Family firms in the Arab world: Culture influences on Socioemotional Wealth

The Arab world is an area of growing economic significance, resulting in dynamic developing and transaction economies. In such a scenario, family firms are predominant and the backbone of the system. Due to the overlapping of the business and family logics, family firms differ from the traditional businesses, especially in terms of goal-setting and strategies. The aim of this paper is to contextualise the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective in the light of specific influences that the cultural embeddedness of the Arab culture asserts. For this purpose, 15 semi-structured interviews with Jordanian family businesses have been carried out. Through a coding analysis, four main cultural elements in the behavioural dynamics of Arab family businesses emerged: 1) favouritism and nepotism; 2) patriarchal approach; 3) public persona; 4) self-serving bias. We related all these cultural influences to the dimension of SEW to obtain a stratified framework which may help in understating family firms beyond traditional economic contexts.