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Family businesses play an important role in economic development and income growth. However, increasing business competition has placed family businesses in a volatile position due to their limited resources. Undoubtedly, the family business's success in responding to the challenge of the business environment depends on their strategy for engaging in entrepreneurial behaviours and the availability of debt financing to family businesses. Understanding the factors that influence debt financing, therefore, becomes important. In exploring the factors that influence debt financing, prior studies investigate the effects of entrepreneurial orientation and socioemotional wealth (SEW) in isolation from each other. Moreover, literature on the effect of SEW on debt financing shows mixed conclusions. The current study, by considering SEW as the kernel, firstly examines the influence of entrepreneurial orientation on debt financing. Secondly, it examines the impact of SEW on the relationships between entrepreneurial orientation and debt financing. To avoid bias from utilising one particular research method, this study purposely employed an explanatory sequential triangulation strategy. This was intended for model testing and an in-depth understanding of the research issues in the Nigerian context. Primary data were collected from Nigeria via a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews. Adopting a purposive sampling and snowball sampling method, a total of 500 self-administered questionnaires were sent out in August 2019 to family businesses to collect primary data. Out of the number sent, 405 useful responses were gathered for the quantitative study generating a response rate of 81%. For the qualitative study, 10 interviews were conducted with family businesses. A hierarchical regression analysis was applied in assessing the impact of SEW on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and the debt financing of family businesses. Research results suggest that, firstly, entrepreneurial orientation influences the debt financing of family businesses. More importantly, SEW has a significant moderating impact on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and debt financing. The study contributes to the literature in three major areas. Firstly, against the backdrop of mixed conclusions in prior research about the effect of SEW on debt financing this study finds that the effect of SEW could be examined along with the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation. Specifically, it establishes that SEW moderates the effects of the EO dimensions on debt financing of family businesses i.e., the antecedents of debt financing. This helps clarify the role of SEW. Secondly, unlike prior studies and models that examine the influence of entrepreneurial orientation and SEW in isolation from each other, this study develops and validates a model to examine how these factors jointly shape debt financing. Specifically, the model shows that entrepreneurial orientation influences debt financing but also SEW would intensify the influence of entrepreneurial orientation on company debt financing. Lastly, even though family businesses are the dominant form of organisation in the world and are the prime source of wealth creation and employment for both developed and emerging economies, it has received insufficient research attention in Nigeria. This study has, therefore, added to the scanty research available about family businesses and their contribution to poverty alleviation, employment generations, and sustainable economic growth in Nigeria. On the whole, the study makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of debt financing of family businesses.

This study set out to understand how one of the poorest, most disadvantaged groups - rural African women - perceive and experience microfinance in the context of extreme poverty. The study employed a qualitative method and purposefully sampled thirty poor rural women entrepreneurs in five villages of South-East Nigeria. Data collected from participant observation, five focus groups and thirty interviews were analysed thematically using the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) to develop insight about the many complexities of livelihoods of rural women entrepreneurs. The study therefore contributes to business scholarship by improving our understanding the perceptions and experiences of rural women about microfinance. The analyses demonstrated that poor women entrepreneurs rely on family to operate their microbusiness and in return sustain the family from the business. The family, as an influential institution, with attendant norms and obligations, informs women's entrepreneurial response and family roles. For these poor women, their priorities revolve around providing necessities for their family and paying for their children's education - clearly a livelihood for survival, not economic maximisation. In their opinion, microcredit is debt and presents a great risk with terrible consequences. The practicalities of their reality means that the potential benefits that microcredit could present may be easily swallowed by its perceived dangers. This is because the complexities introduced by vulnerability and basic consumption needs of the household can impact on the prompt repayment of loans. Therefore, microfinance providers should understand that microcredit is viewed differently by the very poor, and they should endeavour to tailor microfinance in such a way that will support women to fulfil their family and business roles by reducing barriers affecting access to microfinance.

This study is an exploration of the learning strategies of family businesses in the North West of England, within the framework of the theory of the Learning Organisation (LO). The main purpose of this study is to explore and evaluate the notion of the Learning Organisation and to investigate its prevalence and application to the Family Business sector within North West England. To date, a very limited amount of studies focused on the characteristics of the LO within the medium and large family business context. Therefore, this study contributes to knowledge by determining practical guidance for implementing LO characteristics that can be applied to family businesses. The study used a qualitative methodology, associated with the social constructivist and interpretivist paradigm. Six medium and large family businesses operating in North West England were chosen to facilitate the qualitative research. In the North West of England, medium and large family businesses have complex features which create high demand for owners and employees to adopt learning strategies discussed in the LO concept which makes it an ideal context to explore the prevalence and the application of LO characteristics. This research makes a number of contributions to knowledge. Firstly, through review and analysis of the currently available theoretical work from more than 40 LO theorists and practitioners spanning the last four decades. The development of this "theoretical frame of reference" and the terminology used for identifying and analysing of LO characteristics is not only seen as a vital fundamental step in the course of this thesis, but also as a major contribution to providing structure and improving the future academic study of LO. Second, findings from the study suggest that medium and large family businesses have shown the existence of some of the LO characteristics within the three main levels of the organisations. The notable findings of the research are that medium and large family businesses need to develop a learning culture with organisational learning to incorporate with the business strategy and provide a transformational leadership so as to achieve the possibility of becoming a LO. The findings identify that family businesses in the North West region have the potential to become Learning Organisations should they implement the proposed recommendations and changes to their currently family business models. Third, the thesis makes a methodological contribution by introducing a model of Learning Organisations which specifically relates to family businesses. Furthermore, this model aims to facilitate a learning culture that suggests family businesses adopt key characteristics of the LO for continuous improvement, collective learning, and enhancement of performance.

