Exploring North-to-South immigrant family business: a resource-based view theoretical framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This article conceptualizes immigrant family businesses (IFBs) established by families migrating from the Global North to the Global South, an underexplored phenomenon in both immigrant entrepreneurship and family business research. The study addresses the question: How do North-to-South (NtS) IFBs mobilize distinct resources to build competitive advantage, and how do they differ from local and South-to-North (StN) IFBs? Drawing from the resource-based view (RBV) and the lens of global embeddedness, the article aims to theorize the unique resource configurations and contextual contingencies shaping the strategic behavior of NtS IFBs. Design/methodology/approach The framework is grounded in the RBV perspective, integrating six categories of strategic resources: human, social, patient, survivability and cross-border capital. The model is analytically illustrated with two real-life NtS IFBs in Latin America and logically formalized with testable propositions. These cases are used to exemplify how resource access and mobilization reflect the entrepreneurial journeys. The theoretical analysis incorporates global embeddedness to capture how supra-national positionalities shape the entrepreneurial process in NtS IFBs. Findings NtS IFBs diverge from necessity-driven StN IFBs by exhibiting long-term orientation, strategic use of symbolic and cross-border capital, and less reliance on ethnic networks. They display unique advantages in mobilizing international human and social capital, but can face challenges in survivability capital and local legitimacy. Cross-border capital emerges as a key differentiator, shaped by the family’s origin-country reputation and mobility privileges. These configurations create distinct forms of “familiness” with implications for both firm performance and societal integration. Research limitations/implications The framework is conceptual and illustrated with exploratory case material; thus, generalizability is limited. Future research should empirically validate the propositions across different NtS contexts and refine the cross-border capital construct. The article advances family business theory by extending the RBV to transnational family dynamics and invites new dialogue on “familiness” in asymmetric global contexts. Practical implications The model offers guidance for practitioners and policymakers seeking to support entrepreneurial families migrating from the Global North to South. It informs family firms on how to leverage underutilized transnational resources and prepare for legitimacy challenges. Policymakers can use the findings to design migration incentives that attract long-term and resource-rich IFBs with local impact potential. Social implications NtS IFBs contribute to inclusive growth in emerging economies by introducing cosmopolitan governance practices, ethical labor norms and sustainable business models. However, they may also face resistance due to historical inequalities, perceived privilege or lack of embeddedness. Finally, it illustrates the relevance of socially conscious integration strategies for international/migrant family business and reflexive governance. Originality/value This study pioneers the theorization of North-to-South IFBs by articulating an extended RBV-based model within a global embeddedness framework. The inclusion of cross-border capital as a resource category offers an alternative conceptual tool to analyze power asymmetries in migrant entrepreneurship. The work contributes to family business theory by contextualizing “familiness” within global migration flows and introducing analytical precision to IFBs' heterogeneity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".