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The board of directors of a firm is a governing body exercising key top-level decisions. Due to the involvement of the controlling families, boards of directors of family firms have been found to behave differently than those of other organizations. Besides family control, national and/or regional contexts have been suggested to influence how companies are governed. Boards of directors of family firms have been studied mostly in developed regions and knowledge from developing regions such as Latin America is scarce. This chapter summarizes the main findings about boards of directors in family firms and compares this research with our knowledge from Latin America. It discusses the different challenges and opportunities that owners of family firms and boards of directors face in the Latin American context. Finally, it suggests that research on boards of directors of family firms in Latin America has a very promising future as it still has to validate and/or contextualize findings in developed regions, overcome some theoretical and empirical limitations, explore some salient characteristics related to the institutional context in depth, and provide recommendations linking board characteristics and firm performance.

1 Introduction Some interesting new developments have taken place in recent years in the field of ferritic stainless steel (1–16). As a material for chemical apparatus, the common highly alloyed chromium steels as listed in national standards (e.g. in the German Standard DIN 17440) have only found limited applications. The reasons are sensitivity of several of these chromium alloyed stainless steels to intergranular corrosion (especially after welding), lower corrosion resistance compared to austenitic stainless steels, and difficulties in fabricating (especially welding). It has been shown (1–16) that the intrinsic drawbacks of customary ferritics can be overcome by metallurgical measures, primarily keeping the amount of carbon and nitrogen extremely low. The solubility in the ferrite for these two elements in rather low, both occupying interstitial sites. Stainless steels of the type dealt with in this paper are therefore sometimes termed Extra Low Interstitial (ELI)‐ferritic stainless steels. At sufficiently low concentrations of carbon and nitrogen (and some other elements), the sensitivity of ferritic stainless steels to intergranular corrosion is definitely lowered, and their ductility at ambient temperature is increased, i.e. the transition temperature is lowered. An advantage of these steels is their resistance to stress corrosion cracking. They have, so far, shown no sensitivity against chloride stress corrosion cracking under realistic operating conditions. For this reason, cooling water systems using river water with a high chloride content represent a suitable field of application for these steels. They can be welded up to a wall thickness of 3mm without sensitisation and undue loss of impact strength so that tubes for heat exchangers can be made of these steels. Their development has led to alloys ranging from 18 Cr‐2 Mo‐0 Ni to about 28 Cr‐2 Mo‐4 Ni. The present paper will only deal with the 18 Cr‐2 Mo steel because this material can be compared in price and properties with the standard 18 Cr‐9 Ni‐2 Mo austenitic stainless steel. In addition, the material in question has now become available in the form of pipe and sheet.

4 Heat exchanger experiments To study the performance of the ferritic 18 Cr‐2 Mo steel under actual heat exchanger conditions, large scale model heat exchangers were fabricated. After experiments to fabricate heat exchanger plates under standard stretch‐forming conditions, our investigations were confined to heat exchangers of the tubular type.

This study analyses interlocking directorates from the perspective of an emerging market, Mexico, where formal institutions are weak, and family firms with high ownership concentration dominate. It responds to recent calls in the literature on interlocks, which urge the differentiation between family and non-family businesses and to complete more research on emerging economies.

A database was constructed for 89 non-financial companies (52 family-owned) listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange (BMV) from 2001 to 2014. This period includes normal times and an episode of financial crisis (2009–2010). To test the hypotheses, a dynamic panel model (in two stages) is used, applying GMM.

In normal times, the advantages of Board Chairman (COB) interlocks for the performance of publicly traded Mexican family firms are obtained regardless of the weak formal institutional environment. By contrast, during financial crisis, interlocking family COBs are more likely to jointly expropriate minority shareholders with actions that further their family objectives, which mitigates the positive effect of interlocks on performance. These findings contrast with the insignificant effects of COB interlocks found for non-family corporates.

A new framework is proposed which, through agency theory, finds points of concordance among resource dependence and class hegemony theories, to understand the effect of interlocking directorates on the performance of family firms operating in Mexico. The results of the empirical exercise for family companies listed on BMV during normal and financial crisis periods suggest its applicability.

This paper aims to examine the dynamic nexus between corporate governance (CG) and firm performance in hybrid model countries. It also investigates the effect of horizontal agency conflicts on CG adherence.

