Socioemotional wealth (SEW) research has been criticized for not directly assessing the locus and drivers of family members’ SEW. We propose that a social psychological approach to SEW can help address these concerns, conducting analyses on 421 articles published across 25 journals during the first decade of SEW research. We therefore assess how SEW has been used and identify various inherent complexities that SEW poses for researchers. Altogether, our analyses afford us opportunities to better understand SEW scholarship’s social psychological roots and to propose an agenda that can help further build and extend the psychological microfoundations of family firms.

For years, family business researchers have argued that many areas of entrepreneurship research have unnaturally separated the social institutions of family and business, calling for more exploration of the pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship. Recent research has started to explore these effects within a family business context, but scholars still do not know much about how other family environments influence entrepreneurship. Using a family systems theoretical perspective, this conceptual paper addresses how developmental aspects of parenting and family environments, both inside and outside a family business context, contribute to the expression of entrepreneurial intentions and behaviours in adulthood. The most theoretically novel aspects of this paper focus on how family business contexts amplify links between entrepreneurial intentions and behaviours.

In this study, we advance novel understandings of strategies that marginalized entrepreneurs use to overcome institutional bias and mobilize crucial resources. Using grounded theory, we analyzed qualitative interview data from 97 women entrepreneurs across Iran, India, and the United States to understand the source and nature of the institutional constraints they faced, the strategies they used to overcome these constraints, and the agency and legitimacy that ensued as a result. We found that marginalized entrepreneurs engaged in three focal strategies: family transmutation, ally activation, and enabler cooptation. We propose that these strategies enhance marginalized entrepreneurs' likelihood of securing needed resources, but with different consequences for their agency and legitimacy. We offer several contributions to entrepreneurial resource mobilization and institutional literatures.

Research often assumes that a controlling family’s social bonds contributes to superior firm performance. However, there is little theory to address these relationships and findings are often mixed. Here, we integrate resource-based and need-to-belong theories to address these issues, introducing family business potency as a key mediating variable between family cohesion, participative strategy processes, and firm performance in 109 family firms. Altogether, our study answers ongoing theoretical calls for more need-based psychological research in family firms, introduces family business potency to the literature, and contributes to research on family firm heterogeneity. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed.

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