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Recent research has documented the immediate negative impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on household and business consumption, but there is still limited investigation into the medium‐term effects in specific consumption categories. This paper addresses this gap using a vector autoregression analysis of a system of aggregated consumer final demand across Australia. We highlight the importance of studying a demand system, as opposed to investigating independent consumption categories, due to the interactive evolution of consumption during the pandemic. Modelling the paths of various consumption categories in response to shocks from one another, we find that, despite the large and abrupt shocks to consumption during the first two quarters of 2020, most categories reverted to pre‐COVID levels when restrictions were lifted. Importantly, transportation had the largest and most persistent decline. Overall, shocks to sectors other than food, alcohol and education were outside the counterfactual forecast confidence intervals estimated based on pre‐COVID information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant literature on immigrant family businesses (IFBs) refers to the vital role of embeddedness in their success. Yet, little is known about how embeddedness evolves from family to global and how it helps IFBs to establish themselves in a host country, survive the related challenges, and thrive in the international market. By drawing on the lived experience of 25 highly successful family business entrepreneurs in Australia, we develop an integrated process model and identify a four-phase chronology of IFBs' success toward global expansion: arriving, establishing, expanding, and thriving. Further, this model links these transitory phases to the IFBs' embeddedness that evolves from family to local, host country, and global. Our findings suggest that while family embeddedness is critical over time, its scope is limited as the IFBs form new, more extensive networks toward the global market. IFBs act as boundary spanners, blending local and international resources to create value. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are shared in the concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews with Chinese Australian women highlight the impacts of cultural and gendered identities on the educational opportunities and achievements of daughters in 1930s to 1960s Australia. Some women recalled being prepared as children for their later role as dutiful wives – tasked with domestic duties, working in family businesses, given limited educational opportunities, and made aware of their role to be 'married off'. Others recalled equal treatment with their brothers and being encouraged to strive for educational success. This variety of experience points to the diversity of Chinese Australian families and the ways in which Confucian/patriarchal systems were negotiated within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian economy has been significantly affected by the Covid-19 virus and the associated health policy actions. This has warranted a comprehensive policy response from both fiscal and monetary policy. The monetary policy response has been directed at supporting households and businesses by keeping funding costs low and ensuring credit is available. The monetary policy actions have worked as expected by lowering the key interest rate benchmarks in the economy to historically low levels, which has been transmitted through to historically low borrowing rates for households and businesses, as well as governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Food waste generation, management, and legislation in Australia is reviewed. • Major Australian food waste streams and their biorefinery potential was evaluated. • Biorefineries from major food waste streams for circular economy are discussed. • Existing food waste conversion initiatives and future research areas are provided. Staggering amounts of food waste are produced in Australia, and this review provides food waste based biorefinery opportunities in moving towards a circular economy in Australia. The current food waste scenario in Australia including an overview of primary food waste sources, government regulation, and current management practices is presented. The major food waste streams include fruit and vegetable (waste from wine grapes, citrus, apple, potato, and tomato), nuts (almond processing waste), seafood (Fish waste), dairy whey, sugarcane bagasse, and household and businesses. The composition of these waste streams indicated their potential for use in biorefineries to produce value-added products via various pathways combining direct extraction and biological and thermochemical conversion. Finally, the efforts made in Australia to utilize food waste as a resource, as well as the challenges and future directions to promote the development of concrete and commercially viable technologies for food waste biorefinery, are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address some knowledge gaps in the family entrepreneurship literature, examining the cases of seven Western Australian family firms with various degrees of export involvement, including no involvement. In this process, the study incorporates the resource-based view of the firm (RBVF).Design/methodology/approach Face-to-face and telephone interviews conducted with firm co-owners and one manager of seven family firms. Content analysis and word association were employed to analyse the data gathered.Findings The interviews revealed the significance of various key resources regardless of firms’ extent of export involvement. Indeed, alignments with the RBVF emerged, with firms’ strategies resting on valuable, rare, perfectly immobile and non-substitutable resource attributes. More lucrative consumer markets, diversifying, product recognition and minimising the impact of domestic competitors were main reasons to export. In contrast, rising costs, unfavourable currency exchanges or mediocre previous experiences were motives for discontinuing exports. Nonetheless, building on their resource foundation, non-exporting firms’ strategies focussed on strengthening their involvement in the domestic market, perceived as a valued alternative.Originality/value The academic literature identifies various knowledge gaps concerning family firm entrepreneurship, including research focussing on family firms’ internationalisation process. By addressing this under-researched area, the study provides an element of originality and value. In addition, despite Western Australia’s proximity to neighbouring markets, limited contemporary research on family firms has been conducted in this state; hence, the study provides an original component. Finally, the study seeks to refine the RBVF in the context of family firm research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the associations between the resources of a Western Australian regional family firm exporting to Asia and innovation through the lens of the theory of innovation and the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. Design/methodology/approach: In-depth, un-structured telephone and face-to-face interviews were conducted with five members of the firm, including the co-owner. A visit to the business facilities complemented the data collection process. Findings: The importance of tangible and intangible resources, such as forward thinking or investments in technologies, human capital and research is clearly