Introduction
This Special Issue aims to advance theoretical and empirical discussions on Chinese family businesses and entrepreneurial families by diving deep into them as contexts that challenge prevailing Western theories and as generative contexts for indigenous theorizing in family entrepreneurship.
Scholarship has increasingly highlighted the importance of context in shaping entrepreneurial phenomena (Barkema et al., 2015; Suddaby et al., 2010; Welter, 2011) and emphasized entrepreneurship as a socially constructed process (Gartner et al., 2016; Steyaert, 2007; Thompson et al., 2020). Yet dominant frameworks in family business and family entrepreneurship—such as socioemotional wealth (SEW), agency theory, stewardship, and the resource-based view (RBV)—were largely developed in Western institutional and cultural environments characterized by individualism, contractual governance, and relatively liberal market economies (Fang et al., 2022; Huang et al., 2021; Sharma & Chua, 2013). When these frameworks are applied to Chinese family enterprises, their underlying assumptions about self-interest, agency costs, governance logics, and resource valuation often prove misaligned, producing puzzling or contradictory findings (Ge et al., 2024; Steyaert & Katz, 2004).
Given Chinese firms’ global importance, their distinctive development patterns are particularly salient in the current geopolitical context, where family enterprises sit at the center of international business while simultaneously adapting to uncertainties, trade frictions, and institutional turbulence (Ahlstrom et al., 2025; Huang et al., 2021). These dynamics underscore a critical theoretical challenge: do the concepts, relationships, and models embedded in Western theories hold when applied to Chinese family firms, or do they require reformulation?
We view this gap not only as evidence that Chinese family enterprises often appear as systematically different under prevailing frameworks, but also as an opportunity for indigenous theorizing that takes their cultural, institutional, demographic, and geopolitical specificities as central explanatory mechanisms. Addressing this challenge is essential not only for advancing understanding of Chinese family enterprises, but also for broadening entrepreneurship and family business scholarship at individual, organizational, and institutional levels.
Why Chinese Family Enterprises Differ
Culture. Chinese culture exerts profound yet often underexplored influence on entrepreneurial and organizational behaviors (Sharma & Chua, 2013; Ahlstrom et al., 2025), shaping not only decision-making processes but also long-term strategic trajectories. Contrary to the theories that are normally based on Western culture, understanding the Chinese culture amongst Chinese family entrepreneurship can lead to an understanding of counterintuitive business decisions (e.g., succession decisions, see Ge et al., 2024). A recent re-focus on families and practices, for example, provides opportunities to study cultural influence in-depth and provides more opportunities for indigenous theorization. Such contributions need to go beyond surface-level correlations to uncover the causal mechanisms through which cultural values, norms, and practices influence familial and business decisions (Ahlstrom et al., 2025).
Succession. Studies of family business succession often assume families select heirs to optimize competence, legitimacy, or continuity, aligning family goals with firm performance (stewardship, SEW). In China, however, Confucian patriarchy redirects goals toward filial obligation and patrilineal continuity (Jun & Sorenson, 2006). The “Fu Er Dai” stigma, commonly associating them with overreliance on family wealth and a tendency to squander resources, undermines legitimacy irrespective of competence (Sharma & Chua, 2013), while the One-Child Policy eliminates sibling competition, making succession inevitable rather than strategic. These features reveal that family goals may be culturally prescribed and demographically constrained, rather than universally linked to specific dimensions.
Tradition. Tradition is a central yet less focused on concept in family business and entrepreneurship research, where family orientations interplay with business practices (Suddaby & Jaskiewicz, 2020). Tradition, intertwined with Chinese culture, strongly impacts and leads to unique business behaviors and strategies (Lu et al., 2021). Additionally, Chinese family firms frequently mobilize traditions, rituals, narratives, and historical legacies as resources, practicing “innovation through tradition” ((De Massis et al., 2016; Ge et al., 2022). These resources derive value not from novelty but from cultural continuity, identity reinforcement, tradition, and legitimacy, expanding RBV assumptions about what constitutes valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources.
Network and institution. In Chinese family firms, Confucian role ethics and guanxi obligations often suppress overt opportunism while simultaneously creating new relational hazards—nepotism, reciprocal obligations, and political entanglement (Guo & Miller, 2010). However, such a network is also complicated in its own right, combining several at times competing institutional logics, including familial, social, market, regional, national, and international (Ahlstrom et al., 2025; Haveman et al., 2017; Miller et al., 2017), which tends to be treated as stable and analytically separable. As a result, decisions and strategies made by these family enterprises thus emerge not from contract enforcement but from navigating culturally-defined relational obligations.
Why this special issue is important
Chinese family enterprises are entering a critical historical juncture. Legacies of privatization and the One-Child Policy have created unique generational dynamics, with many firms now navigating first-to-second generation transitions under conditions of social stigma and low succession success rates (Sharma & Chua, 2013; Haveman et al., 2017; Ge et al., 2024). At the same time, these enterprises operate amid escalating geopolitical tensions, rapid technological shifts, and intensifying institutional turbulence (Huang et al., 2021; Ahlstrom et al., 2025).
These challenges make Chinese family firms not only economically significant but also theoretically generative. Their responses to succession bottlenecks, social legitimacy pressures, and institutional hybridity provide a natural laboratory for advancing new insights into entrepreneurial continuity, resilience, and adaptation. In particular, they highlight mechanisms that existing theories often overlook—such as how demographic policies constrain succession choice, how stigma reshapes legitimacy, and how firms balance geopolitical uncertainty with long-term family continuity.
