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The purpose of this paper is to explore the internationalization process of small and medium family-owned businesses (FOBs). The authors strive to explain the extent to which family business CEOs identify a signal in either the domestic or international environment for internationalization as a viable business opportunity.

The authors rely on signal detection theory to develop a conceptual model that explains the cognitive process inducing the CEO-founder of an FOB to discover and exploit an opportunity in the international market.

The conceptual model proposes that constraints in a family-firm’s domestic market, as well as opportunities in the foreign market act, as signal strength. However, family business CEO-founders’ centrality and inward orientation might lead them to ignore a signal by generating noise and reducing the motivation to collect further information concerning the trustworthiness of the signal.

The model is conceptual; future research should strive for a potential way to operationalize the cognitive process described herein. In addition, the theoretical argument has been developed in the context of family firms wherein the founder plays a pivotal role. Future research may extend the theoretical arguments to those family firms that are at an advanced stage of development.

The study reconciles conflicting findings concerning the internationalization of FOBs. In doing so, the authors employ an interdisciplinary approach and develop a conceptual model that sheds additional light on the cognitive processes underlying internationalization decisions among founder-centered family firms.

This paper aims to review the important themes in the literature on organizational culture (OC) in family firms.

The review of the current literature is organized around three themes: nature of OC in family firms, antecedents of OC in family firms and outcomes of OC in family firms. The discussion on each theme is followed by the suggested pointers for future research.

Much is known about the identified three themes in the literature on OC in family firms. However, the current review also highlights the limitations of the available literature. With regard to the nature of OC, some inconsistent findings are reported in the literature with regard to the types of prevailing OC in family firms. The literature also reveals a range of positive outcomes of OC. Significantly less research examines the influence of environmental factors and other moderators of OC. Given the focus of the current literature on developed countries, there is a need of more comparative studies in emerging as well as developing countries to understand how contextual factors affect OC in family business settings.

For each theme, the suggested pointers for future research serve as a springboard for future research and improve the theoretical understanding of OC in family firms.

Family businesses are value-based enterprises, contributing significantly to wealth creation. Although extensive research is conducted on family businesses, there is no study investigating how the cultural traits in the Arab world affect the organizational culture of family businesses. This paper discusses how the cultural characteristics in the Arab world shape family enterprises and explores how the Arab world's organizational culture enables family firms to establish competitive advantage underpinned by founder centrality, the concept of family, and business principles spanning many generations.

A thorough search of the extant literature was done in Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCO, and ScienceDirect using a combination of keywords such as Arab culture, family businesses, family firm culture, organizational culture, cultural traits, management strategies, and entrepreneurial strategies. Selected articles were classified according to their content, reviewed, and analyzed.

This study makes a few critical contributions about the nature, and the origins of organizational culture in family firms, entailing the founder's centrality and stewardship theory. Specifically, family firms in the examined region appear to have a stronger firm culture compared to non-family businesses. Also, organizational culture affects family businesses considering the firm-level outcomes, such as hereditary transition success, family inertia, etc.

This paper adds to the existing theoretical knowledge and underlines the cultural traits and family firm culture in the Arab world. A framework is presented, offering practical recommendations to managers of family firms striving to advance their competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze entrepreneurship in the context of the second, third and fourth generations of family businesses, considering the family as an institution and mapping the reasons and influences to institutional forces across generations.

Three focus groups conducted for the study revealed that each generation has dealt differently with issues related to institutional forces, such as legitimacy, business professionalization and succession.

The perpetuation and transmission of entrepreneurial behavior has been greatly influenced by the family and this is especially clear when it is seen as an institution that unites and binds its members, while guiding or restricting the choices available to these agents through limits imposed on them. The family exerts a strong institutional influence across generations, both defining boundaries and creating opportunities for its members. Regardless of the generation of family business, the family founders and their successors’ responses are modeled by institutional forces.

The main limitation is concentration of focus on a specific context, Brazilian family businesses. Therefore, the results are limited to this case. With regard to the methodological approach, the authors employed cross-sectional data collection, making it difficult or even impossible to make a historical analysis of the facts that are limited to the present perceptions of the interviewees. It should also be considered, from the institutional perspective, that the authors only analyze the family as an institution, leaving out of the context other institutions and institutional dimensions such as the political and industrial, for example.

