James Vardaman, University of Memphis

Feigu Zhou, University of Montevallo

Eric Liguori, Florida State University

Shuai Jin, Jiangsu University

Weiwen Li, Sun Yat-sen University

The Theories of Family Enterprise Conference is pleased to partner with Jiangsu University to host a special TOFE research colloquium focused on the future of Chinese family businesses (TOFE China). Submissions will be considered for fast-track review and publication in a forthcoming Journal of Small Business Management (JSBM) special collection. This collection is affiliated with a colloquium scheduled for January 9th, 2027, at Jiangsu University in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China. Scholars from around the world are invited to submit to the colloquium, with a special invitation to scholars who inhabit the Chinese context. The colloquium provides an opportunity for authors to receive developmental feedback directly from JSBM editors and a pathway to publication in the special collection, subject to JSBM's standard peer review process.

The economic reforms initiated in 1978 fundamentally altered the trajectory of private enterprise in China. By loosening restrictions on private ownership and enabling market-oriented activity, the reform era created conditions under which family businesses could emerge, survive, and ultimately become one of the defining organizational forms shaping China's economy. Over the decades that followed, many of these firms evolved from founder-led ventures into large and influential enterprises that now occupy central positions within domestic and global markets.

Yet the historical conditions that enabled the rise of Chinese family firms also create a unique contemporary challenge. As we approach the 50-year anniversary of Reform and Opening, many founder generations are approaching or actively navigating succession. As leadership transfers unfold, questions once centered on founding, growth, and legitimacy are increasingly giving way to questions of continuity, identity, legacy, and preservation.

This timing is particularly important as succession in Chinese family firms raises questions extending beyond ownership transfer or governance design. Succession often involves renegotiating what aspects of the enterprise should endure, what should change, and whose values define the future of the firm. These issues bring socioemotional wealth (SEW) to the forefront.

SEW perspectives suggest family firms pursue goals beyond economic performance, including preserving family control, maintaining family identity, sustaining social ties, protecting emotional attachment to the firm, and ensuring transgenerational continuity. As Chinese family businesses enter second- and third-generation transitions, these noneconomic priorities may become increasingly salient and contested. Founders and successors may differ in the importance they attach to legacy preservation, family influence, entrepreneurial renewal, internationalization, professionalization, and social status.

At the same time, Chinese family firms provide a uniquely important context for advancing family business theory and, in particular, SEW scholarship. Unlike family businesses in many Western economies that have evolved across multiple generations within relatively stable institutional environments, most contemporary Chinese family firms emerged only after China's market reforms and are now experiencing large-scale waves of intergenerational succession. As a result, successors are assuming leadership amid shifts in economic institutions, governance expectations, family structures, and societal values. Traditional Confucian principles emphasizing family continuity, filial piety, and hierarchical authority remain influential, yet these norms increasingly coexist with modern market logics, professional management practices, global stakeholder expectations, and changing attitudes toward gender and inheritance.

This special collection in Journal of Small Business Management seeks research that advances socioemotional wealth perspectives in Chinese family businesses. We welcome conceptual, quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method, and historical approaches.

The generation of Chinese family firms born from the reforms of 1978 now faces a defining moment. As founders transition authority and successors redefine what should endure, Chinese family businesses offer an unparalleled context for understanding how families preserve, adapt, and renew both economic and socioemotional legacies. The goal of TOFE China is to capture this moment and use it to advance a richer theory of family enterprise.

Potential topics

• Founder succession and leadership transfer in post-reform family firms
• Successor identity formation and legitimacy
• Preservation versus erosion of SEW during succession
• Tensions between family control and professionalization
• Emotional attachment, family identity, and transgenerational intentions
• SEW and strategic renewal
• Long-term consequences of Reform and Opening for family enterprise
• State–family business relationships over time
• Family and nonfamily employee experiences
• Shared identity and organizational identification

Timeline

• October 15, 2026: Extended Abstract Submission Deadline
• November 15, 2026: Proposal feedback delivered
• January 9, 2027: TOFE China Colloquium at Jiangsu University
• May 1, 2027: Full Manuscript Submission Deadline
• September 1, 2027: Decisions on first round of submissions
• March 1, 2028: Second round submissions due
• June 1, 2028: Decisions on second round of submissions
• December 1, 2028: Special collection published

Bingbing Ge, Lancaster University Management School

Hanqing Fang, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Alfredo De Massis, D'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara

Junsheng Dou, Zhejiang University

Winnie Qian Peng, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

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 and emphasized entrepreneurship as a socially constructed process. 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. 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.

