The international expansion of large family firms: insights from six case histories

This paper aims to review the understanding of the challenges facing family-owned firms as they undertake a process of internationalization, and to propose a research agenda to fill some of the gaps that remain in the intersection of research on the processes of corporate globalization with work on the particular strategic challenges faced by family-controlled companies. Research in both of these fields has been widely and independently reported in the literature over the past four decades, but less so the confluence of issues that are found when family companies, particularly those based in emerging markets, expand internationally. The authors approach this task by first describing the issues faced by six large family-controlled companies, one based in Europe and five in Latin America, as they each expanded into foreign markets. These case histories are derived from personal in-depth and first-hand knowledge developed while the authors worked closely in the design and execution of these companies’ global strategies over the past 35 years. The authors derive a number of insights from each of these cases that are then compared with the extant literature and summarized into a series of propositions that might serve to guide future research in this important area.