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This research is aimed to better understand what characteristics of family firms create a context in which family governance systems are more frequently adopted.

We analyse a sample of 490 Spanish family businesses using cluster analysis, and we identify four different types of family businesses whose characteristics are associated to the adoption of different family governance systems, i.e. family councils and family protocols. The comparison between clusters of the baseline parameters was performed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for parametric variables, the χ2 test for parametric variables and Kruskal-Wallis for nonparametric variables. By conducting between-profile analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), we tested for differences in the dependent variables (i.e. the existence of family councils and/or existence of family protocols) between the clusters, using cluster membership as the independent variable.

Taking into account the characteristics of family firms in terms of ownership structure, management involvement, and family and organizational complexity, we identify four different contexts that create different communication needs and are related to the use of different family governance mechanisms. We characterize the different contexts or types of family firms as: founder-centric, protective, consensual and business-evolved. Our findings show that family protocols are associated to contexts with high family involvement in management and family complexity, while family councils are more frequent when there is a separation of managerial and ownership roles and there is a high organizational and family complexity.

The study highlights the value of social systems theory in order to explain the association between the characteristics of different firm types and contexts, and the use of family councils and family protocols to govern the relationship between the owner family and the business.

Family governance mechanisms are widely recommended by practitioners and scholars. However, they are usually adopted only by a small percentage of family firms. This study helps to better understand what family governance systems may be more appropriate in different contexts and relativize the necessity of these governance mechanisms in function of the communication needs created within each context.

The improvement of family governance mechanisms helps to increase the likelihood of survival and durability of family firms. These firms contribute to more than 60% of employment in most developed countries. Consequently, good governance in family firms has social implications in terms of labour conditions and stability.

Most family firms don't use family protocols or family councils to govern the relationship between the owner family and the firm. However, little is known about the reasons for this lack of structuration of the family-firm relationship. Using social systems theory, our research contributes to better understand the conditions in which business families are more prone to use structured forms to manage this relationship, as well as the reasons that may be constraining their adoption.

Family governance mechanisms serve to govern and strengthen relations between the family and the business, as well as the relationships between the members of the business family itself. However, despite agreement on the importance of adopting family governance structures, explicit research on the determinants of family governance mechanisms is currently missing. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to uncover the determinants of family meetings. In order to do so, the social systems theory is used to unravel several determining factors of this crucial form of family governance mechanisms in private family firms.

The authors perform a qualitative study by conducting semi-structured interviews in eight Belgian private family firms in order to discover the antecedents of the implementation of family meetings. The authors use a pattern-matching technique as an analytical strategy.

The findings of the study highlight the importance of “soft,” relational, qualitative issues as antecedents of family meetings as opposed to previous research on family governance, which predominantly focused on “hard,” quantitative measures (e.g. family ownership). The findings of the study also provide novel insights into the origins of the family component (i.e. family meetings) of family business governance.

While the current literature has only focused on describing the different types of family governance and their positive consequences for the family firm, the authors take a step back to explain why family meetings, as a form of family governance, are adopted in the first place. Second, the authors demonstrate the instrumentality of the social systems theory in understanding the family's needs that necessitate the implementation of family governance mechanisms.

The advent of the #MeToo movement has brought forth increased national and global attention to sexual assault, abuse, misconduct, discrimination and harassment in the workplace, especially by prominent executives against subordinate female employees. Accordingly, in this article, we are thoroughly analyzing one aspect of office romance and sexual conduct in the workplace, mainly sexual favoritism in the era of the #MeToo movement.

This is a legal and case-based human resource policies paper. It reviews actual workplace romance cases, policies and court-based decisions to create practical recommendations that can be used by managers, entrepreneurs and corporations for their organizations. One delimitation of this paper is the fact that it focuses on the US context. Another is that, while organizational behavior researchers have empirically studied various workplace romance policies and practices, the paper is a case-by-case analysis of sexual favoritism. “Specifically, the legal research for this article was conducted on the law database, Nexis Uni Legal, in the Cases (both federal and state) and Law Reviews and Journals sub-databases, using the direct key words in quotations “workplace romance,” “office romance,” “sexual favoritism,” and/or “paramour preference,” as well as the indirect key words “appearance discrimination, “preferring the pretty,” and/or “lookism.” As the authors' intent was to examine the legal and practical consequences emanating from the #MeToo Movement, the authors concentrated their search on cases and law reviews from 2012 to February 2021.