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. 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?

This gap presents an opportunity for indigenous theorizing that takes the cultural, institutional, demographic, and geopolitical specificities of Chinese family enterprises 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.

Chinese culture exerts profound yet often underexplored influence on entrepreneurial and organizational behaviors, shaping not only decision-making processes but also long-term strategic trajectories. Understanding Chinese culture amongst Chinese family entrepreneurship can lead to an understanding of counterintuitive business decisions. A refocus on families and practices 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.

Studies of family business succession often assume families select heirs to optimize competence, legitimacy, or continuity, aligning family goals with firm performance. In China, however, Confucian patriarchy redirects goals toward filial obligation and patrilineal continuity. The 'Fu Er Dai' stigma, commonly associating successors with overreliance on family wealth and a tendency to squander resources, undermines legitimacy irrespective of competence. 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 is a central yet less focused concept in family business and entrepreneurship research, where family orientations interplay with business practices. Tradition, intertwined with Chinese culture, strongly impacts and leads to unique business behaviors and strategies. Chinese family firms frequently mobilize traditions, rituals, narratives, and historical legacies as resources, practicing 'innovation through tradition.' 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.

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. However, such networks are complicated in their own right, combining several at times competing institutional logics, including familial, social, market, regional, national, and international. Decisions and strategies made by these family enterprises thus emerge not from contract enforcement but from navigating culturally-defined relational obligations.

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. At the same time, these enterprises operate amid escalating geopolitical tensions, rapid technological shifts, and intensifying institutional turbulence. These challenges make Chinese family firms not only economically significant but also theoretically generative, providing a natural laboratory for advancing new insights into entrepreneurial continuity, resilience, and adaptation.

This Special Issue calls for research that goes beyond descriptive accounts to theorize the causal processes shaping Chinese family enterprises. By foregrounding their distinctive institutional, 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. We encourage multi-level, longitudinal, and mechanism-focused studies—empirical or conceptual—that can inform comparative theorizing across contexts. We welcome empirical papers (both qualitative and quantitative), conceptual papers, and literature review papers that shed light on family firms, entrepreneurial families, and family offices in the Chinese context.

Potential topics

• Indigenous Theorizing and Concept Development: Building indigenous theories rooted in Chinese cultural, institutional, and geopolitical conditions, drawing from Confucian ethics, guanxi logics, or dynastic continuity as explanatory mechanisms
• Entrepreneurship as Constraint and Renewal: Exploring how institutional and cultural elements such as filial obligation, demographic legacies, and social perceptions shape entrepreneurial succession
• History-informed research: Taking a history-informed perspective to understand entrepreneurship and family business practices, including innovation through tradition
• Regional Heterogeneity: Incorporating regional institutional heterogeneity as a central explanatory factor in family entrepreneurship across China's varied development models and cultural norms
• Purpose in Chinese Business Families: Theorizing Chinese family offices and their approaches to transgenerational wealth through multi-enterprise portfolios and informal arrangements
• Gender and Patriarchal Paradoxes: Theorizing gendered pathways of leadership specific to the Chinese context and female successors' roles in patriarchal traditions
• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Communal Orientation: Understanding how cultural embeddedness shapes responsibility, CSR, and legitimacy in Chinese family firms
• Geopolitical Turbulence as Institutional Hybridity: Theorizing how family firms navigate global turbulence under conditions of institutional hybridity and restricted learning opportunities

Timeline

• February 1, 2026: Extended abstract submission deadline for workshop participation
• March 1, 2026: Workshop acceptance notification
• April 11, 2026: Abstract deadline
• April 11, 2026: ERD Special Issue Workshop at Zhejiang University, China
• September 1, 2026: Full paper submission deadline