Strategic Persistence, Dominant Strategy and Firm Performance in Publicly Traded Family Firms

One neglected yet very important feature of family business is its internal homogeneity. Different from heterogeneity which focuses on differences across family firms, homogeneity here refers to the continuity and similarity of decision-making patterns either over time or across business units in a single family firm. This dissertation attempts to explore homogeneity in family businesses as well as its antecedents and performance consequences. To distinguish different types of homogeneity, strategic persistence is defined as homogeneity of strategic patterns over time and the pursuit of a dominant strategy as the homogeneity across related business units. Based upon S&P 1500 manufacturing firms from 1996 to 2013, it is found that family firms have a higher level of strategic persistence and a more consistent dominant strategy than nonamily firms. In addition, it appears that being older, with less organizational slack and having higher family involvement in ownership and management tends to strengthen the two kinds of homogeneity in family businesses. Finally, it is found that high homogeneity in decision-making can result in better performance in family business compared to nonamily firms, especially for those with high family involvement in management. Theoretical implications and limitations are discussed

Positioning, Articulating, and Crafting Conceptual Articles on Entrepreneurship

Conceptual Articles Are Important for Theory Building but the Special Challenges of Developing Conceptual Articles on Entrepreneurship Has Not Been Fully Considered. We Begin to Fill This Gap by Discussing the Nature of Conceptual Articles on Entrepreneurship, Particularly Those Geared for Publication in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. We Introduce Three Dimensions of the Entrepreneurship Discipline—uniqueness, Relevance, and Multiplicity—and Discuss How They Can Affect the Positioning of Conceptual Articles and the Articulation of their Contribution. We Also Enumerate Some Basic Principles for Crafting Good Conceptual Articles and Present Guidelines based on Our Discussion

Jump To Platform Faster? Gender, Institutional Change, And Pre-entrant Entrepreneurial Attempt

Purpose: The authors enrich and extend the existing institutional anomie theory (IAT) in the hope of sharpening the understanding of the joint effects of selected cultural values and social institutional changes on women\u27s pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts. The authors theorize that women are culturally discouraged to pursue pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts or wealth accumulation in a specific culture. This discouragement creates an anomic strain that motivates women to deviate from cultural prescriptions by engaging in pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts at a faster speed. Building on this premise, the authors hypothesize that changes in social institutions facilitate the means of achievement for women due to the potential opportunities inherent in such institutional changes. Design/methodology/approach: Using a randomly selected sample of 1,431 registered active individual users with a minimum of 10,000 followers on a leading entertainment live-streaming platform in the People\u27s Republic of China, the authors examined a unique mix of cultural and institutional changes and their effects on the speed of women\u27s engagement in live-streaming platform activity. Findings: The authors find support for the impact of the interaction between changes in social institution conditions and cultural values. Unexpectedly, the authors also find a negative impact of cultural values on women\u27s speed of engaging in pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts. Originality/value: The authors add institutional change to the IAT framework and provide a novel account for the variation in the pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts by women on the platform

Prescribed pattern transformation in swelling gel tubes by elastic instability

We present a study on swelling-induced circumferential buckling of tubular shaped gels. Inhomogeneous stress develops as gel swells under mechanical constraints, which gives rise to spontaneous buckling instability without external force. Full control over the post-buckling pattern is experimentally demonstrated. A simple analytical model is developed using elastic energy to predict stability and post-buckling patterns upon swelling. Analysis reveals that height to diameter ratio is the most critical design parameter to determine buckling pattern, which agrees well with experimental and numerical results.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figure

Profitability goals, control goals, and the R&D investment decisions of family and non-family firms

