Internationalisation pathways of small Singaporean family firms: a socio-cultural perspective

There is increasing recognition that the internationalisation of family-firms is becoming an important area of research. Despite the growth of this research area, studies of the internationalisation of family-firms remains limited. Current research in the area has tended to focus on family-firms in largely Western contexts and the economic and familial factors behind their internationalisation. Furthermore, little is known about the internationalisation pathways of family-firms in differing institutional context and the socio-cultural factors that facilitate the features which lie behind it. This study aims to make a start in researching this gap in our understanding. We do this by looking at four case studies of family-firms from Singapore. Based on our findings, we classified firms into one of three internationalisation pathways - traditional, born global and born again global - and we highlight some important differences between the socio-cultural factors that facilitate their internationalisation pathways.