Applying the socioemotional wealth perspective of family businesses, this study examines how family control affects whether firms tend to go international. Departing from prior research that has treated family involvement in management and family ownership as interchangeable and inseparable, we suggest that they are two different aspects of family control, which independently and differently affect firms’ internationalization strategies. A sample of private Chinese firms supports our predictions that family involvement in management has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with the likelihood of internationalization and that the percentage of family ownership has a U-shaped relationship with the likelihood of internationalization.
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