R&D investments can help build sustainable competitive advantages and improve firm performance as well as foster industry transformations and economic growth. Nevertheless, managers also acknowledge the difficulties associated with managing R&D and the low chances of success of innovation programs. For this reason, researchers have long been interested in understanding how managers make R&D investment decisions and, more specifically, identifying the conditions under which managers are most likely to increase or decrease R&D investments. Research grounded in the behavioral theory of the firm suggests that a primary driver of R&D investment decisions is profitability: when profitability goals have not been met, managers are more likely to initiate a problemistic search through increasing R&D investments. While emphasizing profitability goals and their relationship with R&D investments, prior research largely downplays the role of goals beyond profitability that exist in a significant number of firms (family firms) that are owned and managed by family members whose primary concern is preserving their control over the organization. Research indicates that these family-centered non-economic goals lead family managers to minimize R&D investments and that the coexistence of multiple goals produces highly variable R&D investment behavior in family firms. Yet, how family-centered goals for control and profitability goals enter decision-making in family firms is not fully understood nor has any empirical study directly examined how these two apparently incompatible classes of goals jointly affect R&D investment variations in family firms. In this study, we propose that family managers form distinctive reference points that capture supplier bargaining power and are used to evaluate the degree of external obstruction to their managerial control. Accordingly, we hypothesize that family managers use reference points for profitability and for control jointly when making R&D investment decisions. The empirical analysis of panel data on 431 private Spanish manufacturing firms observed over the period 2000-2006 shows that the importance of profitability and control goals follows a sequential logic in family firms, such that family firms react more strongly to increasing supplier bargaining power when their profitability reference points have been reached. This study extends current understanding of the distinctive organizational processes engendered by family management in business organizations leading to new perspectives and research opportunities at the intersection of the innovation management and family business literatures

A note on family influence and the adoption of discontinuous technologies in family firms

The 4Cs model of command, continuity, community, and connections is useful for examining the effect of family influence on the adoption of discontinuous technologies. However, assuming that family influence differs only in degree rather than kind is naive because such an assumption ignores the likelihood of heterogeneous behaviors among family firms. In this conceptual note, we extend prior work and explain how heterogeneity in the family’s relative emphasis on command, continuity, community, and connections requires that the multifaceted and potentially nonlinear nature of family influence be considered when analyzing strategic decisions concerning family firm innovation

The impact of small- and medium-sized family firms on economic growth

Drawing on family business studies and the knowledge-based view of economic growth, we develop and test a model of how the prevalence of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) under family control affect economic growth. Specifically, we propose there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between family SMEs’ proportional representation and economic growth owing to their relative strengths and limitations vis-à-vis non-family SMEs. Using state-level data from the U.S. between 2004 and 2010, we find support for our hypothesis and the underlying contention that economic growth is maximized when an economy includes a balanced mix of family and non-family SMEs

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information / Extraction of terraces on the loess plateau from high-resolution DEMs and imagery utilizing object-based image analysis

Terraces are typical artificial landforms on the Loess Plateau, with ecological functions in water and soil conservation, agricultural production, and biodiversity. Recording the spatial distribution of terraces is the basis of monitoring their extent and understanding their ecological effects. The current terrace extraction method mainly relies on high-resolution imagery, but its accuracy is limited due to vegetation coverage distorting the features of terraces in imagery. High-resolution topographic data reflecting the morphology of true terrace surfaces are needed. Terraces extraction on the Loess Plateau is challenging because of the complex terrain and diverse vegetation after the implementation of “vegetation recovery”. This study presents an automatic method of extracting terraces based on 1 m resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) and 0.3 m resolution Worldview-3 imagery as auxiliary information used for object-based image analysis (OBIA). A multi-resolution segmentation method was used where slope, positive and negative terrain index (PN), accumulative curvature slope (AC), and slope of slope (SOS) were determined as input layers for image segmentation by correlation analysis and Sheffield entropy method. The main classification features based on DEMs were chosen from the terrain features derived from terrain factors and texture features by gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) analysis; subsequently, these features were determined by the importance analysis on classification and regression tree (CART) analysis. Extraction rules based on DEMs were generated from the classification features with a total classification accuracy of 89.96%. The red band and near-infrared band of images were used to exclude construction land, which is easily confused with small-size terraces. As a result, the total classification accuracy was increased to 94%. The proposed method ensures comprehensive consideration of terrain, texture, shape, and spectrum characteristics, demonstrating huge potential in hilly-gully loess region with similarly complex terrain and diverse vegetation covers.(VLID)219512