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This research objective was to explore how Romanian IT family businesses' co-founders enable entrepreneuring through familiness practices. The authors explored what familiness practices emerge and how these are facilitated and supported by the rhetoric framework.

Drawing on Romanian IT entrepreneurs' practice from five case studies of IT family businesses and purposive revelatory cases, the authors considered the family co-founders' narratives and representations of familiness presented in 31 interviews.

The respondents' communication in entrepreneuring is a joint collaborative effort of the family co-founders to function well. Family entrepreneurs generate positive perceptions in favour of enterprising families using persuasive communication via rhetoric appeals to familiness ethos, familiness logos and familiness pathos, leading to constructive conflict management. The rhetoric of persuasion supports family entrepreneuring.

The authors conducted multiple case studies, profiling technological co-founders and family entrepreneurs in the challenging circumstances of an emerging economy.

The analysis of the use of rhetoric contributes to a better understanding of familiness practices in the family business. Through appeals to ethos, family business entrepreneurs enforce family values built on shared history, complementarity and moral exemplarity. The appeals to logos in entrepreneuring involve fulfilling complementary roles, alignment and continuous learning and coaching. The appeals to pathos are about emotions and how the family entrepreneurs' discourse enforces constructive handling of emotions.

The perceived familiness communicated through appeals to ethos, logos and pathos contributes to legitimating the family firm structures.

Theorising from family entrepreneurs' familiness practices, the authors suggest that entrepreneuring requires good communication of the representation of familiness for co-founders, employees and other stakeholders to also serve constructive conflict handling. The perceived familiness communicated through appeals to ethos, logos and pathos helps family businesses leverage their unique strengths and resources in the entrepreneuring process.

This paper seeks to investigate how familiness and entrepreneurial leadership are related to each other in family firms. Familiness and entrepreneurial leadership are viewed as resources for strategic entrepreneurship. The aim of the paper is to shed light on familiness in three family firms and contribute to the field's growing body of work.

The paper employs a case study method. The interviewees were interviewed by theme questions and secondary information was gathered to strengthen the empirical section. Qualitative interpretation of empirical data was used.

The findings demonstrate the variety of familiness and entrepreneurial leadership within family firms. The degree of familiness varies between firms and the nature of entrepreneurial leadership also differs. The findings suggest that familiness is related to entrepreneurial leadership. It is a resource for strategic entrepreneurship in family firms.

The limitation of the study is the case study method. The paper is based on qualitative and interpretive approach. The paper endeavours to understand familiness related to entrepreneurial leadership rather than generalise the results statistically.

The paper offers a perspective for business schools in teaching leadership for family firms. Education needs to be tailored to meet the relevant needs. Benchmarking from this case study offers one pathway for this.

The study contributes to research on structural, cognitive, and relational familiness. The paper shows that informal relations and flexibility are typical for entrepreneurial leadership in family firms.

Absorptive capacity (AC) is a key competitive advantage and is defined as the capacity to absorb knowledge from the environment. Although some studies have examined how various antecedents to AC differ between family firms and non-family firms, no studies have set out to specifically analyze AC in the context of family firms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ability of family firms to absorb external knowledge by analyzing the relationship between “familiness” and “AC”.

By reviewing and combining studies on AC and knowledge-management practices of family firms, new insights into the AC of family firms are developed.

It is argued that due to higher levels of social capital, familiness is positively related to the ability to transform and use external knowledge (i.e. realized AC). However, firms with high levels of familiness are likely to be inferior in acquiring and assimilating external knowledge (i.e. potential AC).

Although previous studies have analyzed various knowledge-management practices of family firms, no studies have set out to specifically explore how familiness affects various dimensions of AC.

Family businesses often lack sufficient knowledge about digital business model innovation digital business model innovation (BMI). This study's purpose was to analyze how and when organizational readiness for digital innovation exerts a positive impact on family businesses' digital BMI. To do so, the authors examined the mediating effect of the familiness learning mechanism and the moderating effect of family involvement on this relationship.

A quantitative survey method was used to collect the data for this study. Using a sample of 282 family businesses involved in manufacturing in China, the authors conducted hierarchical regression analyses to evaluate the authors' theoretical model.

The results of this work demonstrate a positive relationship between organizational readiness for digital innovation and family businesses' digital BMI, and the find that the familiness learning mechanism mediates this relationship. The findings also show that second-generation family involvement in management moderates the direct effect of organizational readiness for digital innovation on the familiness learning mechanism, as well as the indirect effect of organizational readiness for digital innovation on digital BMI via the familiness learning mechanism. Moreover, the results establish that family involvement in ownership moderates the direct effect of the familiness learning mechanism on digital BMI, as well as the indirect effect of organizational readiness for digital innovation on digital BMI via the familiness learning mechanism.

This study provides practical contributions to the literature on family businesses and to public policy, providing concrete suggestions for fostering digital innovation in family enterprises. This study also enriches our understanding of the unique conditions by which family businesses can successfully implement digital BMI.

This research confirms that organizational readiness for digital innovation is an antecedent of digital BMI. This finding offers a new perspective that helps explain what might lead family businesses to engage in digital BMI. This study also places the familiness learning mechanism into a theoretical framework, which expands the current understanding of how organizational readiness for digital innovation facilitates digital BMI. Moreover, this work provides new insights into the boundary conditions by which organizational readiness for digital innovation affects the digital BMI of family businesses in terms of second-generation family involvement in management and family involvement in ownership.

Family businesses gain notoriety in academic research because they have peculiarities found only in this type of organization, and it is because of these attributes that this work aims to analyze, through an epistemological look, the results of a systematization that sought for works that use the unique characteristics of family businesses, called familiness, as well as two other constructs that showed attractive adherents and little researched in parities with familiness, organizational entrepreneurship, better known as entrepreneurial orientation and the ability to adapt, called absorption capacity.

