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The purpose of this study is to present the relationship between family support factors and Chinese college students’ online-startup thinking on live streaming platforms. Considering China's specific online entrepreneurial environment, this paper divides Chinese college students’ online-startup thinking according to the liberal–conservative thinking theory. This study classifies family support factors based on the tangible–intangible resource division theory. Different tangible and intangible factors have different impacts on their online-startup thinking.

This study tests 588 samples based on the partial least squares path modelling and variance-based structural equation modelling. This study promotes importance-performance map analysis to explore additional findings of influencing factors and provide suitable suggestions for Chinese college students and related departments.

Tangible family support factors, such as labour resources support, and intangible family support factors, such as verbal encouragement, can positively enhance Chinese college students’ liberal thinking to online-startup and decrease their conservative thinking. Meanwhile, according to importance-performance map analysis results, verbal encouragement from the intangible unit instead of financial resource support from the tangible unit has a higher total effect and performance on Chinese college students’ liberal thinking and conservative thinking.

This study draws on psychology research based on Chinese college students’ unique entrepreneurial mentality. This paper divides Chinese college students’ thinking in online-startups into liberal thinking and conservative thinking based on the liberal–conservative thinking theory. Meanwhile, according to the feature of Chinese family support factors, this paper classifies various elements based on the tangible–intangible resource division theory, which is helpful for scholars to understand that the student perceptions of the value of family support are critical to the success of the online-startup.

From an agency perspective, the authors investigate whether family ownership and control configurations are systematically associated with a firm's choice of auditor and audit fees. Agency theory is an economic theory that purposes the existence of a contract between two parties, principals and agents. Auditor choice and audit fees by family firms provide interesting insights given the unique nature of the agency problems faced by such firms.

The authors employ Big-4 auditors (PWC, KPMG, E&Y and Deloitte) as a proxy for high quality auditor (Big N) for the auditor choice model. For the audit fee model, the dependent variable is the natural logarithm of audit fees (LnAF). The authors use two measures for family firm as explanatory variables: (1) a dummy variable (FAM_Control), which equals one if the firm is classified as a family firm and (2) FAM_Ownership, which is an indicator variable with a value of one if a firm has family members who hold CEO position, occupy board seats, or hold at least 10% of the firm's equity. Data of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2021 are used. The authors adopt the Heckman (1979) two-stage model to mitigate the potential endogeneity issue involved in the selection of Big-N auditors.

The findings suggest that compared with non-family firms, Chinese family firms have a less tendency to employ Big-4 auditors due to less severe agency problems between owners and managers. Additionally, Chinese family firms sustain higher audit fees than non-family firms. Similar to the prior literature, however, Chinese family firms audited by Big-4 auditors incur lower audit fees than family firms audited by non-Big-4 auditors in this study. In contrast to young-family firms, old-family firms are less likely to pick top-tier auditors and sustain lower audit fees. Consistent and robust results are found from endogeneity tests and sensitivity analyses.

The empirical evidence provides a unique insight, for accounting practitioners, policymakers, family owners and other capital market participants concerning the diverse effects of various family ownership and control features on selecting high-quality auditors and audit fees. This study advances the understanding, showing that a lower demand for audit quality occurs in Chinese family firms as they encounter less severe Type I agency problems. However, the more severe Type II agency problems in Chinese family firms sustain higher audit fees due to higher audit risk and greater audit effort.

Family business brand communication depends on the effect of the family on stakeholders' perception, and the family influences stakeholders differently, raising the question of whether family business branding varies across stakeholders. Drawing on social identity theory, this research classifies a family firm's stakeholders into family (in-group) and non-family (out-group) stakeholders and explores the communication of family business brands to these two groups of stakeholders.

Data for this research were gathered from a questionnaire survey of 327 Chinese family firms.

The results show that family business brand communication differs between family and non-family stakeholders. Additionally, family harmony has a positive relationship with family business branding to family stakeholders and an inverse U-shaped relationship with family business branding to non-family stakeholders.

This research is the first to demonstrate that family business brand communication varies across stakeholders and that the effect of family characteristics (family harmony in this research) on family business branding differs between stakeholders. In addition, it expands the scope of the out-group in family firms to embrace all non-family stakeholders and suggests an intergroup opposition between family and non-family stakeholders, which is important for advancing family firm theory.

This study aims to reveal and compare the cultural logics of university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong in their mothering practices to improvise their femininities in constituting their work–family interactions.

This qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, has included 32 Chinese mothers to share about their mothering experiences through semi-structured interviews. This methodological design with feminist lens embraces women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and learns their voices to reinvent their role and bodily engagement in shaping their family dynamics.

This discussion basically reaffirms the argument where the mother’s involvement in their children’s schoolwork becomes one of the core elements in their actual everyday mothering practices. It has further reflected the dynamics of family quality time in the light of mothers’ cultural logics as much as their attentive agency capacity to present their respectable femininity in the form of mothering.

