Strategy and Performance of Family Firms: An Institutional Embeddedness Perspective

Whereas family firms are dominant social actors globally, their prevalence, patterns of strategic action, and economic performance differ markedly across contexts. This dissertation explores the underlying conditions leading to these differences in three related studies.;Study I links prevalence, strategic choices, and performance differentials to a new construct, the family-legitimizing environment (FLE), which captures the constitutive legitimacy of family firms in the eyes of a country's general population. Using a combination of meta-analytic and archival data methodologies, this essay shows that in high FLE contexts, family firms are more prevalent and more strategically deviant compared to non-family firms, and they tend to exhibit better financial performance than do non-family firms. Identifying FLE as a contingency variable advances the sociological corporate governance and family firm literatures by reconciling and contextualizing the contrary findings observed in previous studies.;Study II develops an institution-based explanation of the performance differences between family and non-family firms across emerging markets. It proposes that family firm performance is contingent on the state of four types of institutions in a given market - formal constraining, informal constraining, formal enabling, and informal enabling institutions. This study tests these ideas using a meta-analysis of 177 primary studies nested in 49 countries. The results show that family firms outperform when formal constraining institutions are less developed and when family firm informal enabling institutions are present. However, family firms perform relatively worse when formal enabling and informal constraining institutions are weak. Thus, this study concludes that the performance advantages of family involvement in emerging markets are contingent on local institutional conditions.;Study III investigates whether a family firm supporting political context and the availability of firm network resources enhance the internationalization of family firms. Using data from 209 Chilean firms between 2004 and 2012, this study reveals that family firms internationalize more than non-family firms do in a national political environment that provides institutional support to family capitalism. Specifically, family firms internationalize more when the political environment is dominated by policymakers representing Right/Conservative political parties. This study contributes to the sociopolitical embeddedness perspective of the strategic behavior of firms by offering a deep contextual explanation of the family firm-internationalization relationship.