Empirical studies comparing productivity between family and non-family firms have produced contradictory results, which traditional managerial theories have struggled to explain. To address this research gap, we employ a context-theorizing approach to explore whether the quality of local institutions and place connections influence the productivity of family firms vis-& agrave;-vis their non-family counterparts. We develop a theoretical model that integrates corruption-trust theory and place attachment theory to examine the impact of the local context on both family and non-family firms. Our findings, based on a sample of Italian manufacturing firms, reveal that family firms are more productive than non-family counterparts in low-quality institutional contexts. However, this advantage diminishes as the quality of local institutions improves. Contrary to expectations, place attachment is negatively associated with productivity on average. This negative association is concentrated among non-family firms, whereas family firms appear largely unaffected. For family firms, the impact of place attachment is contingent on institutional quality. In low-quality institutional environments, place attachment further reduces the productivity of family firms, suggesting a lock-in effect. In contrast, in high-quality institutional contexts, place attachment becomes a source of productivity advantage for family firms.

PurposePlace attachment enables CEOs to leverage local resources, access information, and seize business opportunities, thereby enhancing firm performance. However, its influence may vary between family and non-family firms due to the family's socioeconomic ties, nonfinancial goals and local community engagement. This study introduces the multidimensional construct of place attachment to business research, extending its theoretical foundations from environmental psychology to organizational studies.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from survey data of 528 French firms, this study uses a stepwise empirical strategy - combining exploratory factor analysis and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) - to test and validate the construct of place attachment and examine its relationship with firm performance.FindingsPlace attachment emerges as a reflective second-order construct composed of five dimensions: place identity, place dependence, nature bonding, family bonding and friend bonding. Multigroup analysis reveals that, while the structure of place attachment is consistent across both family and non-family businesses, its impact on performance varies. The CEO's place attachment is positively associated with economic, employee and environmental performance in non-family businesses but shows no significant relationship in family ones.Originality/valueBy integrating the construct of place attachment into the business domain, this study offers a novel framework for understanding how CEOs' socioemotional connections to a given place shape firm-level outcomes, advancing the context-sensitive approach of management theory. This contextualization enriches family business literature by emphasizing place as a critical, yet overlooked, element of organizational behavior and strategic decision-making.

It is often assumed that family ownership, which consists of individuals who share a common history and values, is homogenous. However, family owners exhibit varied patterns of engagements toward ownership because of differences in their roles, goals, needs and expectations within the family and the business. The research gap lies in the limited understanding of the heterogeneity among family members in relation to ownership. To address this research gap, this article adopts a configurative approach to develop a typology of family owner styles grounded in a psychological perspective and to validate it empirically. The proposed classification model combines two psychological states—agency stewardship intention and harvesting-creation motivation—which identify four distinct family owner styles: Active, Intra-Entrepreneurial, Entrepreneurial, and Detached owners. Additionally, by bridging the gap between academia and practice, this study presents a free access self-assessment online application, enabling family owners to identify their own ownership style.

Recently family firms seen a delicate renewed interest in regional science, regional studies and economic geography and similarly, spatial and regional contexts have been addressed in family business studies. Those strands are driven by interest in the heterogeneity of family firms as the most common type of organization all over the world (family spatialities) and the heterogeneity of spatial and regional context as a significant selection filter for the behavior and performance of family firms (spatial familiness). This editorial addresses these unique settings of family firms and the nature of spatial/regional contexts in a greater depth, by providing a concise literature overview on contextualizing research, by presenting a star shaped model to systemize research around spatial and regional contexts, and by suggesting further research directions. Our proposed star-shaped model frames a holistic view on spatial and regional contexts though a scientific agenda that differentiates between theoretical explanations and modelling (spatial concepts), empirical descriptions and analyses (spatial factors, spatial structures, spatial settings), and policy recommendations (spatial policies). These elements are shaped by scalar (spatial frames) and temporal frames (spatial processes). Most of these spatial building blocks and their interplay are explored by the articles in this special issue.

This study explains family ownership of listed firms in developed countries using a holistic perspective that integrates three approaches: the formal institutional context, cultural context, and socio-economic development. We hypothesize that in developed economies, where economic development is robust and formal institutional voids are less pronounced, there is an interaction between culture and the quality of formal institutions that helps explain family ownership. Specifically, culture becomes more important in influencing family ownership of listed firms as the quality of formal institutions increases. We analyse the ownership composition of a large sample of listed firms from 17 European countries over the period 2009–2015. After conducting descriptive statistics and bivariate correlation analysis to screen the data, we employ panel-data Tobit models to test the hypotheses. Overall, our study contributes to the current debate on context theorising in the family business field by demonstrating that family ownership is unevenly distributed due to contextual dimensions.

This editorial introduces the nexus between family firms, hidden champions, and regional development from an economic geography perspective. Family firms constitute the backbones of most local and regional economies, and some of them are even so-called hidden champions, which are global leaders in their market niches. At the same time, both entities are spatial sources of heterogeneity able to empower regions with difficult-to-imitate competitive and locational advantages that originate from the stickiness of their economic actors. It is mainly an empirical task to prove if this regional distinctiveness results from the structures and embeddings that family firms and hidden champions stand for (e.g., regional persistence and local rooting), and from the practices how these entities are owned, governed, managed (e.g., long-term business relations with [local] suppliers, customers, labour force, international excellence). By outlining three infant research directions on family firms and hidden champions from an economic geography perspective, this editorial frames the field, introduces and locates the contributions in this special issue therein, and calls for a spatially informed view on this rising cross-disciplinary field.

