Family Business and Regional Development

Rodrigo Basco, Roger Stough, Lech Suwala, Rodrigo Basco, Roger Stough, Lech Suwala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367559052
• eBook ISBN: 9780429603471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

This book explores the relationship between families, firms, and regions and the extent to which these relationships contribute to regional economic and social development.

Although family business participation in economic activities has been a common phenomenon since pre-industrial societies, and its importance has evolved throughout time and across spatial contexts, the book suggests that these factors have often been neglected in family business and regional studies. Taking this research gap into account, the book aims to deepen our understanding of the role family firms play in the regional economy. In particular, it explores two seldom studied questions. Firstly, what role do family firms play in regional development? Secondly, how do different spatial regional contexts shape family firm operations and performance?

Family Business and Regional Development presents a model of "spatial familiness" and uses themes such as productivity, networks and competitiveness to shed new light on family businesses. Moreover, it approaches the juxtaposition between family business and regional studies to encourage the cross-fertilisation of ideas, theories, and research methods between the two fields.

Bringing together leading experts in entrepreneurship, regional economics, and economic geography, this book will be a valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers interested in family firms, regional studies and economic geography.

Part I
Family business and regions

1 Spatial familiness and family spatialities—searching for fertile ground between family business and regional studies

Rodrigo Basco and Lech Suwala

Introduction

Although family business and regional studies remained unconnected until a few years ago, key thinkers in both fields reminded us early on about the value added by considering space in family firms and the embeddedness of families and their firms in territories. Indeed, just in the second issue of Family Business Review in 1988, referring to family firms and community culture, Joseph Astrachan emphasised that space can act as an integrative factor in the family firm’s success: ‘Family businesses acquired in a manner that is at odds with the local culture will suffer, while firms that are acquired and managed in harmony with the local culture will have a higher level of morale and long-run productivity’ (Astrachan, 1988, 165). Walther Isard (considered the father of regional science) formulated thoughts on future directions for the discipline by saying that a general theory of human society (as a response to Masahisa Fujita) should consider

family, social group, and political decision-making and policy formulation. The optimization type of decision-making involving the family as a basic social organization and the behavior of political groups (parties)[,] which I explored in my General Theory: Social, Political, Economic and Regional (1969) from an economist’s standpoint would need to be extended greatly to be made much more realistic.

(Isard, 1999, 388)

Family firms are the most common form of organisation around the world, existing in different sizes, sectors, and locations (Basco & Bartkevičiūtė, 2016). Regardless of whether they were investigating gigantic multinational conglomerates in North America, the Middle East, and far-East Asia; small and medium Mittelstand family firms in Germany; or the vast number of family-based micro-businesses in Africa, researchers have observed that family firms (as legal, social, and economic entities) are characterised by family involvement in ownership, governance, and management, which in turn affects firm behaviour and performance (Basco, 2013). In the last few decades, research in family business studies has extended beyond the aforementioned classical internal variables and has begun considering external and/or surrounding variables (Discua Cruz & Basco, 2018; Gomez-Mejia, Basco, Müller, & Gonzalez, 2020; James et al., 2020; Krueger, Bogers, Labaki, & Basco, 2020). For instance, context plays an important role when understanding the idiosyncrasies of family firms, including their economic positions (Steier, Chua, & Chrisman, 2009), the cultural imprints of society (Astrachan, 1988), their embeddedness in wider social networks (Le Breton-Miller & Miller, 2009), and their integration into institutional and political frameworks (Berrone, Cruz, Gomez-Mejia, & Larraza-Kintana, 2010). Although every economic entity is somehow situated or embedded in different contexts (Granovetter, 1985) and those different contexts (e.g., organisational, cultural, social, institutional) have been analysed by family business scholars in a variety of ways, the spatiality aspect of context has received little academic attention in this realm (with some exceptions, such as Seaman, 2012, 2013, 2015; Basco, 2015; Stough et al., 2015; Basco, Stough, & Suwala, 2020; Basco & Suwala, 2020).

On the other hand, in regional studies (including regional science, urban and regional economics, economic geography, urban and regional planning and management, etc.), research on firms has experienced a renaissance in the last 25 years (e.g., Dicken & Malmberg, 2001; Taylor & Asheim, 2001; Taylor & Oinas, 2006). The origins of this interest can be traced back to Robert B. McNee’s (1958) seminal contribution ‘Functional Geography of the Firm’. The following years were characterised by studies on the increasingly global geography of large inter- and multinational conglomerates (e.g., in the petroleum industry) (Krumme, 1969; Taylor, 1975; Dicken, 1976). The crisis of the Fordist formation in the 1970s and 1980s brought research on firms and regional decline to the fore (Hayter & Watts, 1983; Laulajainen & Stafford, 1984; Malecki, 1985), while paving the way for the resurgence and re-examination of small and medium enterprises in (mature) industrial districts of the Third Italy (Becattini, 1978). Later, firms were seen as a forge of innovation situated in new industrial spaces and technology parks with an accompanied interest in regional entrepreneurship and a new wave of high-tech activities. In this vein, scholars from regional studies also focused on specific types of firms (e.g., new-born, small, medium, large, and foreign firms) when dismantling the role they play in regional and economic development (Scott, 1986; Giaoutzi, Nijkamp, & Storey, 1988; Sternberg, 1989; Fritsch, 1992). Then, the network paradigm took over, which dealt with the increased complexities of horizontal and vertical (dis)integration and the ri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of Tables
• List of boxes
• List of Contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Family business and regions
• Part II Micro-foundation channels
• Part III Meso-Foundation channels
• Part IV Evidence around the world
• Part V A policymaker perspective
• Index