External managers, family ownership and the scope of SME internationalization

D’Angelo, Alfredo, Antonio Majocchi () and Trevor Buck

Journal of World Business, 2016, vol. 51, issue 4, 534-547

Abstract: SMEs are important to world business and the majority of SMEs are family firms. Yet some family SMEs are inert, local firms while others are dynamic and international. Do certain governance structures encourage the scale and scope of their internationalization? We jointly apply social capital and corporate governance theories to explain the scope of family SMEs internationalization, and find that professional managers externally recruited from outside the family are important, but only for lower levels of family ownership, suggesting synergistic combinations of ownership and management. It is the combination of external capital with external managers that really works.

Keywords: Family SMEs; Internationalization; International scope; External managers; Family ownership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.jwb.2016.01.004

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