“Cross-cultural and entrepreneurial strategies towards new family business performance: an Asian context”
Family businesses are amongst the oldest type of commercial activity and continue to ignite the curiosity of researchers. Family businesses play an important role in global society due to their impact on economic and social activity (Ramadani et al., 2014). This special issue aims to broaden discussions on the cross-cultural and entrepreneurial strategies towards new family business performance in emerging countries in an Asian context. Family businesses are the most common form of business organisation, and they play a vital role in contemporary economies (Ramadani and Hoy, 2015). Family businesses across the region have developed differently, depending on the economic, cultural and political conditions that exist in each country. Family businesses are an integral part of most economies in Asia. Around 85% of companies in Asia are family-owned businesses. This means that family businesses are a key pillar of countries' economy and society (Anggadwita et al., 2017).
New family businesses face different challenges regarding their sustainability. Dealing with new venture studies, the Asian economic conglomerates expansion promotes the fields on political, social and economical basis. They only exported products for international trade, although they were aware of the importance of the international tie (Okoroafo, 1999). Often, the analysis deals with the going concern of the new ventures, the business sustainability and human capital. In fact, new technology ventures studies (NTVs) statistically remain low. For instance, only 36% of NTVs survived after four years doing business Song et al. (2008). Many factors were found significant to the NTVs' survivability. Amongst others, financial resources and founders' marketing experience impacted significantly on the business length. Related to that financial issue, Riding et al. (2012) highlighted that new growth firms and new exporter firms tended to highly seek for external financing. It implies that these firms are more vulnerable financially as they find difficulty to obtain any financial support. The extant literatures still need further research on the remedy to these problems.
Apart from business orientation and management, culture also matters in family business sustainability (Gupta and Levenburg, 2012). Asia, as a first big continent, rich of cultures and values, an immense household, a future leading continent in the global economic development; research studies on FOBs remain still not conducive as vast as the continent is. A study comparing the Anglo cultures against the Asian cultures in which FOBs were analysed implied that Asian cultures focussed more on both family and performance, whereas the Anglo orientation prevailed only the latter (Dana, 2014; Gupta et al., 2009). As for entrepreneurship on cross-cultural basis, psychological factor of self-efficacy predicted the motivation and barrier of the field (Pruett et al., 2009).
Concerned with the evidence, we would like to invite scholars, academicians, practitioners, researchers and all interested contributors to fill the gap on the inconsistency of the extant literatures to deal with this vast interesting continent. We expect novelty and quality on these fields to enrich the literatures. Furthermore, performance orientation remains one of the prominent factors on the internationalization of entrepreneurial firms for 39 countries (new ventures as well) (Muralidharan and Pathak, 2017). Particularly for the variety of Asian countries, we mostly hope the contribution within a more specific area. Not only the geographical area impacts on that internationalization but also network, experience and technology (Internet) capabilities (Glavas and Mathews, 2014; Seaman, 2015). These are expected but not limited to be analysed. Apart from that, NTVs, FOBs and transnational entrepreneurs become more and more major subjects of concern as they bring new insights. Culture also influences the business towards the stakeholders as the case of Chinese entrepreneur's evidence (Dimitratos et al., 2016). It is then expected as well that Asian countries provide for new insight on the new ventures on global business.
Nevertheless, these topics bring important economic and academic contributions (Ratten et al., 2017). Effectively, it is our concern to increasingly refine the analysis on these promising areas. Amongst others, these topics enable us to enhance the quality of our research in terms of generalizability, objectivity, testability and replicability aspects due to the international diversity scale.
In this special issue, the following papers are included:
“Cultural values and their implications to family business succession: A case study of small Chinese-owned family businesses in Bandung, Indonesia”, by Grisna Anggadwita, Werda Bagus Profityo, Dini Turipanam Alamanda and Anggraeni Permatasari.
“An extension of the socioemotional wealth perspective: Insights from an Asian sample”, by Irfan Saleem, Irfan Siddique and Aqeel Ahmed
“Environment uncertainty and a firm's strategic change the moderating role of political connection and family ownership”, by Kai Wang, Massimiliano Matteo Pellegrini, Jiaan Xue and Cizhi Wang.
“A systematic literature review on family business: Insights from an Asian context”, by Sérgio Teixeira, Pedro Veiga, Ronnie Figueiredo, Cristina Fernandes, Joao Ferreira and Mario Raposo.
“When is the right time for succession? Multiple cases of family businesses in Indonesia”, by Nyayu Lathifah Tirdasari and Wawan Dhewanto.
“Technology as a Driver to Achieve the Performance of Family Businesses Supply Chain”, by Ratih Hendayani and Mochamad Febrianta.
“A Dynamic Capabilities Approach for the Survival of Pakistani Family Owned Business in the Digital World”, by Sumayya Rashid and Vanessa Ratten.
Guest editors of this special issue would like to gratefully thank Professor Claire Seaman, the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Family Business Management, for her inspiration and boundless support; reviewers who helped us to select and evaluate the submitted manuscripts; and all authors for their interest and contribution to this special issue.
