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Factors Affecting Global Business Environment

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As one of the most dominant organisational forms in global business environment, family businesses have been drawing attention among management scholars with a strong focus especially on “succession, performance, and governance” of these companies (Astrachan & Shanker, 2003; Zahra & Sharma, 2004). Although the first attempt to conduct research on family businesses can be traced back to Trow’s (1961) empirical study entitled “Executive succession in small companies” in which he investigated the factors that affect succession planning for top positions in small companies, its popularity has started to increase after 1980s (Benavides-Velasco, Quintana-Garcia, & Guizman-Parra, 2013). In their cluster analysis, Benavides-Velasco et al. (2013) have found that “succession”, “governance”, “organisation theory”, “SMEs”, “ownership”, and “human resources” are the main areas of research that have been studying in the existing family business literature. However, despite the growing interest in these topics, this field of research can be regarded as still a burgeoning field of inquiry and even considered to be in its infancy (Chrisman et al., 2008). The dearth of studies in this field can be attributed to the lack of a standardised definition of family business and its boundaries (Handler, 1989; Sharma, 2004). This lack has led to crucial challenges for distinguishing family- from nonfamily businesses (Astrachan, Klein, & Smyrnios, 2002). In an attempt to eliminate definitional

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