The unique form of social capital among family involved in the business, or family social capital (FSC), has both positive and negative effects on the family firm. To better understand how FSC exists across family firms and advance related theory, we develop a taxonomy of FSC. Using configuration analyses on two samples of family firms, we find that three clusters of family firms exist, which include firms with Instrumental, Identifiable, and Indistinguishable FSC. The specific configurations of each cluster are noted, and effects on economic and noneconomic outcomes are identified to advance understanding of the heterogeneous nature of family firms.
We contend that exploring the construct of bootstrapping could be much more nuanced and interesting than the extant literature has revealed. Unfortunately, the extant literature is stymied by conflicting theoretical as well as empirical landscapes. We address the critical lacunas in the literature by (a) situating the construct of bootstrapping in its historical, chronological context; (b) providing clarity to a construct that is currently lacking; (c) summarizing the theoretical bases which currently apply to bootstrapping; and (d) proposing signaling theory as an appropriate and complementary perspective to use when examining bootstrapping. In addition, our work identifies multiple lines of compelling and novel research that emerge from our approach to the construct of bootstrapping via signaling theory.
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