate the argument.

This article provides a review of important trends in the strategic management approach to studying family firms: convergence in definitions, accumulating evidence that family involvement may affect performance, and the emergence of agency theory and the resource–based view of the firm as the leading theoretical perspectives. We conclude by discussing directions for future research and other promising approaches to inform the inquiry concerning family business.

Greater managerial ownership in family firms need not mitigate agency problems, especially when each family controls a group of publicly traded and private firms, as is the case in most countries. Such structures give rise to their own set of agency problems, as managers act for the controlling family, but not for shareholders in general. For example, to avoid what we call “creative self–destruction,” a family might quash innovation in one firm to protect its obsolete investment in another. At present, we do not know whether these agency problems are more or less serious impediments to general prosperity than those afflicting widely held firms.

Family involvement in a business has the potential to both increase and decrease financial performance due to agency costs. In this article we discuss the different nature of agency costs in family firms and specify the combination of conditions necessary to determine the relative levels of agency costs in family and non–family firms through the impacts of agency cost control mechanisms on performance. We also present exploratory results based on a study of 1,141 small privately held U.S. family and non–family firms that suggest the overall agency problem in family firms could be less serious than that in non–family firms.

Using behavioral and stakeholder theories, we suggest that family firms may have family–centered non–economic goals and that these goals could influence firm behaviors. This study extends the literature by hypothesizing that the essence of family influence partially mediates the relationship between family involvement and family firms’ adoption of family–centered non–economic goals. The results using 1,060 small firms support the hypotheses. Aside from contributing to family business theory by explaining and testing mediating variables as sources of goal heterogeneity among family firms, our findings also imply that the involvement and essence approaches to defining family businesses may be hierarchically reconciled.

Little is known about the impact of family ownership and management on corporate social performance. Some scholars have suggested that family firms are not likely to act in a socially responsible manner, while others have indicated that socially responsible behavior on the part of the family firm protects the family's assets. This preliminary study compares the degree to which family and nonfamily firms are socially responsible using data from 1991 to 2000 from the S&P 500. Two hundred sixty–one firms (202 nonfamily and 59 family) appeared in the S&P 500 for the 10–year period. Findings show that family firms are more socially responsible than nonfamily firms along several dimensions. This is likely due to family concern about image and reputation and a desire to protect family assets.

In the search for ways in which the family firm context is unique to organizational science, the construct of “familiness” has been identified and defined as resources and capabilities that are unique to the family's involvement and interactions in the business. While identification and isolation of a construct unique to family firms is both groundbreaking and important for family firm research, it is also important that the development of the construct continues to be examined from complementing theoretical viewpoints. As such, we set out to review the development of the familiness construct and identify its dimensions. We also explore the nomological relationships of the construct based on a social capital theory perspective and offer a theory of familiness.