Built upon the mixed gamble perspective, we used a recent survey on Chinese family firms (FFs) and found that increased family influence lowers Chinese FF environmental proactiveness, as they show a peculiar tendency to take a financial view rather than a socioemotional wealth view. Moreover, we found that increased resource endowment attenuates this tendency, whereas provincial marketization strengthens it. However, entrepreneur reputation does not have a significant moderating effect. Overall, the study enriches an understanding of environmental proactiveness for FFs, organizational heterogeneity, and institutional differences. It also introduces new elements into the mixed gamble framework.

This paper addresses an important knowledge gap regarding the internationalization of family businesses. To understand the specific factors that influence the internationalization of these firms, this paper investigates the role and articulation of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and family social capital (FSC) on internationalization performance. Our findings reveal that the more entrepreneurial the family business, the higher the likelihood of identifying and exploiting business opportunities in foreign markets. The moderating effect that FSC can have on the dynamics between EO and internationalization indicates that this relational family specific asset facilitates organizational stability and performance enhancement.

Family firms (FF) represent an important business segment worldwide, contributing greatly to their country's GDP and social well-being, giving employment and contributing to communities' development. Due to their particularities, these organizations also face various challenges, one of the most relevant being inter-generational succession – transversal to all FF and their consequent sustainability over time. Given the importance of this issue, through a systematic literature review (SLR), the intention is to provide a general, wide-ranging view of the succession strategies most used by FF, mapping the existing literature. A total of 84 articles from the Scopus database were analysed. Through content analysis and bibliographic coupling techniques (VosViewer), four thematic groups of articles were identified, namely: (i) socio-emotional wealth and corporate governance, (ii) leadership and inter-generational conflicts, (iii) managing succession process and (iv) succession planning drivers. These themes/clusters originated a theoretical framework that depicts the investigation status of the field, and detailed suggestions for future investigations by cluster were also provided. Despite the relevance and long age of succession in FF, this is the first SLR to directly address succession strategies, offering implications for academics and practitioners, to guide a smooth succession.

This article rethinks the relationship between trade and industry in the development of Indian capitalism, focusing on Tata, pioneers in textile and steel production. It shows how two little-known affiliated trading companies, R.D. Tata & Co. in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kobe, and Tata Limited in London, played a crucial intermediary role in securing financing and market access for the parent firm in Bombay while simultaneously increasing its exposure to the effects of global crises. Tata's ultimately dominant position in a protected national economy was due to the contingent failure of these trading companies rather than a foregone conclusion.

Research on innovation in family firms has been increasing recently; however, the results are mixed, especially for non-listed firms. Based on internal social capital, we explore whether the relational antecedents of innovation are contingent on family involvement in management. Using a sample of 172 Spanish family small and medium-sized enterprises – an organisational form with prominent social and emotional factors – we test a structural model that examines the influence exerted by family involvement in the top management team on the relationships between innovation and internal social capital – in the form of family social capital and non-family social capital (family group and non-family group, respectively). The empirical findings obtained using the partial least squares technique show the importance of family involvement in management in such relationships in family firms. Family involvement in management was found to have negative effects in the relationship between internal social capital and innovation.

The principal–principal (PP) perspective of corporate governance shows that multiple large shareholder (MLS) structure has competing monitoring and entrenchment governance effects. We argue that the dominant effect depends on contest for control among large shareholders and the number of large shareholders involved. Using data from Chinese family listed companies from 2004 to 2007, this study shows inverse U-shaped relationships between contest for control and corporate market value, as measured by Tobin's Q, and between the number of large shareholders and corporate market value. Findings indicate that at low to medium levels of contest for control or number of large shareholders, formal institutions can strengthen MLS structure's monitoring effect and can help this effect last longer. As a whole, the findings extend the institution-based view in the context of family corporate governance by showing that formal institutions can shape the ability of MLS structure to exert governance.

This paper provides empirical evidence of family firm corporate governance structures, by examining a set of corporate governance characteristics of 132 non-financial Spanish listed firms. Results show that family firm boards present differential characteristics and that different patterns of family ownership configurations do not affect family firm corporate governance structures. We find that Spanish family firm boards are smaller than those in non-family firms. Family firm directors own a larger fraction of firm shares and have longer Chairman tenure than non-family firms, and family firms use fewer voluntary board committees – such as nomination and remuneration committees and executive committees. Besides, family firm boards and committees are biased towards insiders. Whether these differential characteristics affect other minority non-family shareholders negatively remains an open question.

Family business research has grown over the last decade and there are increasing requests for deeper insights into the nature and workings of these organizations. Currently, family business research is dominated by quantitative research methods. In this article, we argue that these studies should be complemented by a research approach that is more apt to capture the specific complexity and dynamics unique to family businesses. We suggest that the interpretive approach within the broader umbrella of qualitative methods has this potential. The article discusses issues, choices, requirements and implications for family business scholars engaged in interpretive research. We also offer suggestions for how editors and reviewers can assess interpretative research.

Within the traditional business organizational climate in which an executive coach operates, the identity of ‘the coached’ (coachee) can be quite clearly differentiated from the business identity. This is not the case within the world of family business, where the incumbent family business leader, the successor, the business and the family culture, are interwoven. This unique feature of family business means that, for executive coaching to be effective within the family business environment, a radically different approach to that used in traditional business environments must be adopted – namely, the consideration of what generally are thought of as noneconomic variables. This article represents a first attempt to effectively address the key and unique variables executive coaches need to know to work within the family business environment.