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This study/paper aims to create an understanding on how a firm develops dynamic capabilities in new strategic dimensions. Innovation in organizations is not an exclusive domain of large firms. Family-owned and -managed firms have aggressively integrated innovation. Focussed orientation towards product innovation combined with innovative capability and high levels of owner-manager motivation has helped translate technology-based family businesses into highly profitable and competitive ventures. Microlit, is a liquid handling product manufacturer producing high-quality, high-tech, cost-effective, single and multichannel micropipettes. Founded in 1988, by brothers Ajay and Atul Jain, it is based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. The key contributor to the firm’s success has been its strong customer-oriented product designs. The challenge lies in development of dynamic capabilities to gain competence in new strategic dimensions? Would the firm be able to leverage its innovation drive?

The case is based on primary and secondary testing of the case several times and filling the case gaps during the process. To authenticate information, multiple sources of information have been used.

Dynamic capabilities are essential for a firm’s growth. The challenge is in continuously harnessing and managing it within a family business.

The findings are based on observations of one company and research carried through secondary sources, which may limit the theory creation.

An enterprise largely competes on the basis of available talent, knowledge, competency and capability. Therefore, knowledge must be managed, and especially, from tacit to explicit.

The case is original with the business family in its second generation striving to perform amidst professionalization and internationalization.

This perspective paper explores ongoing research into stimuli that promote environmental responsibility in family business contexts. It also delineates emerging patterns and possible directions for future research within this domain.

The authors synthesise, critically assess and integrate existing research to make current thinking about the environmental responsibility of family businesses more accessible to a wide range of readers.

This paper offers a comprehensive overview of multifaceted triggers and sheds light on how they interact and influence the environmental performance of family businesses. The authors delve into family dynamics and values, examining how they enable a business to develop environmental responsibility practices. Simultaneously, the authors emphasise the importance of probing the impact of the macro environment within which family businesses operate, which either might incentivise or challenge their pursuit of environmental responsibility initiatives. The need to design a robust tool to measure the environmental consciousness of familiness, applicable to specific contextual settings, has been identified. Investigating how accounting and control systems act as supportive management tools to enhance the efficacy of overall corporate performance in family businesses is another area for future research. Moreover, examining these dynamics within the unique landscape of emerging economies offers a promising field of exploration.

This article consolidates existing research on the environmental responsibility of family businesses and puts forward potential avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the varying ideologies guiding the cultural dimensions of family business and to examine the cultural sensitivity of these varying ideologies.

The research relies upon the CASE framework of nine cultural dimensions of family business. First, the literature pertaining to varying ideologies associated with each of the family business cultural dimensions is reviewed to form a conceptual analysis. Second, hypotheses are generated regarding the anticipated relationships between the two major dimensions of societal culture (power distance and in‐group collectivism) and the nine family business cultural dimensions. Data from the GLOBE program and the CASE project are then used to conduct non‐parametric tests.

The nine family business dimensions are shown as ideologies intersecting three systems of family business (family, business and social) and three social interaction elements (structural, relational and cognitive). Empirical support is found for the cultural sensitivity of the family business dimensions, in terms of the two major societal culture characteristics (power distance and in‐group collectivism).

This work provides insights into a broader conceptualization of family business in an increasingly global context. By virtue of the cultures in which they are formed, nurtured, and grow, family firms are influenced by a number of ideologies. Ideological differences – both quantitative and qualitative – mean that the forms and formats of family businesses also differ, as a reflection of their ideological and cultural underpinnings. In particular, it is useful to consider how family businesses differ, depending on their proportional support for the family, business and social system ideologies.

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate whether the transition from a family business to a non‐family business affects the institutionalisation of management accounting.

This paper is based on an online survey among all large and medium‐sized Austrian firms. Univariate and multivariate statistical analyses were used to test the impact of the level of family influence on aspects of the institutionalisation of management accounting. Firm size is included as the main control variable.

A lower level of influence from the controlling family was found to be correlated with the institutionalisation and intensification of management accounting in medium‐sized firms. For large firms, such a linear relationship could not be drawn. The level of education of management accountants was inversely correlated with the level of family influence in both large and medium‐sized firms.