To achieve this goal, an investigation of national and international academic production was carried out through a systematization called Proknow-C, being possible to identify the main categorical groups of authors in the area, main journals, besides identifying and analyzing the main objectives and contributions of selected scientific articles.

Among the results obtained, it was possible to consolidate some research intentions inherent to the junction of such constructs, besides directing, which can be the best and most promising fields of research for the application of these constructs and the most indicated methods, based on the three epistemological positions, subjectivism, objectivism and constructivism.

This study adds value to the literature on familiness, pointing to a relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and absorption capacity, in contrast to studies focused on other dimensions of social capital, which obtained divergent results. In addition, this study reinforces the unique characteristics of family enterprises, in which this work intends to consolidate a methodological proposal with arguments linked to positivism or interpretativism in the midst of epistemology. The study provides a valuable theoretical framework of familiness determinants connecting the cognitive perspective of the entrepreneur theory to a view of the absorptive capacity.

For family businesses, familiness constitutes a unique bundle of resources and capabilities resulting from family relationships and influences. The extant literature has shown that familiness impacts organizational outcomes such as performance and innovation. This paper investigates the role of familiness in relation to absorptive capacity (ACAP). It also explores the specificities of nonfamily members’ social capital when different knowledge management (KM) approaches are adopted.

An exploratory comparative case study design is adopted. Data from three family firms based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) provide the empirical setting for this study. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews, available documents, observations and company websites.

Our results reveal that the role of familiness in relation to ACAP varies according to the adopted KM approach. Familiness targets the potential ACAP when an explicit KM approach is adopted, the realized ACAP when a tacit KM approach is adopted, and both potential and realized ACAPs when a strategic KM approach is adopted. Our results also show that family firms invest in KM processes that support knowledge exploration and/or exploitation.

This paper provides further evidence for the role of familiness. It moves beyond the study of familiness from a resource-based view and adopts a knowledge-based perspective to develop a better understanding of the role of familiness in relation to ACAP. It also improves our understanding of nonfamily members’ social capital in family firms.

The purpose of this study is to test the role of familiness-related team forces induced by the CEO of family firms. In particular, we report on the effects of the transformational leadership style of CEOs on their respective top-management team (TMT) and firm performance when viewed through a familiness lens.

Survey measures were taken from a snowballed sample of 72 CEOs of German family firms as well as from 245 members of their TMTs. We tested the aggregated firm-level data with objective performance indicators of the firms they led.

Support was obtained for the three hypothesized team-force mediations and the four-path mediation model. The relationship between CEO’s transformational style and high family-firm performance is found to be serially mediated by TMT cohesion, behavioral integration and efficacy. Together, these three types of collective forces are assumed to be the familiness effect of a family-member CEO with a transformational leadership style.

With our model, we quantitatively tested familiness-type forces vis-à-vis firm performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

By investigating the reactions of family businesses to COVID-19 pandemic this article aims to explaining how family firms are capable to preserve employment during hardship.

Stemming from resource-based-view, we theorise that familiness is not directly associated with new hiring but instead fully mediated by pivoting strategic decisions (the propensity to transform the business).

Our findings show that familiness triggers pivoting strategic decisions and consequently increases the likelihood of new hiring. Additionally, we found that the involvement of multiple generations strengthens this relationship.

Family firms must consolidate their family human and social resources (familiness) and assure the presence of multiple generations in the firm because they can leverage their entrepreneurial disposition and increase the need to preserve employment and new hires during crises.

The main contribution lies in the explanation of the mechanisms that family firms deploy to overcome a crisis and thus explains why some family firms are more resilient than others in relation to firm’s employment during hardship.

This paper empirically tests the relationship between food heritage, familiness, and clan culture, thus, highlighting the pivotal role of familiness in building robustly competitive food firms based on clan culture and food heritage.

The methodological approach adopted is based on a quantitative analysis with data from one eco-tourist city in Iran (Torqabeh). In this regard, we developed a structured questionnaire surveying 98 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the food industry. We then used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to carry out the analysis.

The results indicate the significant positive relationship between food heritage and clan culture, and highlight the role of familiness as a strong mediator, which is also associated with a strong relationship between food heritage and clan culture.

In the present study, the main limitation was linked to the small sample size and data collection, which took place in only a single city; however, further research could overcome this limitation by investigating SMEs from a heterogeneous geographical context.

The value of this research relates to studies that have examined food heritage as a possible antecedent of familiness. Moreover, the novelty of this research is to study the concept of familiness in improving resource-based views and organizational theories.

The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the roots of family firms' competitive advantages by defining and testing the familiness learning mechanisms that emerge from the interaction between family and firm. Because family members are economically, emotionally and socially attached to the firm, family firms are expected to be able to develop unique and difficult to imitate learning mechanisms related to family firm value creation.

This study operationalizes and tests the concept of the familiness learning mechanism using a sample of nonlisted Spanish family firms. The sample is analyzed using the structural equation modeling method.

Results show that family firms' ability to accumulate internal and external knowledge, integrate social knowledge, as well as create and retain socioemotional knowledge forms the concept of the familiness learning mechanism, and the authors show what implications it might have for family firm value creation.

By using the dynamic capabilities approach, this article highlights the importance of the knowledge and learning derived from family involvement in the firm. The creation of learning mechanisms occurs because of the close relationships between family members and their simultaneous participation in the family and in the company systems, which creates a unique context wherein knowledge and learning emerge in an idiosyncratic manner.