The Internationalization of Family SMEs: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

The chapter intends to stimulate a debate on the internationalization processes of small and medium-sized family businesses (family SMEs), which is a specific topic that business literature has only recently deepened. Several research works are dealing with internationalization strategies, but only a few studies focus on SMEs’ internationalization. The chapter aims to discuss the state of the art of the field, which seems to be increasingly explored by academics. Our focus was to identify the factors which can positively or negatively impact SMEs’ internationalization processes. Moreover, we intend to fill the research gap in terms of literature review on the field. The methodology is based on a systematic literature review regarding 29 articles published in the last two decades, whilst most of them are written in more recent years. The study discusses background theories and key contributions of the field. A part of the findings unanimously suggests that there are factors that positively (or negatively) impact SMEs’ degree of internationalization (DOI), instead, the effect of other determinants seems to be controversial, and should be better examined by future research works. Consequently, we then propose a research agenda to identify research gaps that should be explored.