Abstract
Recent research has yet to reach a consensus on the reason behind differences in the performance of family firms. Many theories have been used to explain the performance of family firms, such as agency theory (Miller & Le Breton-Miller, 2006), social capital theory (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998), stewardship theory (Davis et al., 1997), resource-based theory (Penrose 1955, 1959; Barney, 1991) and transaction cost theory (Chrisman et al., 2010; Sharma et al., 2012). Using these conventional economic theories of the firm to analyse family businesses falls short because these theories do not encompass the unique characteristics of family firms, e.g. socioemotional wealth (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007). Hence, there is a notable absence of a theory tailored to family business. We use the Socio-Materiality Theory (SMT) to develop the “Family Business Resourcefulness” concept, which aims to explain why family businesses succeed in constrained environments with institutional voids.