Abstract/Summary

This Ph.D. thesis provides a comprehensive study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature in family firms. Chapter 2 represents a systematic literature review of the literature of CSR in family firms and identifies the drivers and outcomes of CSR practices, processes, and strategies in family businesses. we adopted bibliometric mapping and embraced a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) method to shed light on CSR in family businesses drawing on the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases. The findings of bibliographic coupling show that family involvement, corporate governance, and sustainability are the most commonly studied topics. The findings of the SQLR analysis reveal that firm features, family involvement, corporate governance, ethics, religion, and socio-emotional wealth (SEW) are the key drivers of CSR. On the other hand, the most recurrent outcomes of CSR in family firms are financial performance, reputation, innovation, and sustainability. In Chapter 3, we focus on several antecedents of CSR in family firms. We analyse the interrelationships between firms’ age, the share of family ownership, firms’ size, and industry competitiveness on CSR practices. We analyse a total of 125 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) located in the UK and Italy drawing on the socioemotional selectivity theory and resource-based view theory. The findings reveal that the share of family ownership, firms’ size, and industry competitiveness do not affect CSR practices while the firms’ age negatively influences CSR practices. Moreover, family SMEs focus more on external than internal CSR practices. In chapter 4, we focus on the consequences of CSR in family firms. More specifically, we analyse the firm’s relationship with multiple stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, local community, environment) and investigate the impact of CSR on a firm’s financial performance of family SMEs located in the UK. Based on 106 British family-owned SMEs and drawing on stakeholder theory, we find that neither internal nor external CSR influences financial performance significantly.