Young entrepreneurs whose parents control a business are often subjected to the influence of their parents when starting a firm. These next-generation entrepreneurs may receive resources and emotional support from their parents, and parents may also influence their children’s cognitive style and serve as role models for children. Today, we do not know whether such parental influence is positive or negative for children’s start-up activity. For instance, entrepreneurial parents may serve as positive role models to their children and provide them with resources that facilitate the start-up process. On the other hand, however, children from entrepreneurial parents may feel pressure to succeed as entrepreneurs, and the provision of resources from their parents for their own venture may undermine their independence. With the present study, we hope to shed new light on an important yet understudied aspect of entrepreneurship. We hope that our findings are of interest to practitioners and researchers of entrepreneurship and family business alike.

The paper discusses a social cognitive framework of how employee´s entrepreneurial behaviour (EB) could be influenced in SMEs. The model suggests, individual-level EB mainly to be influenced by processes of social exchange and social learning. That means organizational level with individual level to be conceptually linked by relationships of exchange and learning between the employee and the organization. The employee´s perception of the quality of these relationships is suggested to directly influence individual level EB: the personnel´s motivation for EB can be fostered via social exchange; the personnel´s abilities for EB might be fostered via social learning. Because of the SMEmanagement´s fundamental influence with regard to establishing high quality relationships with their employees, fostering EB is regarded a top-down process. To test the propositions, an experimental study design is proposed.

In order to perform conversion electron and g - ray spectroscopy of odd-N fission isomers with small population cross sections, large solid angle coverage for the fission fragment detection is required. An economical solution is provided by the use of commercially available silicon solar cells. Two detector arrays were developed for conversion electron studies with Mini Oranges and g - spectroscopic studies with the MINIBALL Spectrometer, respectively, aiming at the investigation of the fission isomers in 237Pu [1], following the 235U(a,2n) reaction. *Supported by DFG under contract number HA 1101/6-1

Through the lens of stakeholder theory this text deepens our understanding of financial and nonfinancial performance outcomes in family firms across multiple stakeholder categories, including the family level of analysis. Based on this foundation, we develop a typology of performance relationships between performance outcomes: overlapping, causal, synergistic, and substitutional. We argue that these relationships, when used between constructive (positive) performance outcomes, are able to increase stakeholder satisfaction, which in turn increases organizational effectiveness. Through this analysis, we extend the common one-dimensional and cause-effect understanding of performance in family firms and move towards a comprehensive stakeholder performance perspective, which provides insights for increasing organizational effectiveness of family firms.

The Viable System Model by Stafford Beer embodies a theory about the preconditions of organizational viability. This theory has been discussed extensively by the academics and professionals of organizational cybernetics. The theoretical claim of the Viable System Model (VSM) is bold. It asserts to specify the necessary and sufficient preconditions for the viability of any organization. The empirical evidence, to date, amounts to a substantial corpus of case studies from applications that support the claim of the theory. The present contribution leads beyond the status quo. Its purpose is to test the theory empirically, on the grounds of a broad survey and pertinent quantitative analysis. The available data support the hypotheses and therewith corroborate the theory of the VSM. This implies that the VSM is a reliable orientation device for the diagnosis and design of organizations to strengthen their vitality, resilience, and development potential.

The first year of studying has been extensively researched in order to better understand the transition into Higher Education (HE) as well as the phenomena of student performance, retention, and drop out. Although research points to the importance of the socio-cultural dimension of first-year experiences, surprisingly little is known about the actual processes through which students integrate into the socio-cultural context of HE. To address this research gap, an interview study was conducted with 15 first-year university students. The analysis revealed distinctive transition processes into HE that were developed into a typology with four transition types. Interestingly, students who tended to be more critically reflective about their studies were in danger of having a rougher transition than less critically reflective counterparts. For the former, it is essential to develop social relationships that tie them to their studies while the latter manage study-related challenges by simply working through them.

In addition to fostering lively theoretical debates, research on opportunity identification continues to face thorny methodological challenges. Amongst the most salient is the difficulty to estimate theoretically-relevant differences between opportunity ideas early on, before entrepreneurs’ efforts provide evidence that an opportunity idea is worthwhile or not. Addressing this puzzle remains an important step for advancing scholarly understanding of the motivational dynamics by which, in the very early stages of entrepreneurial pursuits, some individuals get sufficiently excited by the prospects of some ideas to examine them further and continue their entrepreneurial efforts. To help foster research in this area, we revisit prior measures and develop a new and augmented set of items. We then conduct a series of studies to validate these items’ effectiveness in capturing meaningful differences between early-stage assessment beliefs of different opportunity ideas. Methods We first conducted a thorough literature review to identify studies that measure respondents’ early perceptions of opportunity ideas. Building on these studies, we developed additional candidate items and pre-tested these with two panels of 21 undergraduate students and 10 industry experts engaged in a series of brainstorming exercises to identify potential applications for a new technology. We then deployed our reduced set of candidate items in a survey conducted with nascent entrepreneurs in Switzerland, and which follows the PSED protocol. Results and Implications Results from 262 completed surveys provide preliminary evidence for the proposed measures’ internal consistency, reliability, structural validity, and for its discriminant validity with other constructs. We also provide evidence for the measure’s criterion validity – and for its use with different research approaches. By developing and validating an augmented measure for early-stage opportunity beliefs, we hope to contribute means to examine the antecedent reasons why some entrepreneurs have higher / lower beliefs – and the consequences this may have for entrepreneurs’ efforts (and success) at developing and exploiting different opportunity ideas. In doing so, we also hope to provide scholars with tools to examine the effects of relevant differences between opportunity ideas in both experimental and field research – including using our measure for assessing the beliefs of other stakeholders than the focal entrepreneurs.

By blending the behavioral theory of the firm with the socioemotional wealth perspective of family firm ownership our paper investigates how family ownership impacts timing and resource similarity of acquisitions. We show that the influence of socioemotional wealth concerns tied to family ownership when engaging in acquisitions alters with performance framing and, hence, whether performance aspiration levels are achieved. We also discuss how slack resources interact with socioemotional wealth concerns and ultimately bias acquisition activity in family firms. Our study makes several contributions to acquisition literature, the behavioral theory of the firm, and the emerging socioemotional wealth perspective.