Further research into the reasons, underlying drivers and inter‐organisational promoters of management accounting change in family businesses is needed. Furthermore, the organisational impacts of the transition from family businesses to non‐family businesses deserve further investigation.

A framework for assessing the organisational effects of the transition from family businesses to non‐family businesses is provided. The empirical results on the impact of the transition on the institutionalisation of management accounting are presented. The level of family influence was found to act as a significant contextual factor for the organisation of management accounting in medium‐sized firms.

The increasingly competitive manufacturing sector has made innovation crucial for the continued survival of family-owned SMEs. However, family firm owners are highly heterogenous and their diverse characteristics influence their approach to innovation. The purpose of this paper is to provide solutions to two heterogeneity related innovation problems: first, the failure of generic innovation policy advice to address the specific types of family firm owners; and second, the difficulty for owners in understanding how their innovation approach compares to their competitors. The solution is to create a taxonomy of family firm owner-innovators which creates innovator types. This taxonomy addresses these two problems: first, the taxonomy enables policy advice to be tailored to a particular innovator types; and second, the taxonomy allows owners to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach to innovation.

The approach is to develop a taxonomy through exploratory factor analysis (n=1,284) and firm owner interviews (n=27) in a mixed methods study. Socio-emotional wealth theory interprets the findings.

The findings present a taxonomy of family firm innovators which contains five types: the spontaneous radical, the statist altruist, the patient opportunist, the curious traveller and the insular denier.

There are two major limitations: first, a taxonomy is static and does not include the temporal dimension of innovation which can change according to the firm lifecycle stage and, by implication, the changing preferences of a maturing firm owner; and second, the mixed methods approach of using two data sets which themselves used differing definitions of “family firm” has introduced the possibility that the constructs developed from the quantitative study may not have the precision or clarity of a study that uses a single data set with a single definition.

The practitioner implications from the research stem from the diagnostic potential of the taxonomy. SME family firm owners can establish their innovation approach by using the taxonomy to decide which type of innovator they are and by adopting an innovation approach that counterbalances the weaknesses of their type.

The social implications are to improve the innovation potential of the family firm community by offering practical support to their innovation activities.

The originality of the research is in its contribution to knowledge on the role of ownership type in directing the innovation approach of SME family firms. The value of the research is in offering a theoretically informed original taxonomy that is of both academic and practical value.

The paper deals with succession processes in tourism family enterprises. Beginning with a literature review on succession in family firms, the paper focuses on the motivation structure of successors and his/her perceived problems associated with succession in family enterprises. A survey carried out in the Italian Alps during 2003 analyses ex‐post evaluations of succession processes by successors. In a first attempt, the author establishes the importance of family business succession research in terms of the available literature. Relevant succession models to be found in the social sciences literature are discussed in order to deduce relevant research questions for the empirical study at hand. The focus of the paper is an analysis of success in family firms succession processes, based on varying motivation structures (factors) of the successor.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the elements of family-centric non-economic goals, such as socioemotional wealth (SEW) of family business owners, that drive family commitment. The empirical study further tests whether such relationships are impacted by the aspect of ownership, that is, who controls the firm: founder generation or subsequent generation of owner managers.

Deploying the SEW and stakeholder theories, this study proposes a conceptual link between soecioemotional wealth dimensions and family commitment. The study is based on a survey of 357 private family firms in Bangladesh involved in manufacturing ready-made garments. The respondents are all in senior-level management positions in their respective firms and are members of the dominant owning family.

Prior to considering the moderating effect of controlling generation, the results indicate that four out of five FIBER dimensions of SEW affect family commitment, except for binding social ties. The study also finds that when a comparison is made between the founder generation and the subsequent generation of family firm managers, it is the latter that manifests significantly higher levels of family commitment when the focus is on the two FIBER dimensions of SEW: binding social ties and identification of family members with the firm.

