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This perspective article provides a compact view on past and promising future research of family business in tourism/hospitality research, an industry that is dominated and driven by family firms.

This article draws on a review of key literature from family business and tourism/hospitality research, and synchronizes this literature for understanding the groundings and development of the field.

The article finds that there are peculiar research gaps and needs concerning gender roles, sub-industries/family networks, later generation conflicts as well as differences in life cycle stages between emerging and developing countries.

This article summarizes the state of the art of research for family business in tourism/hospitality and provides a novel agenda for theory advancement and research of practical relevance.

Grounded in stewardship theory, this study explores the motives, actions and meanings of multiple stakeholders involved in an inter-family hospitality family firm succession.

A longitudinal, ethnographic case study approach collects data from 15 in-depth interviews, one year of observation and a one-month on-site internship.

Results show that a well-defined succession plan and the active involvement of the successor/s in the succession process would foster a strong stewardship commitment to the family business. Moreover, a clear and open communication strategy is required to strategically manage rivalry and competition among potential successors during an inter-family succession.

The succession process of family firms remains an intensely discussed phenomenon, and despite its importance to the tourism and hospitality industry, the intersection between tourism and hospitality and family business literature is sparse. Notably, the tourism and hospitality literature lacks a multiple stakeholder perspective to holistically capture the motives, actions and meanings of numerous stakeholders involved in an inter-family succession.

Open innovation (OI), by now one of the major concepts for the analysis of innovation, is seen as a methodology for collaboratively designing and implementing solutions by engaging stakeholders in an iterative and inclusive service design process. This paper aims to empirically investigate OI capacities, defined as a cooperative, knowledge-sharing innovation ecosystem, and to explore how it can lead to improved performance of firms in Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Southeastern European (SEE) countries.

The study builds on the World Bank/European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD’s) Business Environment Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) dataset for 2009, 2013 and 2019. Primarily, the research model was estimated using log-transformed ordinary least squares (OLS). Taking into consideration that this method might produce substantial bias, yielding misleading inferences, this study is fitting Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood estimators with robust standard errors and instrumental variable/generalized method of moments estimation (IV/GMM) approach for comparative results. Secondarily, the research model was tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) to investigate the relationship between five OI capacities and firm performance.

The findings indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between most OI capacities and firm performance, except for innovation, which did not show a statistically significant relationship with firm performance. Specifically, research and development (R&D), knowledge and coopetition are statistically significant and positively associated with firm performance, whereas transformation is statistically significant but negatively associated with firm performance. The IV/GMM estimations’ findings support the view that the firm performance is significantly affected by OI capacities, together with some control variables such as size, age, foreign ownership and year dummy to have a significant impact on firm performance.

This paper fills an identified gap in the literature by investigating the impact of OI on firm performance executed in the specific CEE and SEE country context.

The purpose of this study is to explore which actors in the hospitality industry drive innovation in hospitality family firms and particularly aims at understanding how these drivers contribute to create and sustain competitive advantage. The peculiar role of family dynamics in these efforts is considered.

Narrative interviews in 22 hospitality family firms in Western Austria were conducted. Data were analyzed using the qualitative text analysis software GABEK©.

Results show that the entrepreneurial family and employees are key drivers for innovation as actors internal to the firm, but also the guests and regional competitors as external drivers provide comprehensive innovation input. These innovation efforts are perceived to stimulate growth and business development.

Future research might want to test and further concretize the propositions from this study in quantitative surveys. Additionally, the entrepreneurial family formed the central focus of this study; thus it would be interesting to investigate the other actors identified as key drivers of innovation in hospitality family firms.

Recommendations to entrepreneurs and regional politics are to capitalize on the identified actors as important drivers of innovation.

Research widely agrees that in hospitality collaboration, innovation is necessary, for many actors jointly offer complex products and services to tourists. However, it remains unclear which actors are mainly driving innovation in hospitality and how they do this, particularly when considering that the majority of firms in this industry are family firms and therefore family dynamics need to be considered for analysis.

This study aims to explore how haute cuisine excellence is and can be self-represented on the websites of three-star restaurants and juxtaposed onto the websites of external authoritative food guides.

In total, 26 French Michelin three-star restaurant websites and their reviews in the prominent Michelin and Gault and Millau dining guides were examined. This data was then processed using lexicometric software.

Five semantic universes emerged, showing that restaurants and dining guides do not emphasize the same elements of culinary excellence. While restaurant websites emphasize the charismatic leadership role of the chef through family history, professional recognition and vicarious learning, the two iconic guides are far from rating the criteria they claim to: For the Michelin Guide, criteria other than cuisine appear central. Conversely, Gault and Millau, far from its nouvelle cuisine principles advocating democratization at lower cost, insists on fine products.

