Search results

The political behavior of founders, families and their firms in the form of campaign contributions has not been explored by family business scholars. Yet partisan and ideological campaign contributions raise a range of governance issues and hold implications for myriad stakeholders, including investors, employees, customers and the public. The purpose of this paper compares and contrasts the campaign contributions of founder- and family-controlled firms relative to managerially governed firms and develops theoretical explanations for observed differences.

This paper develops a “principal owner” hypothesis based upon a typology of firm ownership characteristics (founder/family control or not; publicly traded or privately held). This hypothesis is tested by multivariate empirical analyses of the campaign contributions of 251 firms across 14 industries with four types of ownership structures.

Founder- and family-controlled firms are more partisan and ideological relative to other firms in their industry and this finding is consistent across industries. Founders and family members influence political behavior, including in publicly traded firms.

Given potential controversies raised by ideological and partisan campaign contributions and the unpredictable returns on political investment, it behooves founders and their family members to assess the impact of their political behavior on the business and on key stakeholders.

This paper is the first to raise governance issues related to founders’ and families’ political spending and develops original insights into the ideological and political behavior of these businesses.

This study documents the role of relational trust in an afterschool organization and its influences on young people’s experiences.

Through a 10-month ethnographic study of one afterschool program that teaches teens how to make documentaries, I demonstrate that the confluence of blurred organizational goals; weak relational trust among staff; and funding pressures may have the unintended consequence of exploiting students for their work products and life stories.

The study finds that, while not all organizations function with student work at its center, many afterschool organizations are under increasing pressures to document student gains through tangible measures.

Implications from these findings reveal the need for developing strong relationships among staff members as well as establishing transparency in funding afterschool programs from within the organization and from foundations in order to provide quality programming for young people.

This study informs organizational theory, specifically in terms of measures of variation in relational trust within an organization and its influence on young people. This chapter includes student accounts of experiences with staff to enhance the significance of relational trust.

The rise of the sharing economy has brought with it a huge variety of new organizational forms and innovative business models. An integral part of these forms and models is the communities and members of sharing-economy organizations, since they significantly contribute to value creation for these organizations. Relying on community member contributions, though, is a challenge for these organizations because fluid community boundaries and voluntary membership makes it difficult to coordinate their activities. This chapter investigates the under-researched question of how sharing-economy organizations govern the actions of their community members. Following an abductive approach that included site visits, participant observations, and 67 interviews, we develop a framework that illustrates four different types of governance: pure market, pure clan, market-hierarchy hybrid, and clan-hierarchy hybrid. The framework explains differences among these types depending on the main activity (providing resources or producing jointly) and the primary aim of the community (business orientation or social orientation). This study thus contributes to research on both governance in general and to sharing-economy organizations in particular by capturing the variety and diversity of community forms, governance practices, and business-model configurations.

This qualitative study attempts to understand what kinds of evolutionary selection and variation occur in family businesses during the preparation of a managerial and ownership succession.

The study was conducted by interviewing members of one family business in Louisiana, USA and one in Finland in order to contribute to the understanding of succession preparation in small family businesses with two generations. Evolutionary economics was adapted for this interdisciplinary study to explain evolutionary changes in a family business succession.

The findings indicate that both selection and variation can take place through different routes during the preparatory phase of a family business succession. Selection is influenced both by the founder and next generations. However, it does not occur in company A due to the reluctance of the younger generation. In company B selection is processed through joint thinking and visioning. This will lead to variation which is shaped by both generations.

This study is based on qualitative interpretation. Limitations of the study are the small number of informants and the lack of generalization of the results.

This study shows that selection and variation are intertwined. If selection does not occur in a family business, it leads to no variation between the generations. However, exits are possible; death and birth of companies are part of the life cycle of family businesses.

Evolutionary thinking has not been studied recently among family firms except in the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary thinking offers a variety of topics to study in the future.

Entrepreneurship research has grown in both quality and quantity over the past decade, as many theoretical innovations and important empirical research findings have been introduced to the field. However, theoretical approaches to understanding entrepreneurship remain fragmented, and empirical findings are unstable across different contexts. This chapter describes features of a multi-level process view of new venture emergence that adds coherence to the entrepreneurship theory jungle and brings order to idiosyncratic empirical results, by explaining how ideas become organized into new ventures. The centerpiece of this effort is enactment theory, a general process approach specifically developed to explain organizing processes. Enactment theory – and Campbellian evolutionary theorizing more generally – has a long history of use within and across multiple levels of analysis. Consequently, the description here illustrates how organizing unfolds across multiple levels of analysis and multiple phases of development. After describing the theorizing assumptions and multi-level process view of new venture organizing, the chapter explores implications of applying this perspective by suggesting new research directions and interpretations of prior work. The aim is to advocate process theorizing as a more productive approach to understanding new venture emergence.

The fundamental component of Confucian culture is clan culture, which stresses that family ties are the most important of all social relationships and have an essential impact on the governance model of family firms in Southeast Asian countries, especially in China. This study investigates complex relationships among family firm succession and corporate governance reform in the context of Chinese clan culture.

Drawing upon the analysis of altruistic behavior and conflict in succession process in family firm, the study uses a moderation model to capture the relationships between succession and governance reform in the context of clan culture. This study conducts an empirical study on 295 Chinese listed family firms that initiated intergenerational succession from 2008 to 2018 to test the model.

