Journal of Family Business Strategy 4 (2013) 1–2
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Family Business Strategy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jfbs
Editors’ note
As we enter our fourth year of publishing JFBS, we are delighted to present to you the first issue of volume 4 of JFBS. Before we introduce the articles in this issue, we would like to share with you some exciting news as we start this new publication year. We are pleased and honored to announce that Dr. Phillip Phan (Johns Hopkins University) has joined JFBS as new associate editor. Phillip brings a plethora of expertise as prolific author, editor and leader in the field and we welcome Phillip on board. Our esteemed colleague Kosmas Smyrnios decided to step down as associate editor to focus more on his new administrative duties with his university. We thank Kosmas for his outstanding support and editorial leadership from the very inception of the journal. Our editor-in-chief, Joseph Astrachan, and Assistant Editor, Torsten Pieper, together with several other editors of the Elsevier family were featured in an article on Elsevier Connect discussing the eight most common reasons why an article gets accepted (http://elsevierconnect.com/8-reasons-i-accepted-your-article). The article, together with a previous piece on common pitfalls (http://elsevierconnect.com/8-reasons-i-rejected-your-article) highlights dos and don’ts in scholarly writing and publishing that potential authors may want to use as a checklist to improve their chances of acceptance and increase the impact of their work. On the operational side of the journal, we are pleased to report that our processing times are consistently fast, such that we can provide authors a first decision on their manuscript within six weeks and publish an article within six months after submission on average. At the same time, our rejection rate is approaching 70% and we expect it to further increase over the course of this year. We are especially delighted to report that our esteemed publisher, Elsevier, has recommended initiating the process of applying for an Impact Factor for JFBS with ThomsonReuters, which represents a major milestone in the development of the journal, and it is highly gratifying given the relatively short period of time since the inception of the journal. We are also strengthening our partnerships with other key family business research organizations and are pleased to announce a strategic relationship with our long-term academic ally, The International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA) making JFBS the preferred research outlet of IFERA. As part of this partnership, JFBS will be available to IFERA members at a discounted rate starting 2013. Further details will be announced in due course. Like in the previous year, editorial team members of JFBS will be present at various academic conferences throughout this year, including the following: 1877-8585/$ – see front matter ß 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jfbs.2013.02.001
United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) 2013 Conference, January 10–13, 2013 in San Francisco, USA: http://www.usasbe.org Family Enterprise Research Conference (FERC), May 17–19, 2013 ˜ a del Mar, Chile: http://ferc2013.org in Vin EIASM Workshop on Family Firm Management Research, May 24–25, 2013 in Helsinki, Finland: www.eiasm.org European Academy of Management (EURAM) Annual Conference, June 26–29, 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey: www.euram2013.com International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA) Annual World Conference, July 2–5, 2013 in St. Gallen, Switzerland: http://ifera2013.ifera.org Academy of Management Annual Meeting, August 9–13, 2013 in Lake Buena Vista (Orlando), USA: http://aom.org/annualmeeting Strategic Management Society Annual International Conference, September 28-October 1, 2013 in Atlanta, USA: http://atlanta.strategicmanagement.net We would be delighted to meet with you during any of these conferences to discuss your research ideas and answer any questions. Please feel free to drop us a note (
[email protected]) and we will gladly arrange for a meeting with you. Articles in this issue The present issue features a selection of distinct scholars and research topics. Contributors to this issue come from Australia (Jill Thomas and Christopher Graves), Switzerland (Claudia Binz and Artur Baldauf), Belgium (Alain Praet), Chile (Rodrigo Basco), and the United States (Isabel Botero and Tomasz Fediuk, Rachel Shinnar, Seonghee Cho and Edward Rogoff, as well as Joseph Hair and Torsten Pieper). In the first article in this issue, Claudia Binz (University of Berne, Switzerland), Joseph Hair, Torsten Pieper (both of Kennesaw State University, USA) and Artur Baldauf (University of Berne, Switzerland) investigate the effects of family firm reputation on consumers’ preferences, an important yet widely underresearched topic in family business studies. Drawing on extant marketing and reputation literature and adapting established scales to their particular research context, the authors find that promoting a company’s status as a family firm strengthens consumers’ preference for the products and services offered by family firms, primarily because of the relational qualities consumers associate with family firms. The article lays a foundation for future research and theorizing on marketing and
2
Editors’ note / Journal of Family Business Strategy 4 (2013) 1–2