This research is about financing practices of Pakistani-immigrant and indigenous-owned small travel agents. The study provides an understanding of the capital structures of businesses owned by both groups and compares these to draw similarities and differences between both groups. The research integrates the 'ethnic enclave' immigrant theory, the capital structure theory in particular the Pecking Order Hypothesis, the role of 'networks' in business financing, and the business life-cycle theories. The research question and the research hypotheses emerged from the literature reviewed. Ten case studies, five Pakistani businesses and five indigenous businesses, confirmed the hypotheses which formed the basis of a survey of a large sample of sixty businesses, thirty in each group. The case study data is considered invaluable since it provided the real evidence of the sensitive nature of financial information in these businesses. The methodology adopted was a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The findings of the study show that there are more similarities than differences among the capital structures of both groups of businesses. The nuclear family plays a crucial role throughout the life-cycle of the business in both groups. The role of family labour is not as prominent as among other industries such as Confectionery, Tobacconists, and Newsagents (CTN's). Informal sources of finance are preferred over formal sources by both groups of businesses due to their availability and lower cost. The Pecking Order Hypothesis theory applies to both groups of businesses. The main sources of formal finance were high street banks, bank overdrafts and loans. Pakistani businesses were not disadvantaged in any way by the formal providers of finance. This research is the first to report on the comparative capital structures among both groups of businesses. However, although considerable contribution has been made by this research to the small business finance literature further research should be conducted into the area.

