Family Businesses and Adaptation: A Dynamic Capabilities Approach

The main objective of this research was to propose a framework centred on the dynamic capabilities approach, and to be applied in the context of family businesses’ adaption to their changing business environment. Data were gathered through interviews with ten FBs operating in Western Australia. Based on the findings, the clusters of activities, sensing, seizing, and transforming emerged as key factors for firms’ adaptation, and were reinforced by firms’ open culture, signature processes, idiosyncratic knowledge, and valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable attributes. Thus, the usefulness of the proposed framework was confirmed. Implications and future research opportunities are presented. © 2018, The Author(s)

Family firms going international: Integrating corporate identity‐building processes and socioemotional wealth dimensions

This study aims to improve understanding of how identity-building processes shape corporate identity and how dimensions of socioemotional wealth affect internationalization pathways in a family firm. The paper uses an in-depth case study of an Italian family firm internationally recognized as excellent in its industry. We developed an integrative theoretical model, combining socioemotional wealth frameworks and elements of the corporate identity mix. This enabled us to incorporate more theoretical knowledge from the field of international management into the domain of family business research. The latent construct of socioemotional wealth provides an in-depth understanding of the multidimensional nature of corporate identity-building processes and shows the intertwined nature of corporate identity and the "affective endowment" in the development of internationalization strategies