This study helps to explain entrepreneurship in the context of the second, thirrd, and fourth generation of family businesses, considering family as an institution, mapping the motivations and influences of institutional forces across generations. The relevance of family as an institution as drivers of family businesses, as demonstrated in this study, can contribute to decision making and succession of family businesses. Equally, the results can contribute to avoidance of the possible pitfalls of transgenerational changes and facilitate better management of problems such as legitimacy caused by a lack of norms and procedures or transfer of tacit knowledge.

There have been few attempts to understand the dynamics of the family business as an institution that also consider transgenerational changes. Rather, family business has been analyzed separately from institutions. Institutions are rarely taken into account in studies of family businesses. Consequently, a perspective that aims to understand the relationship between family businesses and institutions, taking account of transgenerational influences should further theory. Transgenerational family businesses are an appropriate object of study in this context, because of the institutional changes they undergo due to the influence of institutional forces over time.

This study shows the relevance of understanding how these issues are dealt with in different generations of a family institution. Aspects related to entrepreneurship in the context of family businesses have been attracting attention from researchers interested in family businesses and scholars of institutional entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between founder-chief executive officers (CEOs) and firm performance. Specifically, the paper explores two opposing arguments on the performance implications of founder-CEO leadership. The first theoretical perspective argues that founder-CEOs positively contribute to firm performance since they bring passion, vision, and external legitimacy to the organization. The contrary resource-based perspective, argues that while founder-CEOs help in the early years of the firm, they become less effective as the firm evolves into a complex bureaucracy since they lack the necessary managerial skills.

In order to test these perspectives, the paper develops a matched sample of 82 US manufacturing firms and compared their performance using both accounting and market-based measures. Independent sample t-tests and analysis of variance were used to empirically test the opposing predictions. Data were obtained from the Mergent Online database as well as official proxy filings of sample firms.

The results of the data analysis indicate that there is a statistically significant performance difference between founder-led and non-founder led firms. Such performance difference is especially evident when the paper focusses on accounting-based firm performance measures such as return on assets and return on investment. Surprisingly, founder-led firms performed worse than those led by non-founder CEOs. The follow-up analysis indicates a significant difference in age and size among sample firms led by founders and non-founders such that founder-led firms tend to be younger and smaller in size.

Unlike other studies in the literature that found a strong positive impact of founder-CEOs, the findings of the study provided empirical support for the resource-based explanation of founder-CEO impact on firm performance. Specifically, the findings reported here contribute to understanding the role of founder-CEOs in the context of executive succession, strategy selection as well as organizational evolution.

This study makes original contribution to the on-going research on strategic leadership by exploring the performance effect of founder-CEOs and the corresponding alternative theoretical explanations. In addition, the inclusion of both accounting and market-based (Tobin's Q) dependent variables provide a broader measure of firm financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the engagement of chief executive officers (CEOs) in corporate communication and focus on how their approach to communication develops in relation to the longevity of their tenure. The paper also explores how founder centrality is linked to the objectives of CEO communication and the CEOs’ use of personal social media.

The paper brings together the relevant literature from different disciplines, related to leadership communication, CEO longevity and founder centrality, and reveals a number of unexplored issues. Four research questions were defined and an exploratory survey was carried out, involving 93 CEOs from large companies located in Italy.

The results show that CEOs are strongly engaged in institutional communication. Short-tenured CEOs seem more engaged in building and consolidating relationship networks with specific stakeholders (customers and employees), while long-tenured CEOs tend to be more involved in institutional and financial communications.

Due to the exploratory research design and the circumscribed sample from a single country (Italy), further cross-national evidence is needed to substantiate the suggested links between engagement in communication activities and longevity. The study highlights the managerial and communication skills that CEOs must be provided with during their corporate tenure, thus suggesting the need to further examine the “life cycle” of CEO communication activities.

The paper sheds light on CEO communication dynamics. It is the first of its kind in the Italian context, where some factors, such as longevity of tenure, seem to play an important role in shaping corporate communication objectives and activities.

Drawing on theories of organisational identity, social exchange and stakeholder engagement, this study aims to investigate the processes and practices involved in the formation and shaping of identities of social enterprises (SEs) that operate in the Malawian hospitality and tourism industry.

Drawing on an interpretive research paradigm, data collected from 22 semi-structured interviews with four founders of case SEs and stakeholders, and SEs’ reports and other publicly available documents were generated and analysed following a grounded theory approach.

