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The purpose of this paper is to review family businesses as a subset of sustainable entrepreneurship. It is intended that another avenue of scholarship for the growing interest in family businesses and their continuity across generations will be outlined.

Relevant journal articles were selected and broadly analysed to gather an understanding of the current state of existing sustainable entrepreneurship literature. The main themes extrapolated related to sustainable entrepreneurship and potential directions for future research.

Although sustainable entrepreneurship has been traditionally concentrated in the environmental and social responsibility literature, there are emerging paths where family businesses can be considered alongside community-based enterprise.

The findings suggest that future research into sustaining family businesses across generations could be situated under sustainable entrepreneurship scholarship.

This paper presents a novel review and summary of recent literature at the juncture of family business and sustainable entrepreneurship. It is useful for directing scholars towards an avenue which has not traditionally had attention from family business researchers.

This paper aims to investigate how family winegrowing businesses can be sustained across generations.

The authors engaged a multi-level case study approach. In total, 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted with three winegrowing firms in New Zealand. All family members (both senior and next generation) employed in each business were interviewed alongside non-family employees.

Three key dimensions – knowledge sharing, entrepreneurial characteristics and leadership attributes – were identified that can support successful successions in family winegrowing businesses.

The authors have generated a theory that enables academicians and practitioners to understand how family winegrowing businesses can be successfully sustained across generations. The authors argue that knowledge is a central feature in family firms where previous research combines knowledge with entrepreneurial orientation or the resources and capabilities of a firm.

The primary purpose of this research is to explore how the cultural context, in this case, China, influences the teaching of entrepreneurship that seeks to cultivate student entrepreneurs during their university experience.

A qualitative case study approach is adopted to explore how the cultural environment affects the delivery and application of entrepreneurship education to university students in a Chinese context. Seventeen student entrepreneurs and three lecturing staff members in three Chinese universities were interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach.

The findings suggest that while Chinese universities have been importing teaching models and methods of entrepreneurship education from the United States and other countries, both students and educators are starting to recognise the need for teaching methods to be contextualised and designed based on national conditions and cultural characteristics. Findings from this study highlight cultural fusion and collision in the process of importing and implementing entrepreneurial teaching methods. For example, teaching students how to write a business plan appears to offer limited value for students' start-up activities and their venture development. The didactic teaching method centred on teachers without entrepreneurial experience works for the teaching “about” entrepreneurship but is paradoxical to the goal of teaching “for” entrepreneurship.

Little theoretical or empirical attention has been paid to the complexity of the cultural environment of teaching approaches to entrepreneurship education. This paper provides novel empirical insight into why the cultural environment plays a critical role in teaching approaches to entrepreneurship education and how these teaching approaches can be culturally nuanced to better meet the needs of nascent student entrepreneurs in various cultural contexts.

Argues that the discourse of “managing diversity”, emerging from the US management literature, cannot be simply mapped on to organisations in other cultural contexts. It uses the example of Aotearoa/New Zealand to show that a “diversity” based on the demographics and dominant cultural assumptions of the USA fails to address – and may in fact obscure – key local “diversity” issues. It argues that the dominant discourse of “managing diversity” has embedded in it cultural assumptions that are specific to the US management literature. It calls for a genuinely multi‐voiced “diversity” discourse that would focus attention on the local demographics, cultural and political differences that make the difference for specific organisations.

Interest in academic entrepreneurship is gaining attention as pressure on academic institutions to be more entrepreneurial increases. To date, emphasis has been on the transfer and commercialisation of research with little discussion focused on the entrepreneurial potential of university teaching. Drawing on Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship, in particular the combining and recombining of resources and the concept of resistance, we provide an illustrative case study of one entrepreneurial academic venture that emerged from the teaching activities of a university. We examine how this venture, the ICEHOUSE, has evolved and been sustained despite pressure from competing logics from its partnering institutions. We argue that multiple and competing logics by various stakeholder groups led to ‘resistive tension’ which has supported the growth of the organisation.