branding in family business and offers ample opportunities for exploring the topic with alternative samples and methodologies. The second article by Isabel Botero, Tomasz Fediuk (both Independent Family Business Researchers, USA), Jill Thomas and Christopher Graves (both of The University of Adelaide, Australia) continues in a similar vein and explores how organizations communicate their family firm status through their websites. Toward this purpose, the authors content-analyzed the websites of 1036 companies from three different countries (Australia, United States and United Kingdom) and find that a majority (58%) of companies communicate their family firm status directly or indirectly via their websites. Interestingly, the figures are quite consistent across all three countries. Various firm characteristics such as firm age, country of origin, type of industry, and market orientation determine how and where companies communicate their family firm status. The authors discuss alternative explanations for their findings and advance several suggestions that shall spur future research into this timely and important topic. In the third article, Rachel Shinnar (Appalachian State University, USA), Seonghee Cho (University of Missouri Columbia, USA) and Edward Rogoff (Baruch College, USA) take a closer look at family involvement in minority-owned family businesses. Drawing on resource based theory and using a nationally representative sample of White, African-American, Korean-American and Mexican-American entrepreneurs, the authors find that the four ethnic groups differ considerably in their likelihood of employing family members, their degree of family altruism toward the business, and financial involvement in the business. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that family employment affects business outcomes differently across the four ethnic groups. Fellow researchers will find this article of particular interest as it offers ample suggestions for further research into this important, yet understudied topic. In the fourth article, Alain Praet from Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussels (Belgium) studies divestment decisions in family firms. Combining agency theory, interest alignment and entrenchment arguments into a coherent set of hypotheses and using a longitudinal dataset of publicly traded family firms in Belgium, the author establishes a nonlinear (inverse U-shaped) relationship between the level of family ownership and likelihood of divestment. Apart from family ownership, the likelihood of divestment is also contingent upon the governance constellation of the family firm. Specifically, the likelihood of divestment decreases with a greater proportion of family members on the board of directors. Furthermore, founders are more likely to divest subsidiaries than later generations. The study emphasizes the ambiguous nature of family firms resulting in curvilinear relationships that need to be accounted for more rigorously both theoretically and methodologically in future research. The fifth article by Rodrigo Basco (Universidad Cato´lica del Norte, Chile) continues in a similar vein and furthers the debate on how family affects family firm performance by exploring two widespread concepts in the family business field, the demographic and essence approach to family influence. Building on an exhaustive review of prior literature and incorporating both approaches into a single, holistic framework, the author is able to test the models not only separate from each other (as it is commonly done), but also combined and assess their separate and combined impact on family business performance. The findings are quite insightful and demonstrate how using a holistic approach to family business research yields important insights that typically go unnoticed under a more narrow and isolated focus, thereby laying an important foundation for future theorizing and empirical investigations on family business.
Update on special issues We have several exciting projects planned for the coming year. First, the Special Issue on the role and impact of accounting in family business edited by Luca Gnan (University of Rome, Italy), Lucrezia Songini (Boccconi School of Management, Italy), and Teemu Malmi (Aalto University School of Economics, Finland) is completed and scheduled for publication in June of 2013. We are particularly excited about this Special Issue as the articles featured in it cover major accounting areas (i.e., managerial accounting and strategic planning, as well as financial accounting and valuation) and employ a variety of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Second, the Special Issue on trust and relationship commitment in family business co-edited by Robert Morgan (University of Alabama, USA), Kimberly Eddleston (Northeastern University, USA) and Torsten Pieper (Kennesaw State University, USA) has received many strong submissions. This Special Issue is currently scheduled for publication in the second half of 2013. Third, Cristina Cruz (IE Business School, Madrid), Clay Dibrell (University of Mississippi) and Franz Kellermanns (University of Tennessee at Knoxville and WHU) are guest editors of a Special Issue on emotions in family business strategy. The focus of this special issue is on the role and impact of emotions on strategic decision processes in family firms. Submission deadline for this special issue is April 15, 2013. Fourth, research methods experts Joe Hair (Kennesaw State University, USA) and Marko Sarstedt (Otto-von-Guericke-Universita¨t Magdeburg, Germany) together with Torsten Pieper (Kennesaw State University, USA) are guest editors of a special issue on research methods in family business. The focus of this special issue is on various statistical techniques and methodological issues in studying family firms empirically. Submission deadline for this special issue is June 1, 2013. Fifth, JFBS will feature a special issue from the 2013 IFERA World Conference to be held at The University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) on July 2–5, 2013. The topic of this special issue will be aligned with the overall topic of the conference: ‘‘Ownership, Governance, and Value in Family Firms’’. For further information, please visit http://ifera2013.ifera.org. There is an open call for papers for each of these special issues, so please feel free to submit your work regardless of whether you have attended a related conference or not. Further details on these and all other special issues are available through our journal website www.elsevier.com/locate/jfbs. If you are interested in editing a special issue for JFBS, we would be delighted to hear your thoughts. We encourage you to contribute to the increasing growth of family business and JFBS by sending us your work (http:// ees.elsevier.com/jfbs). You may also want to become a friend of JFBS on Facebook to keep up with the latest news (http:// www.facebook.com/jfbs.elsevier). Thank you for your support and we look forward to receiving your submission.
Joseph H. Astrachan PhD Editor-in-Chief Torsten M. Pieper PhD Assistant Editor E-mail address:
[email protected] (J.H. Astrachan)
