Family firm prerequisites for international business operations: a production and marketing capabilities approach

Juha Kansikas, Jari Huovinen and Kimmo Hyrsky

World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, 2014, vol. 10, issue 4, 435-448

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to compare SME family firms' and non-family firms' organisational prerequisites for international business operations. The main focus lies in the production and marketing capabilities needed for conducting international business. A quantitative study was conducted in Finland. A random sampling was done by utilising the database of the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK). A sample of 2,000 firms was gathered from the target population, EK database, which consisted of 16,000 firms. The answer rate for the study was 28%. All together, 555 firms answered the mail survey. Three hundred thirty three respondents were coming from family firms and 222 replies represented non-family firms. Logistic regression model together with t-tests and chi-square-tests were performed to test the hypotheses. As regards their organisational capabilities, family firms, in comparison to non-family firms, tended to internationalise their business operations by focusing their efforts on product and service quality as well as on competitive delivery times.

Keywords: family businesses; internationalisation; growth; organisational capability; Finland; SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises; business operations; entrepreneurship; entrepreneurs; family firms; production capabilities; marketing capabilities; product quality; service quality. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=64949 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:wremsd:v:10:y:2014:i:4:p:435-448

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().