The empirical results suggest that the different stages of the succession will positively affect the family firm's governance reform, whether it is the stage in which the successor takes over the firm or the stage in which the successor completely controls the firm. Furthermore, the succession-governance reform relationship is negatively moderated by the clan concept of the actual controller.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how succession in the family firm can accelerate corporate governance reform (transition from relation-based governance to rule-based governance). The research results provide evidence from the firm-level under the Chinese clan culture context to understand the complex relationship between succession and corporate governance.

This paper aims to create a connection between entrepreneurial learning and succession planning in family-owned businesses (FOB), and how they work together to improve a firm’s chances of survival beyond the founder within a Ghanaian context.

Through a phenomenological study, this work investigates succession planning processes in FOB, with the objective of developing a succession model suitable for the Ghanaian context. Using a constructivist perspective, six family businesses were studied, interviewing the founder, successor, family members, employees and customers therein.

Existing knowledge has been confirmed that succession is not a one-off event, but a process that takes place over time, requiring the buy-in of not just the founder and successor, but also other stakeholders, including the successor’s siblings and spouse (if any), whose support is imperative to the success of the process. This study reviewed and synthesised relevant research data into a conceptual framework.

This study can potentially inform the basis of a longitudinal study, using the developed framework to confirm its robustness. It can also inform further quantitative research to validate the generalisability of the framework.

The study contributes to FOB practice, the holistic succession model spanning the founder’s entry into the business, to the post-succession period, and incorporating contextual intervening variables such as polygamy, religion and systems of inheritance, while also contributing to theory by proposing a comprehensive succession process theory to enhance understanding of the process.

The study contributes increased understanding of the essential elements in the succession process in an African context, what appropriate measures can be implemented for effective succession outcomes, and how key stakeholders of the business can be effectively managed as part of overseeing the succession process for positive organisational outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to develop understanding of how open-access (OA) studios as creative social enterprises (CSEs) can negotiate coexisting creative, social and economic missions, and manage the motivations of stakeholders. In particular, it explores how this affects management practices and ways in which diverse social actors engage with the organisation and each other. This paper expands on the existing literature on social enterprises in relation to multiple value and stakeholder management and also contributes to the makerspace and wider creative industries literature.

This paper uses a qualitative, single-case case study of an OA studio established as a social enterprise based on analysis of secondary texts, interviews and observation.

It is identified that a multifaceted value system creates both challenges and opportunities in relation to communal resource management and community development. Tensions between the creative and economic priorities of members and both the economic imperatives of the organisation and its social mission are also highlighted. It is suggested that despite these challenges, the OA model presents an opportunity to develop more collective forms of creative practice and support a reframing of the creative economy.

As a single case study in the geographical context of the United Kingdom, limited generalisations on OA management in other countries can be made without further investigation.

There are practical implications for OA and other CSE founders in relation to resource and membership management and facilitating inclusive access. There are creative industries policy implications in the encouragement of more sustainable collaborative approaches.

This paper contributes to the literature on social entrepreneurship, makerspaces and the creative industries by developing the understanding of OA studios and CSE management and the internal dynamics that influence organisational and social outcomes.

Multiple forces that shape the identities of adolescents and young adults also influence their subsequent career choices. Early work experiences are key among these forces. Recognizing this, youth service programs have emerged worldwide with the hope of shaping participants’ future trajectories through boosting engagement in civically oriented activities and work. Despite these goals, past research on these programs’ impact has yielded mixed outcomes. Our goal is to understand why this might be the case.

We rely on interview, archival, and longitudinal survey data to examine young adults’ experiences of a European youth service program.

A core feature of youth service programs, namely their dual identity of helping others (i.e., service beneficiaries) and helping oneself (i.e., participants), might partly explain the program’s mixed outcomes. We find that participants focus on one of the organization’s identities largely to the exclusion of the other, creating a dynamic in which their interactions with members who focus on the other identity create challenges and dominate their program experience, to the detriment of a focus on the organization and its goals. This suggests that a previously overlooked feature of youth service programs (i.e., their dual identity) might prove both a blessing for attracting many diverse members and a curse for achieving desired outcomes.

More broadly, our results suggest that dual identity organizations might attract members focused on a select identity, but fail to imbue them with a blended identity; thus, limiting the extent to which such organizations can truly “redirect” future career choices.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of family ownership (FO) and family control (FC) on firm preference for debt financing and to test whether FC affects the association between FO and debt financing.

Debt financing was measured by the total debt to total assets ratio, whereas FO was proxied by family-individual, family-institutional, and family-total shares. Additionally, the appointment of family members, founders, and descendants to CEO positions and the dual role of their CEO positions were used to proxy FC. As a panel data technique, the dynamic estimator of the generalized method of moments (GMM) was employed for a sample of 80 Egyptian listed firms during the 2011–2018 period.

The findings showed that debt financing is positively affected by family-individual shares and family-total shares and negatively affected by family-institutional shares. FC, as proxied by family and founder CEOs, and the dual role of their CEO positions has led to more debt consumption as a mechanism to preserve family dominance over the business. Conversely, the presence and the dual role of descendant CEOs have led to less debt utilization due to their risk aversion behavior. Additionally, we showed that the association between FO and debt financing is affected by various FC patterns.

This study highlighted that firm preference for debt financing is affected by the noneconomic motivations of family CEOs, such as preserving family socioemotional wealth.