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Guest Editors: Stefano Amato, Evans Korang Adjei, Rodrigo Basco, Lech Suwala
Family firms represent one of the most predominant forms of business organization across regions in developed and emerging economies (Basco et al. 2021). Family firms are the backbone of some of the most dynamic regions in the world -like the Baden-Württemberg dominated mainly by the family-owned Mittelstand (Berghoff 2006) or the Third Italy with the small and medium-sized family firms scattered in the Marshallian industrial districts (Becattini et al. 2009)- and important economic players in natural resource-based clusters in developing and emerging regions – such as the Antofagasta region in Chile (Basco and Calabrò 2016).
However, current evidence is torn between the association of family firms with regional long-term economic and prosperity from one side, and the adverse effects like regional decline, regional sclerosis, and/or regional lock-ins on the other side (Basco and Suwala 2021; Pittino et al. 2021). Hence, despite the nascent efforts to elucidate this contradiction and connect family firms and regional context (Adjei et al. 2018; Albers and Suwala 2021; Amato et al. 2021a; Ricotta and Basco 2021) are gaining momentum, family firms have received limited attention in mainstream regional science.
Following the debate opened by Stough et al. (2015) and continued by Basco et al. (2021) to advance the cross-fertilization between family business and regional studies, this call aims to move forward this debate by shading new light in a twofold and not mutually exclusive way. First, by unveiling under what conditions family and non-family firms are differently affected by the regional context where they are located (Capello 2011; Suwala 2021). The pervasive economic, social, and emotional connections with their home place (i.e., territorial embeddedness) may enable family firms to exploit some locational advantages (Cucculelli and Storai 2015; Amato et al. 2021b) or to offset the downsides resulting from regional remoteness (Baù et al. 2019). Second, by exploring the family firms’ influence on the regional context (Berlemann and Jahn 2016), that is whether and to what extent the prevalence of family firms in spatially-bounded areas—such as regions and territories—fosters (Block and Spiegel 2013; Amato et al. 2021c) or hinders (Cappelli et al. 2021) local and regional development.
Review of Regional Research invites scholars to submit papers for this special issue on “Family Firms and Regional Context” to advance our understanding of the interplay between family firms and regional settings. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
Instructions and Dates
Manuscripts should follow the submission guidelines of the journal, which can be found here: https://www.springer.com/journal/10037/submission-guidelines. Submissions should be made through https://www.editorialmanager.com/jfre/default.aspx.
All submissions will go through a blind peer-review process. The deadline to submit the full paper is September 15, 2022. We expect the special issue to be published by or before spring 2024.