The authors show that the trajectory SEs followed and the exchanges that occurred with the external stakeholders allowed three out of four case SEs to swiftly re-evaluate their pre-existing identities and work towards the formation of their new identities.

This study provides an opportunity for policymakers and other actors in developing countries to frame and place SEs in line with the wider societal realities in such contexts. This may in turn call for policymakers to increase actors’ engagement with SEs and provide the necessary support that can allow SEs to be an effective force for the public good.

This paper highlights the role of exchanges with external stakeholders in identity formation and shaping within SEs in the hospitality and tourism sector in the context of institutional voids. By adopting the social exchange theory, this paper introduces a dynamic lens to identity formation and shaping and helps to explain how, across different tourism ventures, stakeholder engagement and different modes of exchange unfold in the inter-organisational and community domains. It further shows how the ventures’ value orientations on the one hand, and stakeholder engagement practices and the ensuing exchanges, on the other hand, are closely interwoven.

Founders have significant influence over many domains within family businesses, and their impact on companies may be felt even after leadership succession. Founders have therefore received much attention from scholars, policymakers, and entrepreneurship educators. This chapter characterizes the current literature on family business founders by identifying the topics explored and the range of methods and methodologies used in recent years to outline a research agenda for future study of founders of family businesses.

A scoping review was conducted to examine the extent and essence of contemporaneous research activity related to family business founders. Scoping reviews describe current research activity without evaluating individual studies and are effective in summarizing significant concerns and themes, identifying areas of deficiency, and establishing recommendations for future directions in research. This scoping review used elements of a rapid review due to resource restrictions and this chapter discusses efforts to mitigate the limitations introduced as a result.

After summarizing the current academic conversation about family business founders, opportunities for future research topics and methodological approaches to the study of founders of family businesses are introduced.

The aim of this paper is to theorize on and empirically extend the understanding of the adoption of codes of ethics within the context of family firms. The authors contend that in family firms the adoption of code of ethics is a process emerging from social interaction.

Through a multiple case study design the authors analyze family firms that have not yet adopted a code of ethics and untangle the process that could potentially lead to that choice.

The authors’ main finding suggests that the institutional context impacts on the adoption of codes of ethics. Furthermore, in first generation the adoption of codes of ethics is hindered by the presence of the founder and the existence of strong family ties. In subsequent generations as founder centrality is reduced the owning-family considers more the possibility to adopt such codes to preserve the family's reputation in the local community.

First multiple views also from external stakeholders could be added; second, an international perspective using cross-country cases could add more nuances on how cultural and institutional aspects shape the adoption of codes of ethics differently across national contexts.

The authors’ findings inform family business owners on the importance of adopting code of ethics to support the formalization of the family value system.

The authors advance the debate on codes of ethics in family firms by disentangling the process through which those codes may be adopted to institutionalize and formalize the family values, history and tradition.

The purpose of this research is to discuss the nature of co‐entrepreneurs (i.e. those companies that have a mixture of male and female founding members) within the ICT sector in Ireland. For the purposes of this paper, the term “co‐entrepreneurship” is used to describe male and female business partnerships. The characteristics of co‐entrepreneurs; their educational, skills and family backgrounds; their current role in the company, and the nature of the team founder structure are examined. A discussion on why the team approach was selected is also included. Other issues explored in the paper include the shareholding percentage of the co‐entrepreneurs and the extent to which the business has a lead entrepreneur.

In 2003 the authors compiled a database of 1,026 indigenous ICT companies, which were electronically surveyed for information regarding software production, ownership of company and gender of founding members. A total of 24 per cent (81) of the responding companies from this survey indicated that there was a mixture of male and female founding members. These companies were subsequently sent another survey designed to gather information on company background, profiles of co‐entrepreneurs, co‐entrepreneurs' motivational factors and co‐entrepreneurs' roles. A total of 34 (43 per cent) of the companies responded, of which 23 were suitable for the research.

The findings of the study indicate that the family business or spouse/partner structure represents a major component of mixed gender companies in the ICT sector in Ireland, and that such companies tend to be small, with well‐educated and experienced founders.

A particularly interesting contribution of this paper is the provision of insights into the co‐entrepreneurial partnership through identifying the key differences between the male and female co‐founders. A key conclusion of the study is that there would appear to be a recognition among co‐entrepreneurs that complementary skills and knowledge are critically important in the exploitation of new business opportunities, especially in the IT industry.