1,721,107 research outputs found
The role of culture in family firms
No full textAlthough family firms are ubiquitous, their prevalence displays major geographic disparities and their performance differs across regions. We review an extensive literature showing that formal institutional factors play a key role in explaining variations in the diffusion of family firms and their performance. We also review a more neglected but rapidly emerging stream of research focusing on culture as a source of these variations. By providing a framework for current theories, findings and methods, we demonstrate how cultural elements such as trust, religion, family values and collectivism provide useful answers to where and why family firms exist, and how well they perform
Is family leadership always beneficial?
No full textThere has been much debate concerning the performance of family firms and the drivers of their performance. Some scholars have argued that family management is to blame when family firms go wrong; others claim that family management removes costly agency problems and encourages stewardship. Our thesis is that these disagreements can only be resolved by distinguishing among different types of family firms. We argue that family CEOs will outperform in smaller firms with more concentrated ownership and underperform in larger firms with more dispersed ownership; they will do neither where firms are smaller and ownership is more dispersed or firms are larger and ownership is more concentrated
Family ownership dispersion and dividend payout in family firms
No full textDividends are an important means of paying shareholders. At the same time, dividends can drain resources useful to grow the business. Focusing on privately-owned family firms, we argue that an important and unexplored feature driving dividend payout is the dispersion of equity shares among family members. Due to potential differences in family owners’ priorities, we hypothesize that equity dispersion is positively associated with dividends. This relationship, however, is weaker for firms led by a family member, first-generation firms, and firms in uncertain industry contexts. Our empirical analysis supports these hypotheses
Ownership similarity in mergers and acquisitions target selection
No full textWe study how ownership similarity between two firms affects the likelihood of an acquisition between them. Assortative matching arguments suggest that similarity between acquiring and target firms can encourage acquisition behavior since more similar partners can better understand one another and combine resources in a more efficient way. Previous research has confirmed this expectation focusing on traits related to industry, strategy and technology. We contribute to this literature by examining similarity in the type of dominant owner. We hypothesize and find evidence in a sample of 14,000 Italian companies that acquisitions are more likely to occur among firms with similar owners
Product innovation, firm renewal and family governance
Get PDFProduct innovation has been recognized as a primary means of corporate renewal as it demands the creation and expansion of organizational competences over time. Among the factors driving product introduction is governance structure. Where shareholders value control over the firm, new product introductions may be avoided if unrelated to the legacy product portfolio and therefore risky. As a consequence, company control goals may favour products within the existing competency domain, and that in turn may impede firm technological competency renewal. Because of their conservatism and desire for control, studying family firms new product strategies may demonstrate how governance conditions driving product selection relate to competency renewal. This study of 220 Italian firms shows family governance to inhibit the kinds of new product introductions that renew competencies, especially in successor generations. Although it does not suppress new product introduction per se, family management limits the products that renew technological capabilities, while increasing the offerings that help to open new foreign markets
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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