Beyond Foreignness: The Social Evaluation of Family Firms in International Markets

Firms entering into and operating within foreign markets must contend with a number of social judgement- based challenges linked to the liabilities of foreignness and outsidership. The distance between host and country of origin may serve to exacerbate these challenges, as social expectations may diverge across the two, impacting social judgements. Such variations in judgements apply even to firms which take on an otherwise common, in- ternationally ubiquitous form, such as family firms. Yet, beyond the acknowledgment of a wide range of diverse national perceptions tied to the family firm as an organizational form, we know little regarding how operating abroad while presenting as a family firm may influence the social judgements, and the related liabilities these firms face. As such, this study explores the societal perceptions impacting foreign family firms entering into and operating within the United States, using a combination of structural topic modelling and grounded theory on a corpus of US-based media publications spanning several decades. In doing so we aim to capture the array of social judgement types evaluators bound by the socio-cultural expectations of their home national setting may draw upon when evaluating internationalizing, foreign family firms.