This Special Issue in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development is therefore timely in calling for research that goes beyond descriptive accounts to theorize the causal processes shaping Chinese family enterprises. By foregrounding their distinctive institutional (and the embedded cultural), demographic, and geopolitical conditions, we aim to generate contributions that not only deepen understanding of Chinese family entrepreneurship but also broaden the theoretical scope of family business research globally. Namely, through promoting an indigenous theorizing of Chinese family enterprises, our call for papers offers an opportunity to advance our understanding of the impacts of culture on entrepreneurship, encouraging multi-level, longitudinal, and mechanism-focused studies—empirical or conceptual—that can inform comparative theorizing across contexts.
In particular, we encourage contributions that go beyond surface-level correlations to uncover the causal mechanisms through which cultural values, norms, and practices influence familial and business decisions. We welcome empirical–both qualitative and quantitative–conceptual and literature review papers that shed light on family firms, entrepreneurial families, and family offices in the Chinese context. We are particularly interested in studies that investigate deep, longitudinal, and multi-level understandings of Chinese family enterprises. Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics that we, the guest editor team, believe may be of interest. We also warmly welcome submissions that bring other valuable perspectives.
Indicative and illustrative topics
1. Indigenous Theorizing and Concept Development: We encourage contributions that build indigenous theories rooted in Chinese cultural, institutional, and geopolitical conditions. Such theorizing might draw from Confucian ethics, guanxi logics, or dynastic continuity as explanatory mechanisms in their own right—rather than as deviations from Western models—thus advancing family business research globally (Jun & Sorenson, 2006; Guo & Miller, 2010; Li et al., 2015).
2. Entrepreneurship as Constraint and Renewal: Entrepreneurship is central to family business continuity, yet Chinese successors often face cultural and institutional constraints that contradict Western assumptions of autonomy, meritocracy, and voluntary succession (Gupta & Levenburg, 2010; Li et al., 2025). We invite studies that explore how institutional and cultural elements such as filial obligation, demographic legacies, and social perceptions shape entrepreneurial succession in ways that advance family entrepreneurship and family business theories.
3. History-informed research: History provides both context and sources for decisions and strategies of enterprises (Vaara & Lamberg, 2016). Taking a history-informed perspective promotes new ways to understand entrepreneurship (Wadhwani et al., 2020; Wadhwani & Lubinski, 2017) as well as key family business practices (Hoon et al., 2023; Lubinski & Gartner, 2023). Chinese family enterprises often draw legitimacy and advantage from historical continuity and tradition (Ge et al., 2022, 2023), which provides fertile ground for theorizing “innovation through tradition” (De Massis et al., 2016; Erdogan et al., 2020) and history-informed entrepreneurship (Argyres et al., 2020; Suddaby et al., 2023) as distinctive indigenous mechanisms of value creation in family enterprises.
4. Regional Heterogeneity: Western theories tend to assume a relatively homogeneous institutional environment, but Chinese family firms operate under starkly varied regional policies, development models, and cultural norms (Dou et al., 2022). These divergences position them as outliers to “one-size-fits-all” theorizing and call for indigenous frameworks that incorporate regional institutional heterogeneity as a central explanatory factor in family entrepreneurship.
5. Purpose in Chinese Business Families: Western research on transgenerational wealth often highlights family offices as formal governance solutions (Hayoz et al., 2025). In China, however, family offices represent only one of several possible approaches. Many families sustain prosperity through multi-enterprise portfolios, diversification strategies, and informal arrangements, reflecting distinctive responses to volatility, institutional uncertainty, and dynastic logics (De Massis & Rondi, 2025; King et al., 2017). This diversity of practices opens fertile ground for indigenous theorizing on Chinese family offices and their purposes.
6. Gender and Patriarchal Paradoxes: Gender research highlights women’s increasing role in leadership and entrepreneurship (Feldmann et al., 2020; Hamilton, 2013; Pecis & Ge, 2025). Yet Chinese family firms remain embedded in patriarchal Confucian traditions while simultaneously facing demographic shocks such as the One-Child Policy (Blalock & Lyu, 2023; Chen et al., 2018). These paradoxes position female successors as both constrained and uniquely empowered outliers, opening opportunities for theorizing gendered pathways of leadership specific to the Chinese context.
7. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Communal Orientation: While Western research often links socioemotional wealth (SEW) to CSR/ESG engagement, Chinese family firms’ communal orientation and Confucian ethics embed these practices in broader cultural logics of harmony and social responsibility (Dou et al., 2019; Dou et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2023). This positions them as outliers to efficiency-driven CSR models and highlights opportunities for indigenous theorizing about how cultural embeddedness shapes responsibility and legitimacy.
8. Geopolitical Turbulence as Institutional Hybridity: Chinese family firms operate at the fault lines of global trade frictions, institutional uncertainty, and restricted learning opportunities, making them outliers to theories assuming stable or liberal market contexts (Huang et al., 2021; Ahlstrom et al., 2025). Their responses—whether resilience-building, adaptive hybridity, or relational buffering—provide a basis for theorizing how family firms navigate global turbulence under conditions of institutional hybridity.
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