دانلود رایگان مقاله شرکت های خانوادگی و شیوه های پایداری

Abstract

There has been growing discussion regarding the potential of family firms to embrace practices of corporate sustainability – the tendency to behave in economically, socially, and environmentally responsible ways in a manner that benefits all stakeholders and the community at large. Different conceptual lenses can be used to stress family firm positives and negatives in this regard. We identify those lenses and summarize the sustainability implications that can be extracted from them. Then we propose a set of moderating factors that may serve to arbitrate under just which conditions family firms are most apt to pursue positive practices of sustainability.

10. Conclusion

Unfortunately, we have not been able to supply any simple answers about the relationships between family firm ownership, management and organizational context and the tendency for family firms to engage in sustainability initiatives. Certainly the sustainability implications from perspectives of stewardship, family values, long-run orientation and managerial agency costs are quite positive and have merit. But so do the far less sanguine perspectives relating to conflict, private socio-emotional wealth, and principal–principal agency. We believe that whereas some family firms will be exemplary corporate citizens, others will not. Thus we have proposed numerous moderating contingencies that may help to determine which sustainability camp family firms will fall into. Family values and educational backgrounds, governance arrangements, organizational factors, and environmental forces all may have important mediating roles to play. We urge future scholars of family firm sustainability to refrain from searching for simple answers and general conclusions, and instead to seek out distinctions based on moderating factors such as those we propose to determine which lenses to use in examining family firm sustainability behavior. Given our rather daunting array of moderating contingencies, we suspect that subsequent research efforts could be simplified by focusing on specific types of family firms – for example, smaller private first- and second-generation firms working in related industries. Another way of dealing with an abundance of contingency factors is to attempt to discover configurations of attributes that describe a common family firm type within its context. This can be done using methods of numerical taxonomy or fuzzy set analysis (Fiss, 2007) and could be useful when contingency factors are related, thereby restricting the typology to a small number of common but richly described types. Type groupings might, for example, represent small, private family-run firms with a strong attachmentto the community, or large, publicly traded family firms run by non-family managers (Mintzberg,1979; Miller & Friesen, 1984).