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This article is the editorial for the special issue on “Entrepreneurial Families in Business Across Generations, Contexts and Cultures”. We aim to develop a road map that can help academics and practitioners navigate the findings of the articles contained in this special issue. We also suggest future lines of research around the topic of entrepreneurial families in business.

We develop a conceptual model for interpreting and understanding entrepreneurial families in business across contexts and time.

Our conceptual model highlights the importance of context and time when conducting research on entrepreneurial families in business.

The findings in this special issue will be of relevance for decision makers who tailor policies that embrace different economic and social actors, including entrepreneurial families.

This editorial and the articles that make up this special issue contribute to family business research by contextualising the phenomenon of entrepreneurial families in business. We propose a new holistic perspective to incorporate context and time in the study of entrepreneurial families that own, govern and manage family firms over time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of family equity creation and its role for transgenerational entrepreneurship.

This paper combines a systematic literature review on family equity with conceptual theory building, resulting in a model of family equity creation.

The proposed model contains three phases of equity creation that ulitmately leads to transgenerational entrepreneurship: harvesting, institutionalization (via a single family office) and reinvestment.

This paper conceptually introduces the family equity creation model, which may serve as integrative framework for future research on transgenerational value creation by entrepreneurial families. The presented findings are of relevance for family entrepreneurship scholars, entrepreneurial families, as well as for practitioners.

Focusing on the family as the central unit of analysis, the purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurial families, with more than one owner/entrepreneur, utilise social capital in a challenging institutional environment.

The empirical focus of this paper is the institutional context of Mexico and how it impacts on entrepreneurial families and their access to social capital. The authors employ an in-depth qualitative approach to understand entrepreneurs’ perspective as being part of an entrepreneurial family. A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with multiple respondents of each entrepreneurial family.

This study shows that social capital allows members in the entrepreneurial family to access a wider pool of resources to utilise to benefit their ventures, while also helping them to operate in a challenging institutional environment. It also illustrates how social capital is used to overcome institutional asymmetries.

This paper contributes to research by examining the links between institutions and entrepreneurial families through a focus on social capital. It provides a nuanced understanding of how the entrepreneurial family serves as an intermediary through which social capital gives family members access to resources and capabilities to enable their pursuit of entrepreneurial endeavours and overcome the institutional challenges they face in Mexico.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between microfinance participation and entrepreneurial behaviour of Ghanaian families as well as the moderating role of the family head’s gender. It is argued from a resource-based theory perspective that microfinance is a financial resource that removes credit constraints to entrepreneurial behaviour of families. However, gender of the family head creates heterogeneity in this relationship in line with the gender theory.

In order to test these claims, cross-sectional data from 2,727 families on microfinance participation and household characteristics in Ghana are utilised.

The study finds that microfinance participation has a positive and significant relationship with a family’s decision to own an enterprise. Also, the study finds that female-headed families are better utilizers of microfinancial resources for entrepreneurial purposes compared to their male counterparts. This difference is a pure gender effect.

This finding is in contrast to the dominant stream of gender-based entrepreneurship research that suggests that women are subordinate to men and need to be helped to become “honorary men”. From a policy standpoint, solutions aimed at reversing discrimination against women in economic markets must consider women within their own right. The study makes a contribution to the literature by showing empirically the source of heterogeneity in entrepreneurial returns to microfinance participation by families.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This study analyses the sequence of actions carried out by successful enterprises in the agricultural sector and aims to understand the logic followed with such actions and the differences related to the types of families that develop them.

Through a multiple case study approach, the business and family trajectories of 14 successful agricultural enterprises in Mexico were analysed. The actions carried out by enterprises are conceptualized as strategic movements and are classified into seven categories: (1) growth and intensification, (2) reconversion, (3) diversification, (4) integration, (5) differentiation, (6) outsourcing and (7) digitization. Depending on their relationship with agriculture, entrepreneurial families are classified into three categories: (1) continuing families, (2) returning families and (3) incoming families.

The entrepreneurship logic follows three stages: evaluation, expansion and consolidation, through which different activities are tested, then the one that produces the best results is expanded and adopted as the main activity, and finally the expansion of the main activity and its evaluation are combined by comparing and complementing it with other agricultural activities. The difference is that continuing families adhere more to the traditional productivist model based on growth in scale and improved productivity of primary production. On the other hand, actions that imply a distinction in the quality of production such as integration and differentiation and that require links with other organizations such as outsourcing are more frequently carried out by returning and incoming families.

The findings obtained through case studies cannot be statistically generalized to a specific population, however, our perspective can be transferred to other cases to obtain analogous findings.

The study is a unique piece in terms of the analysis of how families with different degrees of proximity to agriculture develop successful enterprises.

