International Management IM

Submissions open July 1^st, 2020; Submissions due November 1^st, 2020

Since their seminal paper, Gallo and Sveen (1991) remark the fact that the family nature of the business presents both facilitating and restraining effects on internationalization (related to family business objectives, organizational structure and systems, and company culture). More recent research has developed these seminal ideas including new constructs as familiness (Habbershon & Williams, 1999), or socio-emotional wealth (Gómez-Mejía et al, 2007). Most researchers have associated the internationalization of family firms to the sequential model proposed by Johanson and Vahlne (1990; 2009; Pukall and Calabro, 2014); this is often seen stemming from the risk aversion as the family might want to preserve the company for future generation and is not willing to take high risks in internationalization (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2010). However, other scholars have found links between family firms' internationalization process and the international entrepreneurship field, showing, for example, a higher agility in decision-taking in family-managed firms (Piva and Rossi-Lamastra, 2013; Thomas and Graves, 2005). In summary, different type of behavior in relation to internationalization has been found in the extant literature and IFB continue to be far from a mature topic. The potential heterogeneity of internationalization process of family business derives from the influence of different combinations of family involvement on corporate government structure and functioning.

We seek conceptual, theoretical, methodological or empirical – both qualitative and quantitative – papers that can contribute to the advance of our understanding of IFBs. More information at