2016 IFERA RDW University of Catania, Italy
Family, Firms and Institutional Context: Analyzing the role of the context in the development of the family unit for Family Business Research
Chairs:
Giorgia M. D’Allura
Rosario Faraci
Department of Business and Economics, University of Catania, Italy
Bios of RDW Chairs:
Giorgia M. D'Allura is Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Management at the University of Catania (Italy) where she also got her PhD. She was Visiting Scholar at the Warrigton College of Business Administration- University of Florida (USA). Her research interests are in the areas of top management team and innovation in family business, institutions and entrepreneurship, business ethics, firm competitiveness, service management and customer relationship. Her most recent papers and book chapters reflect some of these research interest.
Rosario Faraci is Professor of Business Economics and Management at the University of Catania (Italy) where he serves also as President of the Undergraduate Programme in Business Administration and Delegate of the Rector for the Technology Transfer. He was Visiting Professor of Strategic Management and Organizational Behavior at the University of Florida (USA). Professor Faraci is Friend of the Strategic Management Society and he has co-organized the XXX Annual Convention in Rome (2010). His research interests are in the areas of family business, entrepreneurship, corporate governance, firm competitiveness and business modeling. Professor Faraci is Co-Editor of the Journal of Management and Governance. He is President of the Center for Study in Family Business, located in Catania.
Workshop Facilitators
Andrea Colli - Bocconi University
Amir Erez - University of Florida
Facilitator bios:
Andrea Colli, PhD in Economic and Social History (Bocconi University, Milan) and Professor of Economic History at the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University, Milan.
His research interests range from the history of Italian business enterprises, to small and medium-sized enterprises, to the role played by foreign direct investments in the course of the Italian industrialization process.
He has published several articles in the main business history journals. He is associate review editor of Family Business Review since October 2012. His most recent books reflect some of these research interest. With Michelangelo Vasta he has edited and published, in 2010, Forms of Enterprises in 20th Century Italy. Boundaries, Structures and Strategies, Elgar. With Abe de Jong and Martin Iversen, Mapping the European Corporations: Strategies, Structures, Ownership and Performance, Routledge 2011 and with Franco Amatori has written Business History: Complexities and Comparisons, Routledge 2011.
Dr. Amir Erez is the Huber Hurst Professor of Management at the Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida. Dr. Erez earned his Ph.D. and M. S. at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University.
His research focuses on how positive moods and positive personality, influence individuals thought processes, motivation, and work behaviors. Dr. Erez also investigates how negative work behaviors such as rudeness and disrespect affect individuals’ performance and cognition. He has published his research in scholarly journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, Personality and Individual Differences, Human Performance, and Journal of Organizational Behavior.
He served on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Business and Psychology, Human Resource Management, and Motivation and Emotion.
RDW Committee
Sanjay Goel - University of Minnesota Duluth
Rosario Faraci - University of Catania
Giorgia M. D'Allura - University of Catania
Gonzalo Gomez Betancourt - INALDE Business School, Universidad de la Sabana
Ranjan Karri - University of Illinois
Ramona K. Zachary - Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College
Donella Casperz - The University of Western Australia
Justin B. Craig - Kellogg School of Management Northwestern University
Jean Luc Arregle - EM Lyon Business SchoolNadine Kammerlander - University of St. Gallen
Reinhard Pruegl - Zeppelin University
Julia Süss-Reyes - WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
Call for papers
IFERA Research Development Workshops (RDWs) are intended to provide an umbrella for gathering of scholars on a specific topic. RDWs are intended to complement IFERA’s Annual Conferences.
TOPICAL FOCUS
Family firms represent over 90 percent of businesses around the world and often play a more significant role in the economies of nations. Given that the family firm is the dominant organizational form in the world today, we question whether current management theory and practice can be generalized to this population of organizations. As family business scholars we know that the impact of the family into organizational behavior and firm performance is the factor that makes the difference between family and non-family firms. Thus, we need to include the family as a variable in our research. To illustrate how the family as a variable can be used to generate theory in a broad explanatory sense, we need to investigate both micro and macro levels of organizations. At a micro level, family firms heterogeneity may be explained in terms of how the family behaves and interferes with the business. At a macro level, a possible explanation of such diversity is the institutional context, that is the general framework that influences firms behavior and strategy along the dimensions of culture, innovation propensity, law, governance rules, economic and financial constraints, and so on. Indeed, the family as a social unit can be considered another dimension of the institutional context.
Thus, in our idea the first topic is the family as social unit that absorbs the national background in term of history, cultural issue, religion influence and law. Family as a social unit decides, behaves and pursues its social goals that is to generate and to nurture the new generations in the daily life. Furthermore, if the family is involved in a business this will turn inside the organization in terms of family dynamics, relations, and also goal, scope, commitment to the group and to the business. In the end, this will affect the business development and performance.
The second topic is the family as entrepreneur and owner as a result of a specific institutional context. Institutions embody collective actions that constrain, guide, and liberate individual action. In fact, institutional theory argues the processes by which structures, including schemes, rules, norms, and routines, become established as authoritative guidelines for social behavior. Moreover, it inquires into how these elements are created, diffused, adopted, and adapted over space and time, and how they fall into decline and disuse. Although the ostensible subject is stability and order in social life, students of institutions must perforce attend not just to consensus and conformity but to conflict and change in social structures. As a consequence, we believe that previous institutions force and guide the development of firms through the influence into the entrepreneurial development and the development of the rule about the ownership and the governance of the firms.
Proposing this topic for the RDW, we seek to open an in-depth discussion of original research papers focusing on different conceptual and empirical approaches to assess the role of institutional context into the family as social unit (how the family culture, tradition, religion, organization, innovation propensity influences the relations and dynamics of this group) and into the characteristics of the ownership based on regulations, norms and laws that are developed in a national institutional context. This topic should be developed adopting multi-disciplinary approaches (history, law, psychology and management) to further develop of the research field also adopting a cross-national perspective to analyze how the institutional context influences the family firms start and development. Furthermore, based on this multidisciplinary and cross national approach this RDW wants to give researchers the opportunity to exchange new ideas and build academic alliances.
Notwithstanding exhaustive, a possible list of research questions related to the RDW are:
- Are family firms similar all over the world, independently from the institutional context?
- Are national contexts relevant to explain the variance in family firms behavior and strategy?
- What's the relationship between the institutional context and the propensity to innovate in family firms?
- Is the succession more related to internal or external conditions, the latter associated with some specific characteristics of the institutional context?
- How could the institutional context be studied in order to understand the family business succession? Using a corporate governance or an organizational approach, i.e. The Hosftede model?
- Is the family as a social unit an important explanatory variable of the institutional context? How does it influence family firms heterogeneity?
RDW Format
Our goal is to select a number of 6-8 research papers in order to develop our understanding in the topic. The workshop will involve the authors of the paper and attendees in general, subject to the discretion of the Workshop Chair. The maximum number of Workshop participants is 30.
Selected submissions will be presented by their authors as original studies or elaborated works in progress to the Workshop group. After each presentation, two discussants, who have read the paper in advance, will give feedback. Finally, the respective papers are discussed in plenum by all workshop attendees. This Workshop will allow for the in-depth discussion of the work of participants and promisingly leads to synergies with colleagues working in a closely related field of research.
Additionally, we are pleased to welcome Workshop Facilitators, who hold introduction speeches to the workshop topic and attend the paper sessions to give feedback, as well as local family business owners who will provide workshop participants interesting insights into their companies.