This research process has revealed the actual experiences of the participants from their own narratives. For future research development, data collection can be extended to include the husbands’ profiles and their narratives in understanding their wives’ mothering experiences.

This discussion enriches the work-family literature by extending it to the Asian Chinese context. While the concepts of cultural capital and habitus have been addressed in previous studies, this discussion highlights the agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in their cultural logics to deliver their respective mothering practices. This filtering process to transmit cultural capital to their children is as much as they involve in reproducing status boundaries for the family.

This study aims to investigate whether auditors compromise their independence for economically important clients in family business settings.

The authors empirically examine the research question based on China for the years 2011 to 2020. The dependent variable is the auditors’ propensity to issue modified audit opinions, which is a proxy for auditor independence. The authors use relative client audit fees as a proxy for client importance. To address endogeneity issues in the selection of family firms, the authors use the two-stage least squares regression model and, subsequently, the propensity score matching and Hausman firm fixed effect modeling.

This study reveals that the propensity to issue modified audit opinions is positively correlated with client importance. Big-N auditors are more likely to issue modified audit opinions for their economically important family firm clients, whereas such evidence is not found for non-Big-N auditors. Results are consistent and robust to endogeneity test and sensitivity analysis.

This study enriches the literature on auditor independence and the effect of family firms’ ownership structure factors on audit reporting behavior for their economically important clients. Findings may prove useful for managers and practitioners interested in family business.

It is acknowledged that the firm and the family interact in the family firm system and that family identity can influence family business brand communication through affecting stakeholders' perception, raising a question of whether the firm can implement its effect on the communication of family business brands via family identity. To address this question, this research investigates how firm revenue influences family business branding via family harmony.

Data for this research were gathered from a survey of 327 Chinese family firms.

The results show that family harmony fully mediates the relationship between firm revenue and family business branding.

This study is the first to demonstrate that the firm has an indirect effect on family business branding via family identity, a contribution to family business brand literature. The findings also offer insights into the relationship between firm performance and family business branding. Additionally, this project has implications for research on family harmony in the family business.

The widespread family businesses play an important role in the national economy of developed countries in Europe and North America, or of developing countries in East Asia. However, family business succession is a worldwide difficult problem. The innovative family business succession practices of Robert Bosch GmbH, the German family company which has a history of 130 years (1886-2016), basically follow the trend of evolving from family businesses to social enterprises after further socialization. However, it has its own innovation and uniqueness which is worthy of reference by Chinese family businesses.

Innovative behavior is a microfoundation of an organization’s innovation. Knowledge workers are the main creators of innovations. With the boundaries between work and family becoming increasingly ambiguous, the purpose of this study is to explore how the work–family conflict affects knowledge workers’ innovative behavior and when such a conflict arises.

To test the theoretical model, this study collected data from a time-lagged matched sample of 214 dual-career couples. The data were analyzed with the bias-corrected bootstrapping method.

The results of this study showed that work-to-family conflict had not only a direct negative effect on knowledge workers’ innovative behavior but also an indirect effect through spouses’ within-family emotional exhaustion and knowledge workers’ family-to-work conflict. If wives’ gender role perceptions are traditional, then the indirect serial mediating effect is weakened, but if such perceptions are egalitarian, then the mentioned effect is aggravated.

In terms of organizational implications, managers could alter their approach by reducing detrimental factors such as work–family conflict to improve knowledge workers’ innovative behavior. Emotional assistance programs for both knowledge workers and their spouses can be used to prevent the detrimental effect of work–family conflict on innovative behavior. As to social implications, placing dual-career couples into a community of likeminded individuals and promoting their agreement on gender role identity will greatly reduce the negative effects of work–family conflict.

Starting from the perspective of the behavior outcome of knowledge management, this study advances the existing knowledge management literature by enriching the antecedents of knowledge workers’ innovative behavior, illuminating a spillover–crossover–spillover effect of work–family conflict on knowledge workers’ innovative behavior and identifying the boundary condition of this transmission process.

Despite the enormous benefits, smart homes (SHs) are still not widely adopted by residents in China. Furthermore, research on the intention to use SHs has overlooked the role of family factors. Thus, this study aims to propose a new research model to examine the impact of family factors on the usage intention (UI) of SHs.

This study collected 265 valid data from potential users of SHs in China using a convenience sampling method. The PLS-SEM method was applied to test the research model and related hypotheses.

The empirical results confirm the mediating role of optimism (OP) in perceived family support (PFS)/perceived family trust (PFT) and attitude (AT). Unsurprisingly, the results validated the relationship between perceived usefulness (PU), attitude (AT) and UI of SHs through TAM theory. Besides, this study also identified the moderating effect of perceived risk (PR) between AT and UI.

To improve SH adoption, practitioners should focus on family factors and utilize family influence to promote the spread of smart home reputation. Besides, SH practitioners should enhance user trust and reduce perceived risks through technological upgrades and security measures.

Based on the Social Impact Theory and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study is an empirical attempt to explore the impact of family factors on the intention to use SHs, expanding the research on smart home adoption.