Call for paper: Resilience and Reinvention: Family Enterprises and business in Asia Pacific’s Emerging Markets

Resilience and Reinvention: Family Enterprises and business in Asia Pacific’s Emerging Markets

This special issue explores how context shapes the growth, operations, and sustainability of family enterprises—particularly micro and small firms—in the Asia Pacific region. While family businesses dominate global economies, current theorising is largely grounded in developed-world contexts and mid-sized firms, producing a limited and monolithic understanding. In contrast, Asia Pacific family enterprises operate across diverse institutional, cultural, and historical environments that influence ownership, governance, and entrepreneurial behaviour. This issue seeks to advance contextual theorising by examining how these differences shape resilience, reinvention, and cross-border impact. It invites contributions that reveal how local philosophies, institutions, and histories explain the heterogeneity and global significance of Asia Pacific family enterprises. This special issue offers an original contribution by advancing contextual theorising in family business research, addressing the prevailing dominance of context-free studies (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2020).

It specifically focuses on micro and small family enterprises—an understudied segment despite their growing significance—within the diverse socio-cultural, institutional, and historical landscapes of the Asia Pacific region. Unlike prior reviews (e.g., Teixeira et al., 2020), this issue explicitly integrates a context-lens (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2020; Kreuger et al., 2021; Fang et al., 2022) to explain how local philosophies, governance traditions, and regional dynamics shape family business behaviour and sustainability. By doing so, it will generate novel theoretical and empirical insights that extend existing paradigms, providing a richer and more globally relevant understanding of family business phenomena across Asia Pacific’s micro and small enterprises.

Submission Information

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Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.