Business succession planning (BSP) is a process through which organisations plan for the handing over of either the ownership and/or top management in the future (Ip and Jacobs 2006), therefore BSP is a main concern in family-owned businesses (FOBs). Succession in FOBs is nowadays one of the issues drawing great worldwide attention within the study of success and failure factors in FOBs (International Council for Small Business, 2010). The overall focus of this study looks at how ethnicity affects BSP in FOBs; particularly in small and medium scale migrant family-owned convenience stores and restaurants in Christchurch. Researchers have long stressed the importance of business succession planning (BSP) in the sustainability of family-owned businesses (FOB) (Boyd et al., 2015; Mokhber et al., 2017); it is the key to the success of the FOB (Ghee et al., 2015). BSP in FOBs is part of a larger succession process and is defined as the ‘deliberate and formal process that facilitates the transfer of management control from one family member to another’ (Lybaert and Steijvers, 2015). Mandl (2008) reports that the success of a FOB is based on several integrated factors; the founder’s business management skills, including the formation of a solid foundation for successors, to the successor transition process. Mandl and Mokhber et al. (2017) in their study on BSP in FOBs report that many FOBs failed to appreciate BSP in their business resulting in only one third of the FOBs surviving into the second generation, and only 10%-15% making it into the third generation. This research focuses on BSP in ethnic migrant FOBs; a popular concept in the modern multi-cultural society; where skills and aspirations to be entrepreneurial across borders have become more evident among many ethnic migrants across the world (Nnabue 2016; Mokhber et al., 2017). In doing so, McDougall and Oviatt’s (2000) findings is deemed as important where it identify a migrant business as ‘a combination of innovative, proactive and risk-seeking behaviour that crosses national borders and is intended to create value in organisations’. de Vries and Dana (2009) report that aspects such as moving across countries, settlement, culture and tradition and business emerged in a variety of forms based on an intricate and vigorous combination of the migrant entrepreneur’s background along with the receiving country’s socio-economic setup. Studies by Ram et al. (2001), de Vries (2010) and de Vries and Kantor (2013) report that migrants face many impediments in the migrant country’s labour market such as racial discrimination, lack of necessary language skills (for example the ability to speak English in an English-speaking country), and limited employment opportunities, which has forced them into initiating entrepreneurial ventures to escape unemployment. In this process where migrants engage in entrepreneurial ventures, de Vries (2010), Ram et al. (2012) and Mokhber et al. (2017) state that, in most cases, these migrant businesses were regarded as FOBs and were often categorised as small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs). With migrant businesses being mostly FOBs, Tatoglu et al. (2008), Kaunda and Nkhoma (2013), Vassiliadis and Vassiliadis (2014) and Mokhber et al. (2017) in their studies report that BSP is the key to the success and continuation of these migrant FOBs. Migrant FOBs have at their base a variety of nationalities and ethnic backgrounds (Sonfield 2014), and in spite of the different ethnic backgrounds of these migrants, it is important that these migrant FOBs plan for business succession the same as any other FOB (Nel and Abdullah 2014; Sonfield 2014; Gongález and Campbell 2018). The literature on BSP in FOBs by Alcorn (1982), Bachkaniwala et al. (2001), Bagwell (2008); Whatley (2011), Saxena (2013), and Collins and Fakoussa (2015) reports on family business succession in terms of the different levels of business succession, the family characteristics in succession planning, transgenerational business succession, models for family business succession, and stages of family business succession. However, there is a notable absence of research on how ethnicity impacts the decision for business succession in migrant FOBs. As mentioned before, this study investigates the impact of ethnicity on BSP in small and medium scale migrant family-owned convenience stores and restaurants and is unique because it is the first of its type in New Zealand. Literature reported by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (2011) and the Inland Revenue Department (2014) suggest that the retail trade and the food services sector was considered as industries with low-barrier-to-entry as these industries did not require extensive skills and/or knowledge and these were two industries which most migrants engaged in as a method of entering the New Zealand workforce. The research sample comprised fifty-one research participants from twenty ethnic family-owned convenience stores and thirty-one ethnic family-owned restaurants operating within a five kilometre radius of Christchurch city centre, New Zealand. The sample was a combination of twenty-four Chinese, ten Indian, seven Thai, five Korean, three Vietnamese and two Japanese businesses. A mixed qualitative methodological approach including elements of grounded theory and case study methods was used, data were gathered via semi-structured interviews and analysed using NVivo. A large proportion (49%) of the sample were middle aged (ages 35-44), tertiary qualified, second generation owners who are mostly male, who mostly believe that their ethnic background including culture, traditions, beliefs, religion, rituals, impacts on their business practices including their decision to plan for business succession. Interestingly, thirty-nine respondents (76%) had planned for business succession and twelve respondents (24%) had not. Given the high ethnic enforcements and the ethnic intensity, of those who had a BSP, thirty-eight (98%) held their plan in informal methods including at the back of their minds, merely as a thought and/or as a family matter discussed among family members. However, irrespective of such ethnic enforcements and family ethnic thinking of the participants, they were also eager to provide their children (heirs) with a good education that may result in the heirs wanting to choose a different career option over choosing to continue with the FOB. This resulted in creating a conflict of interest between two opinions which required further consideration by those who had a BSP; first, the business founders of the participants wanted their children to be well educated, which would enable them to become professionals and, secondly, because of ethnicity aspects such as “persevering family pride”, “continuing with the family reputation”, “fulfilling family responsibilities”, they also wanted them to take over the family business. Irrespective of the incumbents having planned for business succession, in most cases a common feature in the respective ethnicities, having been brought-up and nurtured in the New Zealand cultural background and acclimatised to New Zealand surroundings, the heirs to FOBs were open to policy, societal, and environmental changes that may reduce and/or eliminate their interest in taking over the FOB in the future. The study participants were, in some, cases oblivious to certain transformations in their behaviour and business practices that included their decision to plan for business succession. For example, some participants from the convenience store sector preferred to do their grocery shopping at supermarkets over convenience stores; the sustainability of convenience stores could be at a risk in the future. Furthermore, the findings of this research highlights on potential changes in elements including policy changes and societal changes which could lead to a possibility in migrant family-owned convenience stores and restaurants coming to an end in New Zealand in future. It also emphasizes on a possibility of the ‘ethnicity’ factor becoming less intense in future due to such policy changes and societal changes. The findings of this research add to present FOB BSP models and the literature.