This research uses vector autoregression methods and dynamic panels to examine the cross-sectional and longitudinal association between CG and performance, using three CG adherence indexes of transparency, management and board governance. The data set includes annual market and firm performance data from a sample of 93 companies trading in the Mexican stock market for the period 2010–2016.

This study finds evidence of dynamic interdependence between CG and firm performance, as well as weak effects of CG adherence on firms’ performance. The adverse effect of increasing return on equity and return on assets (ROE-ROA) gaps on CG adherence, which results from agency conflicts and insider ownership, is likely behind the weak association between CG and firm performance.

The findings in this study provide evidence that hybrid systems weaken the nexus between CG and firm performance. The propensity to prefer banking and bond debt to issuing stocks, as indicated by a greater ROE-ROA gap, points to favorable provisions for majority shareholders, adverse normative environments for minority shareholders and a low level of compliance with CG measures, among other problems.

This systematic literature review investigates the phenomenon of board multiple directorships and its implications for corporate governance and organisational performance.

The study adopts a systematic approach, which involves identifying and analysing relevant research papers on board multiple directorships. This study synthesises the latest research findings to gain insights into the determinants and consequences of multiple directorships. The sample literature was collected from the Scopus database from year 2000 till 2023.

The review reveals several key findings. Firstly, multiple directorships have both positive and negative implications for corporate governance. They can bring value by providing directors access to valuable information and resources from different companies, enhancing board functions and improving firm performance. However, there is a concern that overworked directors may not effectively fulfil their fiduciary responsibilities on any board, compromising their monitoring abilities.

This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by comprehensively reviewing multiple board directorships research and their impact on organisations. This study synthesises the latest research findings and offers valuable insights into the determinants and consequences of this practice. Also, this study highlights the need for effective corporate governance practices that balance multiple directorships’ benefits and potential drawbacks. The study also identifies research themes and suggests potential areas for future research, contributing to the advancement of understanding in board multiple directorships.

International entrepreneurship (IE) has received a considerable amount of attention in the recent decades as a result of globalization enabling access to new international markets and business opportunities. Despite the growing increase in academic publications, IE still faces certain inconsistencies, with doubts remaining as regards its boundaries and the thematic groups making up the field. The purpose of this article is to systematically analyse the IE, mapping the intellectual territory and the evolution of the field.

Indexed to Web of Science( WoS) database until 2021, from 52 journals, 130 articles were selected, applying content analyses techniques to identify the main research lines.

The results reveal that IE presents four conceptual themes/clusters: (1) international business networks and opportunities; (2) institutional environments; (3) the characteristics and motivations of entrepreneurs; and (4) internationalisation drivers and processes. Extant analysis show that IE has progressed immensely, concentrating a good diversity of subtopics and research trends. An integrative framework bringing together 27 years of publications and 67 future research lines, detailed by cluster, were also presented in this study to improve understanding and guide future studies.

This review makes a broad contribution to the IE literature, assisting in consolidating the academic field, expanding and complementing the results of previous theoretical–conceptual studies. We reflect and individually discuss the state of the art of the four streams that characterize IE to identify key themes, points of convergence and advance new subfields.

This article examines the dominant research topics that guide the literature on women's entrepreneurship in family businesses.

The authors used performance and scientific network mapping analyses from bibliometric techniques. Performance analysis was used to identify the most influential journals, authors, countries, co-citation, multidimensional scaling (MDS), hierarchical cluster (HCA) and document analysis to identify dominant research themes.

The research results show that studies on women's entrepreneurship in family businesses are gathered in three clusters. The studies in the first cluster focused on family succession and women's roles. The themes of the succession process, gender bias, leadership and entrepreneurship in the second cluster are intense. Finally, in the third cluster, the themes of women leaders and identity construction dominate.

First, new conceptualizations of female entrepreneurship from family businesses emerge over time (example: “fementerpreneur”); accepting and using these words takes time. For this reason, the authors may have missed the newly emerged concepts in the field of family businesses in the search strategy. Second, although MDS results are widely used in bibliometric research, other forms of MDS analysis may reveal different groups and clusters. Finally, bibliometric analysis is based more on retrospective and dominant themes in the most cited articles, with a heavy emphasis on the most cited papers. Hence, new articles and contributions can be equally important.

Previous studies have not examined the subject of women's entrepreneurship in family businesses. By addressing this issue and setting the agenda for future research, the authors contribute to the literature on women's entrepreneurship in family businesses.