World Vision exists to eradicate extreme poverty. The primary fundraising mechanism that has fuelled its growth into one of the largest international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has been Child Sponsorship, which connects over 10 million individual donors with vulnerable children around the world. However, shifts in the market, geopolitical landscape, and institutional logics have seen this once innovative product come under increasing pressure. Using World Vision New Zealand (WVNZ) as a case study, we explore the challenges of implementing social entrepreneurship strategies, including the institutional constraints of developing new business models, through hybridization. Hybridity has gained increasing attention in the field of entrepreneurship and has been offered as a sense-making frame for business model innovation within social entrepreneurship. The use of institutional logics to understand the challenges of hybrid organizing in social entrepreneurship has been invaluable. However, as with any theoretical perspective, this approach has limitations. We suggest that nuanced challenges and sources of resistance to social entrepreneurship in established sectors and organizations might usefully be explored through concepts drawn from complexity theory. Specifically, we propose the use of the concept of structural attractors, which enables the explication of convergent, unifying, and generative dynamics. Our case study findings suggest that, paradoxically, the very essence of historical success may constrain future success. To wit, when faced with changes to institutional and market conditions, WVNZ was constrained by the very construct that enabled its initial growth. The challenge that this case demonstrates is that despite ostensibly hybrid shifts occurring in the management, governance, and espoused innovation strategy of the organization, the governing structural attractor of Child Sponsorship has constrained innovation and change.

The main aim of the evaluation was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the service in order to contribute to its further development and sustainability. The study was carried out in partnership between Lincolnshire Adult Social Care and Lincolnshire Primary Care Trust. A secondary aim was to determine the impact of the service on the quality of life and independence of service users using appropriate scales. These measurements were performed in parallel with an audit of the performance and cost effectiveness of the service. Service users, carers and staff all contributed to the evaluation. Initial results have indicated a positive response to the equipment, with a reduction in anxiety and increased independence for both the service user and carer.

Continued research around innovation within small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) family businesses is needed to better understand the influence of specific resources and capabilities that might promote and/or constrain entrepreneurial activities. The purpose of this paper is to develop an organising framework investigating SME family business innovation drawing on a Schumpeterian understanding of innovation as the introduction of new combinations.

Four guiding principles are developed and applied to an illustrative case study of an entrepreneurial family business that highlights the usefulness of complexity thinking for understanding innovation.

NZ Sock provides a rich illustrative case study to highlight how principles of complexity thinking along with Schumpeterian notions of innovation can usefully inform the authors’ understanding of entrepreneurial SME family businesses. The proposed guiding principles offered are borne out in application to the illustrative case example.

The findings suggest that complexity thinking and a Schumpeterian lens can usefully inform and extend the authors’ understanding of innovation within entrepreneurial SME family businesses. Further research would benefit from exploring the guiding principles proposed in other entrepreneurial SME family businesses to further substantiate this field of inquiry.

Principles of complexity thinking may provide additional understanding and insight for SME family business members needing to innovate and adapt to ever-changing operating environments.

Innovation is critical to the long-term survival and success of such firms; yet, to date little theoretical contribution and research has been offered in the field of innovation within the context of SME family businesses. Complex adaptive systems provide a lens from which to understand such businesses and that that a complexity framework helpfully allows attention to be given to such phenomena as emergence, adaptability and combinations through which innovation outcomes and processes may be understood. This paper offers four guiding principles that can be further tested and refined.

The purpose of this paper is to use social identity theory to explore factors that contribute to the development of family social capital. Effects are investigated both for the family and the business.

A single in-depth case study focussing on the family unit was coducted within a fourth-generation family business involved in the arts retailing.

The findings suggest that social identity theory is a useful lens to explore the development of family social capital. The six themes identified highlight that there is a normative and an affective dimension, leading to family members’ desire to uphold the status of the business. Evidence suggests that the normative factors may be both positively and negatively related to the development of family social capital, due to their potentially restrictive nature.

The paper’s findings imply that social identity can contribute to understanding family dynamics. Evidence highlights various factors for family members that are not involved in the family business to uphold its status. This is attributed to the emotional significance of the business to the family’s identity. Furthermore, this paper suggests that the strong focus on norms and values, which developed gradually, may have adverse effects on the identification with the business and the willingness to uphold its status. Propositions are offered to provide guidance for future research to investigate this controversial evidence regarding the impact of value orientation on family social capital.