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This perspective article underscores the importance of conducting studies that examine the African philosophy of Ubuntu among indigenous African family businesses. The article summarises the understanding of the role of Ubuntu in indigenous African family businesses and explores potential pathways for further investigations to understand existing cultural and economic differences that could contribute to family business heterogeneity.

The article adopts an analytical and interpretative approach to existing literature in family businesses and Ubuntu philosophy. The approach helps to evaluate the role of Ubuntu philosophy in indigenous African family businesses. Ubuntu was chosen for examination in this article because it is a fundamental African value commonly acceptable in Africa.

The article emphasises the need to deepen the current understanding of the African philosophy of Ubuntu, highlighting the role this philosophy could play in shaping and positioning indigenous African family businesses for long-term success. This perspective article calls for integrating indigenous African philosophies into other knowledge systems to advocate for a better understanding of the institutional structures in indigenous African family businesses. Additionally, as businesses increasingly operate in a global context and more indigenous family businesses enter the formal global economic environments, non-indigenous business stakeholders and practitioners must gain an understanding of a diverse cultural perspective, such as Ubuntu.

This article highlights the importance of African philosophies in understanding business organisations by highlighting the need for family business scholars to investigate the role of Ubuntu in indigenous African family businesses. The perspective article proposes sample research questions and areas for exploring Ubuntu in indigenous African family businesses, which could offer new avenues to understand the cultural and economic differences embedded in indigenous African family business context.

The purpose is to examine the relationship between entrepreneurs’ exit strategies and modes of entry. The topic of exit strategies in the context of approaching retirement warrants further attention.

We apply logistic regression to analyse 1,192 responses to an online survey of firms with entrepreneurs aged over 55.

Family successors are more likely to choose family succession and buyers to choose to sell, but the association between founding and exit mode cannot be confirmed. Firm size is also significant. Our findings suggest that entry and exit via a business transfer are linked. Entrepreneurs might be influenced by their form of entry when choosing their exit strategy.

The data were collected from a single European country, limiting generalisation. Future research should incorporate intervening variables not controlled for here, such as, entrepreneurial experience. Future studies should also seek to test the existence of imprinting directly, as it is implied rather than verified here.

If the entry mode has a lasting effect on the entrepreneur as our results suggest, thus influencing the exit strategy selected, entrepreneurs could benefit from greater awareness of the imprinting mechanism. Increasing awareness of imprinted biases could unlock the benefits of exit strategies previously overlooked.

The study is the first to consider sale, family succession and liquidation as exit strategies in relation to the original entry mode of ageing owners. It contributes to the understanding of exit strategies of ageing entrepreneurs and proposes using entrepreneurial learning and imprinting as lenses to clarify the phenomenon.

There are many factors that contribute to a person's career choice. The decision of whether or not to join the family business is certainly most influenced by parents. The aim of this research is to determine how much of an impact parents have on their next-generation family members' (NGFMs) decision to join the family business.

Following a positivistic paradigm, a cross-sectional design was followed using a quantitative, self-administered questionnaire through a judgemental sampling technique. A structured questionnaire was distributed to South African respondents who have parents who own a family business. The data were analysed using Statistica.

The results indicate that parental style, culture, self-efficacy and parental identification were found to influence the NGFMs' intention to join the family business significantly. Their decisions can be influenced by several factors, and parents can better manage these aspects by being aware of these influencing factors.

Given the imminent ageing of a large cohort of senior leaders, this research adds to the body of knowledge by highlighting the necessity for committed, willing and ready next-generation family members (NGFMs) to ensure efficient succession in family businesses. Therefore, effective management is required for succession-planning, particularly from the perspective of the successor.

This study, therefore, responds to calls for more in-depth quantitative studies on family businesses in general and on Black-owned family businesses in South Africa in particular. This study will evaluate the significance of parent influence on NGFMs to join Black family-owned businesses in South Africa. This research will assist family business owners and their families in understanding their children's intentions, designing and evolving an appropriate system to instill necessary traits, skills and attitudes in the children, preparing them for upcoming challenges, adding new perspectives to the family business and ensuring its profitability and long-term growth.

