Family Business And Social Capital

This book provides recent ideas, insights, facts, evidence, frameworks, and perspectives on how and why entrepreneurial families are successful over generations. The book focuses on how families successfully implement entrepreneurship across generations. That success, it argues, requires entrepreneurship at the level of the family, not only in the businesses the family owns and manages. Written by noted academics and consultants who are authorities on family entrepreneurship, the chapters provide a comprehensive exploration of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurial families, their motivations, how they behave over time, and, suggestions for how business families can encourage and sustain entrepreneurship. This comprehensive look at family entrepreneurship will serve as a fundamental reference text for family business consultants, owners, and scholars.

The chapters in this cutting edge book comprise scholarly work on social capital in family business along with chapters written by family business owners and advisors. As the research in family business evolves, scholars are exploring the issues that are unique to the field. From the start, research has been closely tied to the real world issues faced by business families. The genesis for this book is a conference on family business and social capital in which a wide variety of issues were presented and discussed. Participants included academics, family business owners and business advisors. Topics covered in the book include social capital as it relates to governance, trust, family and business identity, communication, family councils, workÐfamily balance, and the use of advisors and continuing education to build social capital. Novel in its approach of integrating the voices of scholars, business families, and advisors, this book is an invaluable tool not only for business research and classroom use, but also for business families and their advisors.

Family-owned businesses account for many of the small and medium-sized enterprises that exist around the world in various industries. Due to their unique make up, these firms are often heavily influenced by family dynamics that must be reconciled by family and non-family workers alike in order to ensure the sustainability of the business. As smaller businesses competing against an increasingly globalized economy and more directly impacted by economic instability, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, these businesses must continue to improve their practices and processes in order to not only survive but thrive. The Research Anthology on Strategies for Maintaining Successful Family Firms discusses the strategies, sustainability, and human aspects of family firms in order to understand what sets them apart from other businesses and how they can survive and compete in a globalized economy. This book discusses the unique dynamic brought by family firms that offers both opportunities and challenges for a growing business. Covering topics such as corporate venturing, the family unit, and business ethics, this text is an essential resource for family firms, entrepreneurs, managers, business students, business professors, researchers, and academicians.

The literature on family business has developed significantly over the last years. However, efforts remain to summarize and systematize the main aspects that affect the behavior of this type of company. In this regard, the topic of strategic management has been developed. In this sense, it is especially important to recognize how the family decisively influences the behavior of the company and also to identify how the existence of the company affects family dynamics. Those who manage family businesses, whether family or not, must reconcile both perspectives (business and family) in the definition of strategic objectives, allowing sustainability and continuity in this type of organization. The Handbook of Research on the Strategic Management of Family Businesses provides emerging research that covers how strategic management in the family business has been developed and identifies the objectives that sustain this strategic behavior, the main areas of analysis (family and business), the definition of strategies, and their implementation. Also, the authors of this book review the different scenarios for family firms and propose strategies to tackle the challenges and seize the possibilities to grow in a competitive and dynamic environment. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as human capital, organizational leadership, and knowledge creation, this book is ideally designed for family firms, managers, advisors, consultants, policymakers, business professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

This is the first systematic study of the succession process of Chinese family businesses which reveals what is truly happening during the time of hand-over. In explaining the features of the Chinese way of succession, special attention is paid to the transfer of social capital and guanxi, among other cultural and socioeconomic contexts, which could impact the behaviours and decisions of the family business stakeholders. Carefully selected 63 cases of family firms and the authentic words and experiences of the founders and their second generation are of high relevance in helping the readers to understand Chinese family businesses and their successions as well as to learn from their successes or failures.

Social Capital and Entrepreneurship concludes by examining the tension between the properties of social networks used in entrepreneurship researchers' models and the limited perspective on networks available to practicing entrepreneurs.

This book disputes the traditional argument that the equal inheritance system hinders the growth of Chinese family business, approaching this not only in terms of economic capital, but also in terms of human capital such as education and leadership, and social networks. Zheng argues that most of the family business patriarchs only focus on the passing on economic capital, but give little attention to human capital and social capital when the come to the stage to transfer control to the next level. It further elaborates that the equal inheritance system itself isn’t the destructive force that weakens family business competitiveness, but can assist economic development by generating dynamism and capital. Based on extensive primary research, the work discusses how equal division encourages sibling comparison, analysing how such comparisons initially generate stress and anxiety but will ultimately galvanize competition, benefiting the business. The author also assesses how family division can offer initial economic human and social capitals that can motivate siblings to start their own businesses and be free from the subjugation sometimes associated with a family firm. Through the evaluation of these issues the book argues that the equal inheritance system can be regarded as the origin of the self-employment mentality, which not only fosters the growth of Chinese family business by plays crucial role in promoting economic development. Providing a valuable contribution to the field, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of Chinese and Asian business.

In today’s ever-changing global world, there is a permanent need for anticipating new and evolving customer needs, resource supply constraints, and dynamically changing employee expectations. Sustainable innovation applies to products, services, and technologies as well as new business and organization models. This book provides insights into sustainable innovation trends in various marketing- and management-related fields. Authors critically investigate, amongst others, the sustainability impact of disruptive product design and innovative collaboration solutions within buyer-supplier relationships, along with innovative organizational processes to promote sustainable well-being-productivity synergy in a VUCA world. This volume is a uniquely positioned contribution of interrelated research articles on the sustainability-driven innovation needed for organizational health and future viability.

Deals with the issue of entrepreneurship and family business. This title considers the issues, problems, contexts, or processes that make a family firm more entrepreneurial. It covers topics such as the emergence and growth of family businesses, and the use of entrepreneurial policies, practices and strategies by family firms.

This book focuses on a central success factor for family businesses: maintaining the decision-making ability over generations while not jeopardizing the business due to family conflict, inefficient governance structures, or lack of identification. The authors identify that this is not as easy as the endeavor to bring two social systems together with contradicting logic (family and business) leads to many dangerous pitfalls. This book presents outcomes of a unique research project in which family managers of eleven of the oldest and largest German family businesses, at least the fourth generation, met for more than three years on a regular basis and presented the essence of their family governance structures to each other and to the authors. It was a joint “learning journey” that admits identifying twelve core questions that these families had been answering to keep up the relationship between family and business successfully over generations. Obviously, there is no “right” answer to these questions. The key to success is rather engaging the families in a process to find out their own answers and make them aware of the “two sides”: being a family is different from being a business family.