Family Firm Configurations for High Performance: The Role of Entrepreneurship and Ambidexterity

The performance drivers of family firms have spawned considerable research interest. Almost exclusively this research has relied on independent sets of explanatory variables in linear analyses. These analyses mask the complex interdependencies that are likely to exist among key success factors, leading to faulty theory and misspecified implications for practice. As treatment, the authors propose a configuration approach to family firm performance that accounts for complex interdependencies among entrepreneurial, innovation and family influence conditions. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis of a sample of 129 Finnish family firms, the authors identify sufficient conditions with regard to the existence or absence of antecedent conditions to family firm performance. These conditions include entrepreneurial orientation, exploration and exploitation activities that form causal paths towards family firm performance. To enrich the analysis, the authors theorize and empirically analyse how these conditions might differ in family firms with high and low levels of family influence. They deepen the current understanding of configurations that promote the performance of family firms, offer important implications for theory and practice, and set new directions for future research on the strategic management of family firms. The results are also virtually identical and insensitive to change across subjective and objective performance measures

Family firm configurations for high performance: The role of entrepreneurship and ambidexterity

The performance drivers of family firms have spawned considerable research interest. Almost exclusively this research has relied on independent sets of explanatory variables in linear analyses. These analyses mask the complex interdependencies that are likely to exist among key success factors, leading to faulty theory and misspecified implications for practice. As treatment, we propose a configuration approach to family firm performance that accounts for complex interdependencies among entrepreneurial, innovation and family influence conditions. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of a sample of 129 Finnish family firms, we identify sufficient conditions with regards to the existence or absence of antecedent conditions to family firm performance. These conditions include entrepreneurial orientation, exploration and exploitation activities that form causal paths towards family firm performance. To enrich our analysis, we theorize and empirically analyse how these conditions might differ in family firms with high and low levels of family influence. We deepen the current understanding of configurations that promote the performance of family firms, offer important implications for theory and practice, and set new directions for future research on the strategic management of family firms. Our results are also virtually identical and insensitive to change across subjective and objective performance measures

Knowledge-based processing for aircraft flight control

This Contractor Report documents research in Intelligent Control using knowledge-based processing in a manner dual to methods found in the classic stochastic decision, estimation, and control discipline. Such knowledge-based control has also been called Declarative, and Hybid. Software architectures were sought, employing the parallelism inherent in modern object-oriented modeling and programming. The viewpoint adopted was that Intelligent Control employs a class of domain-specific software architectures having features common over a broad variety of implementations, such as management of aircraft flight, power distribution, etc. As much attention was paid to software engineering issues as to artificial intelligence and control issues. This research considered that particular processing methods from the stochastic and knowledge-based worlds are duals, that is, similar in a broad context. They provide architectural design concepts which serve as bridges between the disparate disciplines of decision, estimation, control, and artificial intelligence. This research was applied to the control of a subsonic transport aircraft in the airport terminal area

Does consultation count for corruption? The causal relations in the EU-28

Consultation is a policy instrument geared toward stakeholder engagement in the formulation of primary and secondary legislation. It ensures certain categories of actors can access draft proposals, examine the evidence produced by government or regulators, provide comments and receive feedback. Using an original dataset of consultation design across the EU-28, we examine how variations in combinations of consultation design matter for perceptions of corruption. Using Ostrom’s Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT), we develop expectations about the causal effects of combinations of formal consultation rules together with the condition of social capital, which captures important attributes of the context in which consultation operates. We test our expectations using set-theoretic techniques. Our findings indicate: formal consultation rules are rarely sufficient for mitigating perceptions of corruption, legally prescribed procedures are often replaced by informal rules, and the limited effect of formal consultation rules on perceptions of corruption is due to an incomplete design of the procedures

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.