Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is an essential concept in entrepreneurship research. Many scholars have shown CE theoretical and empirical implications for firms’ survival, development, and growth. We use a systematic literature review approach to analyse and discuss 214 articles published in top-tier journals from 1985 to 2023. This review proposes a conceptual model and highlights that little attention has been given to discussing the role of context in the corporate entrepreneurial process. Thus, we propose a research agenda for contextualizing corporate entrepreneurship concerning business, social, spatial, institutional, organizational, and ownership contexts.

Family is the most important, yet under researched, dimension in family business research. Following recent calls in Entrepreneurship-as-Practice, we bring a practice-based approach to family business research to understand next generation engagement over extended periods in family life. Drawing on a culinary family business’s three published cookbooks, theorized as ‘discursive artefacts’, we examine how mundane family business practices can enable next generations to become successors. This study contributes to family business research with its re-focus on the family and offers new insights into practice theory-building in the emergent Entrepreneurship-as-Practice. Our findings illustrate how everyday practices in family lives–for example, cooking–can enable next generations’ becoming family business successors, through socializing, bridging, and leading.

A divorce of a family business owner does not only affect the divorcing spouses, but it poses a threat to the business and its various stakeholders. Some of the complicating factors stem from the overlapping of roles, where persons that share family ties are also active in the strategic decisions and daily operations of the business. We describe the impact of divorce in the three dimensions of psychosocial, legal, and financial. Tools to decrease the negative impacts of a divorce include family law instruments such as marital agreements, gifts and wills, and company law instruments such as shareholders’ agreements and the articles of associations. Specialized advisors and proper governance structures can also reduce the negative impacts. Family business owners need to increase their awareness on how a potential divorce will affect them and the business, raise the issue, and undertake the necessary preparations.

In this study, we seek to understand firm behaviour during times of crisis, with a particular focus on family firms in different contexts. We theorize that family control mitigates (i.e. negatively moderates) the relationship between economic crisis and the layoff of employees, resulting in a higher propensity of family firms to retain their employees during a crisis compared to their nonfamily counterparts. Furthermore, taking a closer look at family firms, based on their location, we argue that family firms in rural regions are more likely to adopt measures leading to involuntary job turnover than family firms in urban areas due to a higher sensitivity to the loss of socioemotional wealth following a business closure. Relying on a panel dataset of Swedish private firms active in the period 2004-2012, our study contributes to a better understanding of family firms as employers in different contexts.

Introductory paragraphs:

Family business owners often depend on legal advice to control ownership changes and uphold a functional balance between owners. This legal advice on ownership issues spans both family law and business law. Properly done, it creates contracts that protect the family’s interests during painful and/or emotional transitions such as death, conflict or divorce. 

However, our research showed that family business owners often underutilize the legal instruments available, either because they are afraid to contemplate unpleasant matters or they think one type of advisor can help them with all types of problems. Our research focused on exploring the market for legal advice provided to family business owners specifically about contractual ownership regulation to find out two things:

• Why is family business ownership insufficiently regulated by contracts?
• What factors impede the market for legal advice to family businesses and their owners?

Från inledningen: Civilsamhällets organisationer omfattar ett brett spektrum av verksamheter, inklusive icke-statliga organisationer (NGOs), ideella föreningar och religiösa grupper. I denna artikel fokuserar vi främst på exempel från vår forskning om organisationer inom välgörenhet, bistånd och ungdomsutveckling. Till skillnad från vinstdrivande organisationer prioriterar civilsamhällets organisationer samhällsfrämjande ändamål framför vinstgenererande aktiviteter, allt från miljöskydd till att minska sociala ojämlikheter och främja ungdomars utveckling inom sport och kultur. Civilsamhällets organisationer spelar en avgörande roll i att driva samhällsfrågor och arbetar aktivt för att lindra olika problem både på nationell och global nivå. De bidrar också påtagligt till samhällsekonomin. Enligt en rapport från SCB bidrog civilsamhällets organisationer i Sverige med 3,3 % till BNP år 2021, genererade en omsättning på 161 miljarder kronor och sysselsatte cirka 192 000 personer.

Family business owners are dependent on legal advice to control ownership changes and uphold a functional balance between owners. This advice spans both family law and business law. However, family business owners are found to underutilize the legal instruments available, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises. We explore the market for legal advice provided to family business owners. Our findings describe specific ownership costs that decrease owners’ willingness and ability to contract. This avoidance of ex ante costs puts the owners at risk of extensive ex post costs that could ultimately jeopardize the business.

Longevity is at the core of what makes family businesses special. Unlike most attempts to explain longevity that have focused primarily on the factors within a family business that lead to longevity or the factors outside of an organization’s environment, we adopt a business-history perspective that enables us to show how the interplay between the organization and its environment can help to explain family business longevity. Building on the category literature, we trace the interaction of a small Swedish fourth-generation high-quality furniture manufacturer with its category over a period of more than 120 years. We identify the internal mechanisms driving family business longevity, the external mechanisms driving category development as well as the mechanisms underlying their interaction. Specifically, we provide new insights into how agency exercised by the family business contributes to the shaping of the category they are a member of, thereby nurturing their business longevity.