The vulnerability of the tourism industry to an array of risks, encompassing family-related, small- and medium-sized enterprise-specific, strategic, tourism-specific and external factors, highlights the landscape within which small and medium family enterprises (SMFEs) operate. Although SMFEs are an important stakeholder in the dynamic tourism sector, they are not one homogenous group of firms, but have different strategic orientations. This study aims to investigate the interplay between strategic orientation and risk perception to better understand SMFEs risk perception as it is impacting their decision-making processes, resilience and long-term survival. The authors investigate how different strategic orientations contribute to different perspectives on risk among owner-managers.

Based on a qualitative data corpus of 119 face-to-face interviews, the authors apply various coding rounds to better understand the relationship between strategic orientations and the perceptions of risks. Firstly, the authors analysed the owner–manager interviews and identified three groups of different strategic orientations: proactive and sustainability-oriented SMFE, destination-affirmative and resilience-oriented SMFE and passive SMFE. Secondly, the authors coded the interviews for different risks identified. The authors identified that the three groups show differences in the risk perceptions.

The data unveil that the three groups of SMFEs have several differences in how they perceive risks. Proactive and sustainability-oriented SMFEs prioritize business risks, demonstrating a penchant for innovation and sustainability. Destination-affirmative and resilience-oriented SMFEs perceive a broader range of risks, tying their investments to destination development, emphasizing family and health risks and navigating competitive pressures. Passive SMFEs, primarily concerned with external risks, exhibit limited awareness of internal and strategic risks, resist change and often defer decision-making to successors. The findings underscore how different strategic orientations influence risk perceptions and decision-making processes within SMFEs in the tourism industry.

The authors contribute to existing knowledge include offering a comprehensive status quo of perceived risks for different strategic orientations, a notably underexplored area. In addition, the differences with respect to risk perception shown in the paper suggest that simplified models ignoring risk perception may be insufficient for policy recommendations and for understanding the dynamics of the tourism sector. For future research, the authors propose to focus on exploring the possible directions in which strategic orientation and risk perception influence one another, which might be a limitation of this study due to its qualitative nature.

Varying strategic orientations and risk perceptions highlight the diversity within the stakeholder group of SMFE. Recognizing differences allows for more targeted interventions that address the unique concerns and opportunities of each group and can thus improve the firm’s resilience (Memili et al., 2023) and therefore leading to sustainability destinations development. The authors suggest practical support for destination management organizations and regional policymakers, aimed especially at enhancing the risk management of passive SMFEs. Proactive SMFE could be encouraged to perceive more family risks.

Viewing tourism destinations as a complex stakeholder network, unveiling distinct risk landscapes for various strategic orientations of one stakeholder has the potential to benefit the overall destination development. The proactive and sustainability-oriented SMFEs are highly pertinent as they might lead destinations to further development and create competitive advantage through innovative business models. Passive SMFEs might hinder the further development of the destination, e.g. through missing innovation efforts or succession.

Although different studies explore business risks (Forgacs and Dimanche, 2016), risks from climate change (Demiroglu et al., 2019), natural disasters (Zhang et al., 2023) or shocks such as COVID-19 (Teeroovengadum et al., 2021), this study shows that it does not imply that SMFE as active stakeholder perceive such risk. Rather, different strategic orientations are in relation to perceiving risks differently. The authors therefore open up an interesting new field for further studies, as risk perception influences the decision-making of tourism actors, and therefore resilience.

This research aims to better understand the factors and determinants that shape the job satisfaction of European family business owners.

The study is based on a unique sample of 11,362 European family business owners surveyed within the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) framework, and the main findings were obtained by estimating ordered logistic regression models.

The authors show that only 26.8% of European family business owners are women, which underlines the gender imbalance in family business ownership, and the authors' results also report that their job satisfaction is significantly lower compared to males. The authors also find the highest job satisfaction amongst family business owners with master-level degrees and point out several interesting statistically significant differences across the industry focus of the family business.

This research contributes to the body of knowledge on the job satisfaction of family business owners by conducting a large-scale study based on a statistically representative sample of European respondents.

Family business sustainability is a critical issue. This study considers if adopting a strategic entrepreneurship orientation can support the sustainability of a family business.

A qualitative approach is used, in which semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve family business owners. Data collected during the interviews provides insights into understanding, practices, motivations, behaviours and attitudes relating to sustainability.

Although awareness of sustainability processes and procedures is found to be low, sustainability is important to the family business. However, sustainability is not managed or implemented systematically.