PurposeThis perspective article aims to summarise the understanding of the link between regional development and family business and explore potential pathways for further investigations.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed a scoping review methodology which attempts to explore a new topic of study and unveil its main concepts and relationships.FindingsThis study emphasises the need to enhance the cross-fertilisation of knowledge to bridge the gap between studies on regional development and family business. In addition to the traditional research pathways towards discerning the impact of formal and informal institutional contexts and economic and geographical locations on family business behaviour and performance, this perspective article encourages future researchers to delve into the regional-level mechanisms through which family businesses can influence and contribute to regional economic and social outcomes.Originality/valueThis perspective study employs a context theorising lens to examine the connection between regional development and family business.

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context. Originality/value 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.

This encyclopedia entry focuses on research that links informal institutional context and family business. It provides an overview of what institutional context is, the differences between informal institutions and culture, and family business roles across different informal institutional contexts. Additionally, this entry explores further opportunities to expand the debate about theorizing about context in family business research that could enrich our understanding of how family businesses behave and perform.

PurposeBy investigating the reactions of family businesses to COVID-19 pandemic this article aims to explaining how family firms are capable to preserve employment during hardship.Design/methodology/approachStemming from resource-based-view, we theorise that familiness is not directly associated with new hiring but instead fully mediated by pivoting strategic decisions (the propensity to transform the business).FindingsOur findings show that familiness triggers pivoting strategic decisions and consequently increases the likelihood of new hiring. Additionally, we found that the involvement of multiple generations strengthens this relationship.Practical implicationsFamily firms must consolidate their family human and social resources (familiness) and assure the presence of multiple generations in the firm because they can leverage their entrepreneurial disposition and increase the need to preserve employment and new hires during crises.Originality/valueThe main contribution lies in the explanation of the mechanisms that family firms deploy to overcome a crisis and thus explains why some family firms are more resilient than others in relation to firm's employment during hardship.

As not all firms benefit to the same extent from regional competitiveness, this article investigates the influence of the regional context on the productivity of a sample of family and non-family manufacturing firms in Spain. Using a multilevel approach to account for the nested structure of the data, and a composite indicator of regional competitiveness, to capture the spatial endowment of tangible and intangible resources, we found family firms to be more sensitive to the regional context than non-family businesses. Cross-level interactions show that family firms achieve higher productivity gains from their location in more competitive regions than their non-family counterparts. This result is in line with our theoretical arguments postulating the unique social capital of family firms which allows them to benefit most from location advantages. Implications for regional and family business studies, as well as policymakers, are discussed.

The existing typologies, classifications that identify types of family firms based on specific characteristics, aim to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneity of family businesses. However, these typologies fall short in thoroughly exploring and predicting behavioural and performance consequences associated with being categorized within specific classifications. Furthermore, the majority of the existing analyses have been empirically tested in one single country. To address these two research gaps, we use a sample of 814 small- and medium-sized family firms operating in 21 countries, collected by the STEP Project Global Consortium. This sample is employed to classify family firms based on their corporate governance similarities and explore their behavioural and performance patterns. Building on the principles of the configurative approach, we find that each of the four family firm configuration—group of family firms with related corporate governance mechanisms—has a unique yet similar combination of patterns in terms of transgenerational entrepreneurship practices, non-economic goals, and firm performance. Additionally, expanding on the isomorphic effect, we find evidence indicating that certain world macroregions exhibit a greater propensity for specific corporate governance configurations compared to others.

Drawing on the micro-foundation of institutional logics, this chapter aims to explore how successors address the demand to introduce changes in their family firms. When a successor takes over a family firm, market and family pressures challenge the existing family business model; however, these pressures do not necessarily result in changes. Relying on a single case study, we discovered that successors respond to these pressures based on the level of successor status quo in terms of the family and business logics. To generalize our results, this chapter presents a model of change during the succession process.

How do exporters react to changes in formal institutional contexts? We hypothesise that when the formal institutional context reduces uncertainty, family-firm exporters increase their productivity more than those of non-family firms. To examine our general conjecture empirically, we leveraged the shift from a flexible to a fixed exchange rate regime that occurred with the adoption of the euro. Our findings showed that, after adopting the euro, intra-European Union (EU) family-firm exporters achieved higher productivity than non-family-firm exporters. Owing to the elimination of exchange rate volatility, intra-EU family-firm exporters, who were particularly sensitive to uncertainty because of their specificities related to wealth concentration, family-oriented goals, and corporate transparency, became more willing to adopt investment decisions than intra-EU non-family-firm exporters. Consequently, these investments yielded significant improvements in the productivity levels of the former group. We also found that the gains in productivity were not evenly distributed among intra-EU family-firm exporters. The introduction of the euro facilitated the transition of intra-EU family-firm exporters from low to intermediate productivity levels. Moreover, it allowed those with initially intermediate productivity levels to remain in the same group, while reducing the likelihood of falling behind high-productivity intra-EU family-firm exporters.