Research shows that about 35–42% of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment or sex discrimination at work. Many of the high-profile sexual cases that generated the #MeToo movement involved powerful executives asserting that their romantic relationships with subordinates in the workplace were “merely” consensual office romance or sexual favoritism. As a result of the #MeToo movement, employers have been compelled to reconsider how they should respond to sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, office romance and sexual favoritism in the workplace. This article offers best practices for policymakers and human resources professionals.

This article's recommendations are limited to workplaces in the US and may not be relevant in other countries as the local laws might vary.

There are policy and behavioral implications for companies, managers and employees regarding workplace romance and sexual favoritism. As such, we provide policy recommendations to human resources department and management on how to provide a healthy work environment for all employees and avoid liability for sexual harassment cases pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The awareness of policies and laws regulating office romance can help educate managers and employees in local communities as to their rights regarding relationships with coworkers and those who report to them. When people are able to date whomever they desire outside of the workplace, employers can regulate some aspects of sexual relationships in the workplace.

This is an original paper by the authors.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between bank institutional setting and risk-taking by exploring whether board education and turnover are drivers of the risk propensity of cooperative banks compared to joint-stock banks.

Based on a comprehensive data set of Italian banks over the 2011-2017 period, this paper examines whether these board characteristics affect the risk propensity of cooperative and joint-stock banks. Bank risk is measured by the Z-index, profit volatility and the ratio of non-performing loans to total gross loans.

The findings show that cooperatives take less risk than joint-stock banks and have lower board turnover and education. Furthermore, this study finds that while board education mediates the relationship between the cooperative model and bank risk-taking, there is no evidence for board turnover. Thus, the lower educational level of cooperative directors contributes to explaining the lower risk-taking of cooperative banks.

The findings have several implications. In terms of the more general policy debate, the results point to the need to strengthen the governance model for both joint-stock and cooperative banks while supporting the view that a more ad hoc perspective on the best models and practices for each type of institutional setting would be preferable. In particular, the study reveals how board education’s effects on bank risk-taking should be carefully monitored.

Through a mediation framework, this study provides empirical evidence on the relationship between bank institutional setting (by distinguishing between cooperative and joint-stock banks) and risk-taking behavior by exploring the underlying mechanisms at the board level, which is novel in the literature.

This paper proposes a new metric, named Operational Space Efficiency (OpSE), intended to diagnose and quantify the inefficient use of floor space for stocking materials in industrial workstations. OpSE presents a formulation analogous to the well-known Overall Equipment Effectiveness and can be obtained as the product of three distinct indicators: Standard Compliance Effectiveness, Standards Selection Effectiveness and Design Space-usage Effectiveness.

This indicator scrutinizes how usefully floor space in workstations is used to temporarily stock materials in the form of raw materials, semi-finished products, parts and components. It is suited for analyzing fixed-position layouts as well as product layouts typical of repetitive manufacturing settings, such as assembly lines in the automotive sector. The proposed indicator leverages an appropriate loss structure that features those factors affecting floor space utilization in workstations with regard to supplying and stocking materials.

An Italian manufacturer in the field of electro-technology was used as an industrial case study for the application of the methodology. The application shows how the three indicators work in practice, the effectiveness of OpSE and the methodology as a whole, in diagnosing floor space usage inefficiencies and in properly addressing improvement actions of the internal logistics in industrial settings.

The paper scrutinizes some important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) dealing with space usage efficiency and identifies some significant drawbacks. Then it suggests a new, inclusive structure of losses and a KPI that not only measures efficiency but also allows to identify viable countermeasures.

This paper seeks to analyze the family firm's capital structure decisions, focusing on the speed of adjustment (SOA) as well as on the effect of distance from the target capital structure on the SOA towards target short-term and long-term debt ratios in unlisted small and medium-sized family firms.

Methodologically, we use dynamic panel data estimators to estimate the effects of distance on the speeds of adjustment towards those targets. Data for the period 2006–2014 were collected for two research sub-samples: one sub-sample with 398 family firms; the other sub-sample contains 217 non-family firms.

The results show that the deviation from the target debt ratios impacts negatively on the speeds of adjustment towards target short-term and long-term debt ratios in unlisted family firms. These results suggest that family firms, deviating from target debt ratios, face deviation costs, i.e. insolvency costs, inferior to the adjustment costs, i.e. transaction costs. Therefore, family firms stay away from the target debt ratios for a long time than do non-family firms.