The paper presents a new model to describe the sustainability practices of family businesses. Adoption of strategic entrepreneurship is advocated as mechanism for improving sustainability. Practical and policy implications are suggested to enhance the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives in family business settings.

The institutional context in which family firms operate influences their behaviour and performance, yet literature reviews seldom analyse family firms on a regional basis. To fill this gap, this review aims to present research on family entrepreneurship in the transition economies of the Visegrád countries (V4). In this particular group of European economies, the current formal institutions have largely evolved along Western European lines. However, the transformation of informal institutions appears to be still in its infancy.

In order to identify the most representative authors, the methodologies used, the main research topics and to establish a future research agenda, the authors selected, through a systematic process, 112 papers from the Web of Science up to the year 2022. The authors performed a bibliographic analysis using clustering algorithms, complemented by a traditional literature review.

The performance of family firms in transition economies has been the subject of very little research. The results allowed the authors to identify four main areas of research: governance, innovation, sustainability, competitive advantage and considering the influence of the region's characteristics on family business behaviour.

Studies from transition economies can contribute to a broader understanding of family firms in terms of the impact of the institutional environment (especially the influence of sociological changes and specific historical experiences of family members) on their long-term planning, socioemotional wealth (SEW) protection and ethics. In light of recent events, research from the region may also contribute to the understanding of how and to what extent “familiness” influences crisis management or socially responsible behaviour in family firms.

The efficiency of each of an organization’s individual workers determines its effectiveness. The study aims to explore the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational effectiveness with employee performance as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 800 police officers in the Greater Accra and Tema regions. The data were supported by the hypothesized relationship. Construct reliability and validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis. The proposed model and hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling.

The results show that career planning and employee performance were significantly related. Self-managed teams and employee performance were shown to be nonsignificantly related. Similarly, performance management and employee performance were shown to be nonsignificantly related. Employee performance significantly influenced organizational effectiveness. The results further indicate that employee performance mediates the relationship between HRM practices and organizational effectiveness.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s police service focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers for the police administration in the adoption, design and implementation of well-articulated and proactive HRM practices to improve the abilities, skills, knowledge and motivation of officer’s to inordinately enhance the effectiveness of the service.

By evidencing empirically that employee performance mediates the relationship between HRM practice and organizational effectiveness, the study extends the literature.

The study aspires to enhance comprehension of the intricate interplay between supply chain management (SCM) and resilience in family businesses, thereby offering valuable insights to managers and policymakers endeavouring to foster resilience in uncertain environments.

Commencing from the premise that family businesses (FBs) prioritize the preservation of socio-emotional wealth (SEW) when formulating strategic decisions, this study endeavours to advance understanding of supply chain practices adopted by FBs and their direct impact on resilience during crisis situations or economically challenging periods. Through an exploratory case study of nine FBs, the present research reveals four pivotal strategies in SCM that contribute to their resilience: (i) reorganization of inventory management; (ii) cultivating close relationships with suppliers; (iii) emphasizing product quality and customer retention; and (iv) implementing cost reduction measures to bolster resilience. The aim of the study is to provide an in-depth understanding of the intricate interplay between SCM and resilience in FBs, thereby offering valuable insights to managers and policymakers endeavouring to foster resilience in uncertain environments.

Our approach offers a theoretical framework for SCM aligned with prior research on the interplay between characteristics of family businesses and resilience strategies. Furthermore, this paper illustrates how factors such as the emphasis on high-quality products and services by family businesses contribute to achieving non-economic objectives that owners adopt to reconcile family and business needs, creating intrinsic added value for the company. It reveals various challenges in SCM, including inventory organization changes, supplier closures and the significance of customer retention. Family businesses are implementing product and technology enhancements and leveraging digitization to enhance supply chain processes.

This paper contributes significantly to the field of FBs by highlighting the crucial role of SCM in enhancing business resilience during crises. It empirically examines how the SEW characteristics of FBs influence the reconfiguration of their supply chains to enhance resilience, presenting a theoretical model for this context. Our theoretical framework employs an SEW perspective to elucidate how FBs respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic by adapting their SCM processes to safeguard their social and emotional legitimacy, organizational visibility and reputation. These adaptations gain particular relevance during crises or turbulent conditions, potentially leading to alterations in how FBs formulate their supply chain strategies and manage supply chain-related processes.

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.