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Past research has advanced a plethora of theoretical arguments on the effect of family ownership on firms’ international expansion and produced mixed empirical results. It is argued that the oversimplified way in which researchers have examined theoretically and tested empirically business families’ socioemotional priorities may explain the state of fragmentation in the literature. This study aims to investigate the differential effects of restricted (short-term and family-centric) versus extended (long-term and business-centric) socioemotional priorities on the extent of family firms’ internationalization to capture more nuanced aspects of the socioemotional wealth concept.

The authors test the hypotheses through OLS regressions on a sample of 287 family firms.

The authors find that restricted family-centric socioemotional priorities and extended socioemotional priorities related to the establishment of long-term relationships with business partners are negatively associated with the extent of family firms’ internalization. They also find that extended socioemotional priorities related to long-term orientation and transgenerational control intentions are positively associated with international expansion and that this effect is stronger for younger family firms.

This study disentangles the differential effects of two kinds of socioemotional priorities on family firms’ internationalization, thus developing more fine-grained theoretical arguments about the socioemotional drivers of family firms’ behavior. In addition, the authors directly measure socioemotional priorities instead of relying on indirect governance measures.