The research sample comprises a low number of family firms, therefore for future research we suggest increasing the size of the sample of family firms to get a deeper understanding of family firms' SOA towards capital structure. Additionally, we suggest the analysis of other potential determinants of the speed of adjustment towards target capital structure.

The results obtained suggest that the distance from the target short-term and long-term debt ratios can be avoided if these firms do not depend almost exclusively on internal finance to adjust towards target capital structure. Moreover, for policymakers, we suggest the creation/promotion of alternative external finance sources, allowing reduced transaction costs that contribute to a faster adjustment of small family firms towards target capital structure.

The most previous research focusing on capital structure decisions have focused on listed family firms. To fill this gap, this study examines the speed of adjustment towards target debt ratios in the context of unlisted family firms. Moreover, transaction costs are a function of debt maturity, therefore this study examines separately the speeds of adjustment towards target short-term and long-term debt ratios. This paper shows that the adjustment costs (i.e. transaction costs) could hold back family firms from rebalancing its capital structure.

This study aims to investigate how the timing behavior affects the capital structure decisions of South Asian family firms. A strand of literature is available based on the capital structure of firms in general but inconsistent with family businesses framework and not from market timing outlook. This study looks at the issues from the market timing perspectives of both equity and debt market timing.

The sample of the study is the listed family firms of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The firm-level data are collected from Thomson Reuters' DataStream and the ownership data collected from the countries' stock exchanges and financial statements of the family firms.

The results show that there is strong support for the market timing in the family firms' capital structure. Moreover, the financial crisis of 2007–2009 surprisingly had a positive effect on the capital structure of South Asian family business.

This study looks at the issues from the market timing perspectives of both equity and debt market timing. It provides evidence for supporting the equity and debt market timing effect on the capital structure and financing decision of family firms. It also addresses the impact of the 2007–2009 financial crisis on the capital structure of family firms.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the dependence structure in volatility between Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market in China based on high-frequency data.

Using a multiplicative error model (hereinafter MEM) to describe the margins in volatility of China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market, this study adopts static and time-varying copulas, respectively, estimated by maximum likelihood estimation method to describe the dependence structure in volatility between Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market in China.

This paper has identified the asymmetrical dependence structure in financial market volatility more precisely. Gumbel copula could best fit the empirical distribution as it can capture the relatively high dependence degree in the upper tail part corresponding to the period of volatile price fluctuation in both static and dynamic view.

Previous scholars mostly use GARCH model to describe the margins for price volatility. As MEM can efficiently characterize the volatility estimators, this paper uses MEM to model the margins for the market volatility directly based on high-frequency data, and proposes a proper distribution for the innovation in the marginal models. Then we could use copula-MEM other than copula-GARCH model to study on the dependence structure in volatility between Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market in China from a microstructural perspective.

This study aims to take a dual-process perspective and argues that peer influence on increasing impulse buying may also operate automatically. If-then plans, which can automate action control, may, thus, help regulate peer influence. This research extends existing literature explicating the deliberate influence of social norms.

Study 1 (N = 120) obtained causal evidence that forming an implementation intention (i.e. an if-then plan designed to automate action control) reduces peer impact on impulse buying in a laboratory experiment with young adults (students) selecting food items. Study 2 (N = 686) obtained correlational evidence for the role of norms, automaticity and implementation intentions in impulse buying using a large sample of high-school adolescents working on a vignette about clothes-shopping.

If-then plans reduced impulse purchases in the laboratory (Study 1). Both reported deliberation on peer norms and the reported automaticity of shopping with peers predicted impulse buying but an implementation intention to be thriftily reduced these links (Study 2).

This research highlights the role of automatic social processes in problematic consumer behaviour. Promising field studies and neuropsychological experiments are discussed.

Young consumers can gain control over automatic peer influence by using if-then plans, thereby reducing impulse buying.

This research helps understand new precursors of impulse buying in understudied European samples of young consumers.

The decision of the Council of the Library Association not to hold a Conference this year will surprise only those who are not satisfied with the present progress of the library movement in this country. If we ventured to judge by the absence of complaints at this decision our conclusion would necessarily be that by far the greater number of librarians are thus satisfied. It is only when a comprehensive glance at the whole movement is taken that doubts arise in our mind that we should like to see resolved. We are to rest in acquiescent contentment with the present silence and apparent inactivity. Other bodies, probably possessed of less wisdom—professional associations, trades unions, and similar organizations—are meeting with a certain eagerness and enthusiasm which, in the circumstances, must be rather bewildering to our placid Council.