Filling the institutional void: The social behavior and performance of family vs non-family technology firms in emerging markets

Danny Miller, Jangwoo Lee, Sooduck Chang and Isabelle Le Breton-Miller
Additional contact information
Danny Miller: HEC Montreal, and University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
Jangwoo Lee: Department of Management, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea
Sooduck Chang: Department of Business Administration, Hannam University, Daejon, Korea
Isabelle Le Breton-Miller: HEC Montreal, and University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

Journal of International Business Studies, 2009, vol. 40, issue 5, 802-817

Abstract: Family businesses (FBs) are said to treat their employees with unusual consideration to form a cohesive internal “community”. They are also claimed to develop deeper, more extensive “connections” or relationships with outside stakeholders. Both behaviors may increase the viability of a business intended to support an owning family and its later generations. Such social linkages, we believe, may compensate for the lack of capital, product and labor institutional infrastructures in dynamic emerging economies. This survey study of a most challenging emerging-market sector, namely Korean high-technology businesses, argues three major points. (1) Relationships of community and connection will be more common in FBs than in non-FBs. (2) These relationships will enhance performance in emerging-market high-technology sectors, which, because of their competitive, complex, and ever-changing nature, rely on significant expert knowledge and social capital within and outside the organizational community. (3) The performance of FBs will benefit more from these community and connection relationships than the performance of non-FBs, because in these personally intimate settings employees and external partners will be especially likely to return the generosity of a visibly active owning family, or to penalize its selfishness. Significant empirical support was found for most of these hypotheses. Journal of International Business Studies (2009) 40, 802–817. doi:10.1057/jibs.2009.11

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (139)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jibs/journal/v40/n5/pdf/jibs200911a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jibs/journal/v40/n5/full/jibs200911a.html Link to full text HTML (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:pal:jintbs:v:40:y:2009:i:5:p:802-817

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/41267/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Business Studies is currently edited by John Cantwell

More articles in Journal of International Business Studies from Palgrave Macmillan, Academy of International Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().