A Survey of Asian Family Business Research

Morten Bennedsen, Vikas Mehrotra and Yi-Chun Lu conducted a literature survey on family firms with a focus on Asian countries.

They begin with identifying three key motivational drivers of research on family business – their dominance, relative performance and extent of family embeddedness in the business.

Thereafter, they provide a brief survey of family firms in eight Asian economies with a focus on the history and current challenges faced by family firms in each country.

Then, they document the variety of family firm definitions used in the literature and the resulting difficulty in drawing inferences due to a lack of definitional consistency.

They then discuss the strategic advantages family assets such as legacy and networks bring to family firms in the Asian context.

Finally, they identify some unique challenges family firms face in their countries, and provide examples of how ownership and succession structures mitigate these challenges.

They close the survey by suggesting some open research questions relevant for Asian family firms.

The paper has been published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Financial Studies on February 14, 2022. 

Authors:

Morten Bennedsen - INSEAD, University of Copenhagen

Yi-Chun Lu - University of Copenhagen, I-Shou University

Vikas Mehrotra - University of Alberta