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.

This article takes a health assets approach to extract policy lessons for Ghana’s present Child and Family Welfare Policy, introduced in 2014. We examine the role of Ghanaian adolescents’ socioeconomic status and family social capital in their subjective well-being using data obtained from a representative survey of adolescents (aged 13-18 years) in Ghana’s Upper West Region. Our empirical results revealed that various sub-components of family social capital, including family sense of belonging, autonomy support, control, and social support, varied with adolescents’ self-reported life satisfaction and happiness after controlling for their family socioeconomic status and other personal characteristics. Once family social capital was controlled for, socioeconomic status explained adolescents’ life satisfaction, but not their happiness. These findings confirm existing studies suggesting that family social capital can function as a protective ‘safety net’ for adolescents with low SES in the specific Ghanaian context. Consequently, this study contributes to the literature by arguing that, in order to develop Ghana’s Child and Family Welfare Policy further, adolescent ‘social empowerment’ ought to be accentuated alongside its current focus on enhancing household ‘economic empowerment’ via social protection interventions.

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.