It remains essential for restaurants to use a repertoire of cultural components and symbols, capitalize on the charismatic and architectural roles of their chef and showcase fine products that are representative of classical cuisine. Storytelling and dynamic narrative add-ons, regularly updated on large-audience social media, appear central to increasing restaurants’ perceived value, communicating innovation and attesting to their singularity and uniqueness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to overlap the lexical perspectives of three-star restaurants and iconic guides’ websites.

This paper aims to examine how organisational values affect diversity in terms of different competencies in rural family Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Recruiting a diverse workforce in rural family SMEs can be particularly difficult due to the prevalence of internal family values and the lack of available local specialised competencies. A deficiency of diversity in employment and competence acquisition and development can create problems, as it often prevents rural family SMEs from recruiting employees with a wide variety of qualifications and skills.

The study takes on a multi-case method of Swedish rural family SMEs, applying a qualitative content analysis approach. In total, 20 in-depth structured interviews are conducted with rural family SME owners and 2 industries were investigated and compared – the tourism and the manufacturing industries.

Rural family SMEs lack long-term employment strategies, and competence diversity does not appear to be a priority for rural family SMEs, as they often have prematurely decided who they will hire rather than what competencies are needed for their long-term business development. It is more important to keep the team of employees tight and the family spirit present than to include competence diversity and mixed qualifications in the employment acquisition and development.

Contrary to prior research, our findings indicate that rural family SMEs apply short-term competence diversity strategies rather than long-term prospects regarding competence acquisition and management, due to their family values and rural setting, which strictly narrows the selection of employees and competencies. Also, a general reluctance towards competence diversity is identified, which originates from the very same family values and rural context.

Organisational learning drives tourism organisations towards more sustainable tourism. Digital transformation also provides opportunities for sustainable tourism development. This study aims to combine these perspectives and explore how digital transformation enables organisational learning to contribute to sustainable tourism, following organisational learning theory (OLT).

Based on a critical realist paradigm, this study focuses on developing an in-depth understanding of organisational learning in tourism organisations. Thirty qualitative interviews with tourism organisations participating in an executive development programme (EDP) show how tourism organisations create, retain and transfer knowledge.

This study demonstrates that the EDP initiates knowledge creation through content transmission and exchange, triggers knowledge retention through utilisation of digital technologies and reinforces digitalisation through data value creation. Furthermore, this study enables knowledge transformation as implementation, which contributes to the three pillars of sustainable tourism and facilitates the development of networks encouraging sustainable tourism.

This study identifies approaches that enable economic, social and environmentally sustainable tourism development by facilitating collaborations via digital transformation, digital technologies that guide guest streams, online mobility offers and online environmental awareness campaigns that reduce environmental impacts. Thus, this study strengthens OLT and has implications for organisational learning and tourism policymakers.

The aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of strategies for how established companies can respond to disruptive innovation, handle increasing complexity, facilitate entrepreneurial culture and processes and successfully manage organizational ambidexterity.

A qualitative multiple-case study was conducted to explore successful practices of innovation ambidexterity (IA) and their organizational design, entrepreneurial culture and mindset, processes and leadership. Two internationally established firms that have launched and established IA programs provided deep insight, revealing their strategy and learning on the path toward effective IA.

The findings show that accepting and managing the inherent complexity increases within an ambidextrous organization strategy is a decisive factor in achieving effective IA. As a result, segmenting small organizational units and granting them extensive autonomy is proposed for managing the complexity of an organization while increasing its effectiveness. Furthermore, it is shown that this helps foster entrepreneurial culture, mindsets and processes as additional mediators for achieving effective IA. Coaching, empowerment and trust were identified as key factors of ambidextrous leadership values that encourage entrepreneurial behavior and decision-making.

To the best of the authors knowledge the first study connecting the research fields of complexity management, organizational ambidexterity theory and entrepreneurial culture while applying the fundamentals of systems theory to propose a practical management framework for successfully responding to disruptive innovation.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a standard for family firms as the challenges facing organizations today are pervasive. In this context, employees’ perceptions of CSR are a novel research field. This study aims to address human components of business operations as it aims to understand how employees perceive CSR activities and determine their role for employees’ identification and commitment in family firms.

This study uses a mixed-method design combining samples of employees of family firms in a quantitative (N = 168) and qualitative phase (N = 18).

In summary, the findings show that employee-directed CSR is most effective to influence employees’ identification and commitment. Detailed mediation analyses further support the path from community-oriented CSR toward identification-commitment and performance. Findings from employee interviews show that identification is particularly pronounced in CSR perceptions and that mechanisms of identification occur across three interfaces: the firm, the firm in the region and the firm in a globalized world impacting commitment and performance.

Family firms engage in various CSR activities. The authors show that existing efforts can be empirically supported but that there is room for improving the strategic selection and engagement of activities. In a nutshell, the findings emphasize the importance of human components for businesses. In this context, understanding how CSR activities build identification and affect organizational commitment has important implications for family firms boosting CSR activities. In particular, the contribution emphasizes family firms’ need to stay engaged in community-directed CSR while increasing awareness for environment-related activities and diversifying employee-related activities to enable identification.