TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF FAMILY BUSINESS GROUPS FROM A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract The competitiveness of the Made in Italy luxury industry is in question. Traditionally Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has flowed from the advanced developed economies into developed and developing countries. More recently a new trend has emerged in the pattern of FDI. Outward bound FDI from emerging economies has begun to increase significantly and has been growing at a faster pace than FDI from the advanced developed world. The proposed project seeks to to study the impact of Chinese acquisitions and their impact on the Made in Italy luxury sector and its stakeholders. The proposed project has been funded by Marie Curie CIG grant and will start next June. The overall goal of the project is to establish and implement a substantial research agenda that will assist policy makers in responding to this trend and will be of value to all stakeholders in the Italian luxury industry as they face this facet that inevitably globalization entails.

Around the world, some of the largest firms in many countries are controlled by family business groups such as Fiat in Italy, Ford in the US, Hutchison Whampoa in Hong Kong, Samsung in South Korea and many others. Further, many family groups have a long history. Although family business groups are a significant and long standing phenomenon in most parts of the world, their resilience to globalization in their use of different governance structures and relational capabilities have received little attention from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on our previous work, the study provides a theoretical framework to classify family business groups 'key traits on the basis of their etic/emic distinction from a cross-cultural perspective.