Family Firms and Foreign Entry Strategies

Extant literature has recognised that family businesses have peculiar features influencing their strategies. Scholars have demonstrated the family influence on the firm’s international level, but with few exceptions they failed to investigate whether and how the family control affects entry modes. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it aims to provide an integrative framework of the literature on family firms and foreign entry strategies, identifying the main existing gaps in the research. Second, it aims to demonstrate empirically that family control affects entry strategies, studying the entry mode (joint venture versus wholly owned subsidiary) and the establishment mode (greenfield versus acquisition) of a sample of family and non-family firms. Differently from previous studies, the entry strategies have been studied here as bilateral choices, thus, both the family status of the MNE and of the local firms have been considered.