Although the cross-sectional nature of the study exposes the study to the specter of common method bias, procedural remedies were initiated to minimize the likelihood. Furthermore, data were collected from a single key informant in each organization. Therefore, both a longitudinal study and corroborating data from more than one individual in each firm would possibly provide a more robust picture.

Key decision makers from within the family who wish to see their subsequent generation remain engaged and committed to the family firm may find cues from the fact that focusing on binding social ties and identification of family members with the firm play an important role in ensuring continued commitment to the business by their successors.

Family businesses are recognized to be vital contributors to most societies around the globe, both as employment generators as well as catalysts of economic activities. Hence, policy makers may derive pertinent information from the study in adopting policies to nurture and ensure survival and continuity of family-owned businesses, by understanding how family-centric non-economic goals impact family’s desire to commit resources, time and effort to the enterprise from generation to generation.

Determining the factors that drive continued engagement and commitment of family members to the business enterprise is a phenomenon that needs to be better understood in order to ensure continuity and survival of family enterprises across generations. This study attempts to provide a more nuanced understanding of how different components of family-centric goals, such as SEW, impact family commitment. The study contributes to theory building by providing a conceptual link that demonstrates the components of SEW that are most pertinent in terms of ensuring higher levels of family commitment to the family-owned business.

When ownership starts getting dispersed among several individuals, families, branches, and generations, a need for organizing communications and decision-making usually arises to ensure functional relationships within the family. The need for a shared vision and mutually agreed ways of handling the shared ownership emerges, and a process for developing a family governance structure is often initiated. Family governance, hence, appears to be a central topic in family business research, but we still lack a more profound and specific understanding of how the owner family uses different family governance mechanisms to manage specific situations with possible conflicting goals, interests, and opinions, or just to develop the shared ownership further for or together with the next generation. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview and highlight different processes developed by the family within owner families with dispersed ownership to identify and align governance goals. This overview intends to broaden the understanding of what the role of family governance, as a family internal mechanism, can be in owner families with dispersed ownership among several family members.

Although family business literature acknowledges that family firms owners are motivated by a set of socioemotional wealth (SEW) goals along with firm-centric business goals, yet a consistently predictable pattern of relationship between SEW and financial wealth is yet to be discerned. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model based on the stakeholder approach to suggest that family commitment mediates the association between the dimensions of SEW and firm performance.

A set of hypotheses are proposed that are tested using structural equation modeling with data collected from 357 medium to large sized privately held family firms in Bangladesh. The data analysis is done with SmartPLS (v.3.2).

The results indicate that family commitment partially mediates the relationships between family control and influence, family identification, emotional attachment and renewal of family bonds through dynastic succession and firm performance. The only non-significant relationship was between binding social ties and firm performance. The results provide a more nuanced understanding of the link between SEW goals and firm performance, and present important implications for theory and practice.

The cross-sectional nature of the study exposes it to the specter of common method bias despite the fact that procedural remedies were initiated to minimize the impact of such occurrence. A longitudinal study with data obtained from multiple individuals at different levels of the organization would possibly yield more robust findings. Furthermore, in the absence of a multi-country and multi-sector analysis, a broad generalization of the findings may not be feasible.

The knowledge that family identity, emotional attachment and renewal of family bonds through dynastic succession may be leveraged to enhance the commitment of subsequent generation of family firm owners to the firm that may be pertinent to incumbents who desire to see their successors more engaged in the family enterprise. Furthermore, knowing that excessive focus on family control over the firm leads to negative outcomes is also pertinent to family firm leaders.

Survival of family businesses is vital to the global economy as one of the primary drivers of global GDP growth and source of new employment. Policy makers can benefit from the findings of this study to customize policies that take into cognizance the importance of SEW owners of family firms and the fact that some of these SEW goals actually benefit the firm in terms of enhanced commitment to the enterprise and consequently superior firm performance.

The role of family commitment as a mediator between SEW and firm performance has not been dominant in the literature. By providing a finer-grained understanding of how family commitment accounts for the relationship between family-centric non-economic goals such as SEW and firm-centric goals such as business performance, the study presents a theoretical link between sociomemotional wealth and financial wealth in the context of private family firms.