Josh Wei-Jun Hsueh

The social ties of the owners, directors, and managers of firms have cross-level effects on firms’ network development. Firms can develop affiliations with a business group and connections across business groups. We expand the theoretical focus of Mani and Durand’s (2019) examination of the family and community ties of firm leaders and their impact on firms’ business group networks. We discuss the relational content heterogeneity of those ties and the associated logic in developing a firm’s networking strategy. Thus, we suggest alternative developmental processes for a firm’s network development strategy.

This paper examines the success of corporate communication in voluntary sustainability reporting. Existing studies have focused on the perspective of the communicators but lack an understanding of the perspective of information recipients to clearly evaluate this interactive communication process. This paper looks at the issue of a credibility gap perceived by external stakeholders when they doubt the authenticity of communicated information due to the reporting company’s governance structure. The paper uses family businesses to exemplify the emergence of such a gap when outsiders become concerned about the potential agency problem of the integrated ownership and management controlled by a few members of the same family. Following source credibility theory, these concerns raise a credibility gap associated with a family firm’s trustworthiness and goodwill, even if the family has the expertise to carry out sustainability reporting. The findings of two experimental studies indicate that family businesses suffer a greater credibility gap than non-family businesses. An external and independent assurance service can mitigate such gaps, especially when the service is comprehensive and targets family businesses. The paper provides a complete view evaluating corporate communication by looking at the interaction between the communicating company and the information recipients.

How are founders’ social identities affected by societal trigger events? To address this question, we build on social identity literature and theorize how the abrupt and significant increase in the number of refugees in Europe in 2015 is related to the strength of Darwinian, Communitarian, and Missionary social identities of founders residing in the affected countries. Furthermore, we introduce a country’s percentage of foreigners before the 2015 refugee event as relevant contingency factor. Using a dataset of 6,841 nascent entrepreneurs from 24 European countries, we reveal a positive relationship between the 2015 refugee event and the strength of founders’ Communitarian identity. This relationship is even stronger when the previous percentage of foreigners in a country is lower. Interestingly, we do not find significant relationships between the refugee event and Darwinian or Missionary identities. Our study provides important contributions to the (founder) social identity literature and valuable implications for policy and practice.

This chapter provides a theoretical model to explain the heterogeneity of family businesses regarding sustainability activities. Family business scholars tend to argue that the non-financial goals of family businesses, through the construct of socio-emotional wealth (SEW), would motivate a family business to adopt more a proactive sustainability strategy than a non-family business that is driven by the financial goal. However, studies have mixed supports when scholars rarely consider that family businesses have both financial and non-financial goals and their importance are contingent upon the life-stage of the firm. In this chapter, I propose a temporal framework that differentiates family businesses at three stages – founding, post-founder, and cousin consortia – in which the alignment between financial and SEW goals varies, and thus changes the focus of a family business’ sustainability strategy. It discusses the critical role of the temporal factor when examining sustainability strategies of family businesses.