Family businesses do not perpetuate themselves. Entrepreneurs must nurture and propagate the values that led to the creation of the very thing most precious to them‐their business.This of course depends on stability. Nor do these cherished values propagate themselves. To be made meaningful for others, and for future generations, family experiences, values, and achievements must be communicated to others via language, narrative and storytelling, or other forms embedded in the narrative such as symbols. Often a variety of different socially constructed stories may be necessary contingent upon situation, purpose, or need.

As families engage in entrepreneurship, particularly in developing economies, women's engagement in such activities is subject to the traditional cultures, norms and values of the communities to which they belong. This paper aims to investigate how the socio-cultural context influences women's entrepreneurship as women engage in “family entrepreneuring”.

The study draws on an inductive qualitative approach to explore how multiple cultural, social and economic contexts encourage women's entrepreneurship and, thus, position them at the centre of family entrepreneuring within this community. Using snowballing techniques, we analyse narratives from 51 women entrepreneurs, generated through semi-structured interviews, to reveal key insights into the practice of family entrepreneuring.

The findings reveal the complex socio-cultural context within the “Adja” community, where polygamy, a traditional and cultural practice, enables the transfer of culturally and socially embedded informal knowledge. The study explains how women's entrepreneuring activities are supported by informal in-family apprenticeships, resulting in family members learning specific skills while also experiencing the feeling of belonging to the family. Showcasing the heterogeneity of contexts, particularly those found in Africa, this study challenges the normative view within the Global North and the dominance of the “heroic male” in entrepreneurship by showcasing how women (especially matriarchs) are significant actors in training other women, co-wives, daughters and relatives in family entrepreneuring.

Thus, this study contributes to the extant literature on family entrepreneuring by revealing an unusual case of women from polygamous families becoming the focal actors in family entrepreneuring activity and challenging the culturally ascribed gender roles to evolve into the breadwinners in their households, as well as focusing on how this process is driven by endogenous knowledge exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurship traditions evolve in diaspora.

A qualitative multiple case study examining the role of diaspora embeddedness, extended family, ethno-religious-, cultural- and social ties and relevant structures shaping diaspora entrepreneurship.

The authors found that social ties and diaspora embeddedness create dynamism fostering entrepreneurial identity as a part of the Bukharian culture, and as a preferred career option in the context of Bukharian Jews in diaspora. Diasporic family businesses are products of culture and tradition that migrate to new locations with families and communities, not as disconnected business entities.

The ways in which families nurture a highly entrepreneurial culture that transfers across generations and contexts are context-specific and not per se generalizable to other diasporas.

Diasporans often continue their traditions and become again entrepreneurs after their settlement, or they may generate hybrid, circular solutions that allow them to employ their competences in the new contexts or connecting various contexts. This calls for transnational entrepreneurship-policymaking.

Time changes diasporas. A long-term commitment to the business environment evolves and reduces the mobility of the individual diasporan; typically the children of these migrants become more integrated and develop divergent career paths. Hence, their plans are not necessarily including family entrepreneurship creating a challenge for continuation of the original culture of entrepreneurship.

Despite a notable tradition in Jewish studies, there is limited research on Jewish entrepreneurial diaspora and its contemporary entrepreneurial identity and tradition. Furthermore, the population of Bukharian Jews is an unknown and under-explored highly entrepreneurial group that may offer instrumental views to larger diasporic audiences being concerned about maintaining notions of ethnic heritage and identity.

There is a growing interest in understanding the strategic behaviour of family firms producing international commodities such as coffee, particularly in contexts where decisions about what products to sell, where to commercialise them and how to promote them appear to be highly based on both business and family aspects. The purpose of this paper is to explore product differentiation strategies in family firms in the specialty coffee industry across Latin American countries. Whilst the socioeconomic relevance of coffee production in Central America is unequivocal, the approach and rationale of families that engage in specialty coffee production remain underexplored.

This study examines product differentiation in specialty coffee family farms across countries in Central America: Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The study relies on in-depth interviews, case studies and an interpretative approach to unpick the dynamics of product differentiation by families in business dedicated to producing specialty coffee.

The findings show that product differentiation in specialty coffee family farms is influenced by both business and family aspects and driven by entrepreneurial stewards. Coffee-farming families can engage in product differentiation through a shared vision, a combination of traditional and specialised knowledge, and through the continuous development of an exchange network. The findings reveal a connection between families in business balancing family and business interests, and the strategic intention to build up their assets entrepreneurially over time.

This study contributes to the literature on stewardship and strategic behaviour in family firms when families in business engage in differentiating their products in a highly competitive industry. More specifically, this study focuses on companies across countries where coffee is of crucial socioeconomic importance, and where the said companies are owned and managed by families. The study expands understanding of product differentiation in family-enterprise-first businesses and suggests that the family elements in differentiation can be explained through an entrepreneurial stewardship perspective.