Editorial

Citation

Collins, L. (2014), "Editorial", Journal of Family Business Management, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFBM-02-2014-0004

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Family Business Management, Volume 4, Issue 1

I am delighted to welcome you to Volume 4 Issue 1 of the Journal of Family Business Management. As JFBM moves into its fourth year of operation we have ourselves undergone a refocusing of strategic direction and succession change. I am now Editor-in-chief working alongside a new team of Associate and Regional Editors. We aim to ensure that JFBM becomes recognised for its quality and reach in the family business space and we will be working hard to expand our collaborations and create new strategic partnerships with family business organisations working in our field.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Nicholas O’Regan, from the University of the West of England, our co-founding editor, for his help and assistance in putting JFBM on firm foundations. We very much appreciate his generous support and invaluable contributions to JFBM during the early stages of our development.

I would also like to welcome our new Associate Editors to the JFBM team. Dr John Cater from University of Texas Tyler, Dr Keanon Alderson, California Baptist University and Dr Claire Seaman, Queen Margaret University, Scotland have extensive family business experience and work diligently to promote the study of family business. I am delighted to welcome them to JFBM editorial team and look forward to working with them to in the future.

In our first issue of Volume 4 we present papers which explore a range of family businesses in diverse situations, countries and cultures. The papers in this volume seek to shed light on some of the more under investigated topics in family business and we hope they will both intrigue and satisfy the family business scholars and practitioners in our readership. We are ever indebted to our reviewers who in reviewing these papers continue to offer high quality feedback and input to our contributing authors. Thank you so much.

Isabel Botero, Gonzalo Gómez Betancourt, Jose Bernado Betancourt Ramirez and Maria Piedad López Vergara's paper entitled “Emotional intelligence in family firms: its impact on interpersonal dynamics in the family, business and ownership systems” is a novel paper. This single firm case study is useful as it represents a deep foray into the nature of emotional intelligence within a family firm. The study of emotions in family firms is nascent and this case study contributes to the early exploration of this complex phenomenon.

“The impact of succession on family business internationalisation: the successor's perspective” by Jose Carlos Pinho, Raquel Meneses and Richardo Coutinho is a paper that examines successor's perceptions of major objectives and subjective factors on the process of internationalisation of entrepreneurial family firms. The paper offers case study evidence from six mature global firms from different sectors. The paper presents some interesting findings about the nature of how internationalisation strategies and activities develop and it also challenges a few myths about the risk taking nature of family firms.

Mark Hoelscher's paper “Does family capital outweigh the negative effects of conflict on firm performance” focuses on how family capital can mitigate conflict in family businesses. The findings support that family capital exists as a valuable, rare, inimitable, unsubstitutable and path dependent resource thus it provided a competitive advantage for these firms. Family capital can then lead to the ready creation of an abundance of other resources which, themselves, lead to sustained competitive advantage (Barney, 1996; Penrose, 1959; Porter, 1980). The results of this study provide, perhaps not surprisingly, strong support for considering family capital one of the unique resources which may lead to sustained competitive advantage within a family business. It substantiates that further development of theory and application of the construct family capital is required.

“Ripple effects on family firms from an externally induced crisis” by John Cater and Brent Beal examines the experiences of family business owners on the Acadian coast parishes of central Louisiana, USA affected by the BP oil spill in 2010. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig resulted in the tragic deaths of 11 workers and the release of just <15 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This paper explores the impact of this catastrophe on the family businesses and examines the ripple effects that occurred at industry level, industry sub-group level and the firm level. Since there have been relatively few studies that have looked at family firms ability to perform in crisis situations, this paper is welcomed. We hope it will stimulate others to consider family firm performance in extraordinary situations.

Finally, “Successors in Dutch family businesses: gender differences” by Chantal Remery, Ilse Matser and Roberto Flören focuses on a small group of potential successors (young women) in Dutch family businesses. It makes a useful contribution to the limited discourse on women and succession within family business by looking at a sample of (potential) successors in family businesses in the Netherlands and exploring possible gender differences in the process towards ownership. The respondents participated in a specific development programme for (potential) successors in family firms, the so-called Young DGA-program (DGA refers to owner-managers) and so it is a rather unique sample as it includes people who already work in the family firm but have not yet taken over the leadership and/or ownership of the business completely.

Lorna Collins