In the last two decades, the families that own some of Colombia's largest privately-owned companies have been implementing strategies of corporate governance that seek to rationalize and professionalize business practices in order to prevent the internal disputes that often befall family firms. In addition to standard corporate governance measures like setting up boards of directors and convening shareholders meetings, many business-owning families have also begun applying rule-based structures and procedures to regulate relationships between family members. Following the recommendations of consultants belonging to a newly emerging field of family business expertise, these Colombian business-owning families write out what they refer to as “family protocols,” and gather in “family assemblies,” where they work specifically toward the continuity of their family businesses. Based on twenty months of ethnographic field research among members of such families in Bogotá, Colombia, this dissertation explores how family business governance and the idea of successful succession create bonds of kinship among family shareholders. Specifically, I argue that the procedures of governance and the notions of efficacy that consultant recommendations involve, provide family members with a means to enact family identities that are closely associated with obligations to work. For individuals who are descendants of notable entrepreneurs and understand themselves as having inherited their unique disposition for success, expert-endorsed measures present tangible ways to take family relationships into their own hands. As such, I argue that in this context, kinship is re-created alongside family governance, and not necessarily as a result of it. In other words, it is the idea that family business can be sustained through concerted action, combined with ideologies of genealogy and of expertise, that continue to bring together shareholders to interact as family. Drawing from anthropological accounts that disrupt notions of expertise based on efficacy, this study of the role of expert knowledge in the production of kinship among Colombian business-owning families contributes to the ongoing effort in anthropology to elucidate the contingent constitution of relatedness. In this case, a close engagement with how family business successful succession motivates specific forms of agency presents kinship as an unexpected effect of business expertise. In addition, by presenting the enactment of family as an unintended consequence of the ideas and techniques of consultants rather than as their direct result, the dissertation provides a framework in which to consider a fuller picture of concerted action in the world of business.

This dissertation examines the tension between doing good and doing well in the context of institutional efforts to revitalize the handloom textile industry in India. It is based primarily on ethnographic research undertaken in Delhi and two sites in Madhya Pradesh, namely, the commercial city of Indore, once famous for its textile mills, and the town of Chanderi, where two-thirds of the roughly 30,000 residents are either practicing weavers or work in directly related industries (e.g., as traders, dyers, and yarn-sellers). These sites each form part of the corporate geography of Fabindia, which is the largest private retailer of craft in India and, in the context of this dissertation, also serves as an occasion for the analysis of market ethics and their institutionalization. Drawing on archival as well as ethnographic material, I begin by tracing the history of Fabindia from the historical and global contexts in which it was established in 1960 to its more recent efforts to realize a vision of “inclusive capitalism” through the creation of a network of “community-owned companies” in which artisan-suppliers own shares. Rather than presupposing the nature of market ethics, instead, this becomes the focus of my inquiry. I examine market ethics as they are constituted through interactions and transactions that shape the broader contexts in which Fabindia operates and where the material qualities of cloth—but also looms, account books, and brand labels—enabled certain projects while impeding others. These instances of ethical contestation and construction reveal diverse efforts to define the goodness of handloom cloth as well as profit. The chapters of the dissertation are organized around four interrelated themes: (1) the purification or, alternatively, resolution of humanitarianism and capitalism; (2) the materiality and morality of market transactions; (3) community and family as they come together with corporate enterprises; (4) forms of ownership and the legal and extra-legal protection of property.

The aim of this study is to explore and conceptualise the entrepreneurial behaviour and entrepreneurial capacity building (ECB) of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the least-developed countries (LDCs). The case site for this study is Laos. This country was chosen because of its unique political and cultural aspects. In essence, most SMEs in Laos are called “family economies” (Set Tha Kid Khop Khoua). It is proposed that these SMEs may exhibit unique approaches to entrepreneurial behaviour and ECB. The research question is ‘How do we conceptualise the entrepreneurial capacity building of SMEs in the least-developed countries (LDCs), particularly in Laos?’ This research project employed in-depth interviews using grounded theory and thematic coding as the mode of analysis. Eleven respondents were interviewed in Laos including SME entrepreneurs, regardless of business industries and policy makers from government agencies concerned and other international organisations. It was found that there are three significant themes that define entrepreneurial behaviour and capacity development in Laos: new initiatives, efficiency of government policy and ECB value. At the same time, key challenges that prevent SMEs in Laos from having access to effective entrepreneurial development are identified, including financial resources, information resources, low awareness of ECB and low ECB qualifications. The research findings suggest that strategic conceptualisation for an effective ECB framework should be formulated, based on the local context of SMEs. It should act as a guideline to facilitate SME access to finance and become a mechanism for implementing a government policy of SME promotion and development. It should also be the basis for the promotion and development of entrepreneurial education. The research question is ‘How do we conceptualise the entrepreneurial capacity building of SMEs in the least-developed countries (LDCs), particularly in Laos?’ This research project employed in-depth interviews using grounded theory and thematic coding as the mode of analysis. Eleven respondents were interviewed in Laos including SME entrepreneurs, regarless of business industries and policy makers from government agencies concerned and other international organisations. It was found that there are three significant themes that define entrepreneurial behaviour and capacity development in Laos: new initiatives, efficiency of government policy and ECB value. At the same time, key challenges that prevent SMEs in Laos from having access to effective entrepreneurial development are identified, including financial resources, information resources, low awareness of ECB and low ECB qualifications. The research findings suggest that strategic conceptualisation for an effective ECB framework should be formulated, based on the local context of SMEs. It should act as a guideline to facilitate SME access to finance and become a mechanism for implementing a government policy of SME promotion and development. It should also be the basis for the promotion and development of entrepreneurial education.