illustrated; these resources positively influence innovative practices. Associations between the findings and the theoretical frameworks were identified. For instance, the imperfectly imitable and non-substitutable attributes comply with the RBV of the firm, and the hypothesised four dimensions of innovation. Importantly, the significance of strategic partnering emerges as an extension of these attributes. Originality/value: This study addresses some knowledge gaps, first, contributing to the body of research on family firms' adoption of innovation. In addition, the study contributes to the literature on regional Western Australian family firms operating internationally. This state makes a significant contribution to Australia's economy, and its close geographic proximity to various important consumer markets highlights future opportunities for family firms in international trade. Despite such potential, research on global family firms operating in this state has been almost non-existent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate if private family firms have a greater environmental performance focus than nonfamily firms, and if this relationship is moderated by the strength of the firms' social embeddedness. We empirically test these issues using a representative sample of 1452 private Australian small and medium-sized enterprises. Contrary to prevailing assumptions and previous indicative findings in the public firm context, our results show that family firms have a lower environmental performance focus than nonfamily firms. However, in cases where the firm is highly embedded in the social community, we find that family firms have a higher environmental performance focus. We explain our unexpected results by considering the role of financial risk in publicly held family firms. Accordingly, we posit that prior findings in the public firm context may be evidence of families expropriating wealth from nonfamily shareholders rather than altruistic pro-environmental behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the continuing uncertainty about whether family firms enjoy lower agency costs, this article hypothesizes that a combination of the effects of family ownership, altruism and self-control is instead at play. To begin with, family ownership can indeed reduce agency costs through better aligning the interests of owners and managers. This is a ‘determining’ effect in that it independently mitigates one source of agency problems. However, altruism combined with self-control problems arising from the highly concentrated ownership often found in family firms can also increase agency costs. This is an ‘embedding’ effect as it is rooted in the personal relationships within the family firm. Using the Business Longitudinal Database compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we find that for larger SMEs (those with 20–200 employees), the gains in lower agency costs arising from family ownership are almost completely offset by the losses from altruism and the lack of self-control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this study is to compare the performance of unlisted family and nonfamily small and medium-sized enterprises (SMFEs and non-SMFEs) and the effect of internationalization on their relative performance. Results of the regression analysis of 4,217 firms with 11,821 observations over a 3-year period found that SMFEs achieved a higher return on assets as a result of having a superior return on sales. Also, although the results indicate that internationalization had a significant negative effect on the return on assets of SMEs overall, this was not the case for SMFEs, and the results suggest that SMFEs perform better in the international marketplace. These results were consistent across different definitions of family business employed. Implications for future research are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding how private family firms gauge performance is of great interest to family business scholars. Unfortunately, finding comparable data to understand differences in the performance of such firms is challenging. This study draws from the organizational identity literature to show how private family firms communicate different goals in publicly available organizational narratives. The authors illustrate a process using content analysis that allows family business scholars to create a comparative data set that captures both normative and utilitarian goals using website and press release narratives from a sample of Australian firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features the Australian family-owned entertainment company Michael Edgley International. The company tours productions to places like Australasia, Asia, South Africa and the U.S., which include theater, dance, circus and other live entertainment shows. According to the authors, the company is unique because of its capacity to diversify, import, manage and tour circus and other performances and shows while maintaining a family business model.

This article proposes a strategy for the family firm sector to gain the attention of policy makers. The strategy builds through influencing social expectations, creating political issues, and developing legislative actions that are subsequently implemented and regulated. To achieve this, the authors suggest that the family business sector must achieve salience as a community’s definitive stakeholders in which capacity they possess, or are perceived to possess, attributes of power , legitimacy, and urgency. Experiences from Australia to illustrate the introduced processes are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relationship marketing is a practice that has been used effectively in marketing products and services to customers. Its use as a means of enhancing relationship outcomes between employer and employee in family-owned business is yet to be appreciated. A triangulation of research was conducted into family-owned and family-managed small businesses in the service industry in rural and regional Australia. This article reports on the possible benefits of adapting a new relationship marketing model for the recruitment and retention of employees and the beneficial outcomes for employers in their employees in their endeavor to recruit and retain staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, family businesses account for a significant portion of the Australian economy, constituting more than two thirds of all Australian companies, and employing over half of the workforce (Featherstone 2005). An overwhelming number of businesses are also small, comprising more than 90 per cent of businesses in the private non-agricultural sector, and providing work for over 3 million people (Australian Bureau Statistics (ABS) 2001). Notwithstanding their contribution to the Australian economy, the academic literature has accorded little attention to human resource management in general, and learning and development in particular, in smaller family businesses. This lack of research is surprising given the role of learning and development in creating a more highly skilled national labour force upon which organisations can draw to increase their competitiveness; and all the more surprising given the recent interest afforded to the field by the business press. This study examines the nature and extent of differences in learning and development initiatives between family and non-family small businesses that have embarked upon different growth development pathways. The results indicate marked differences, with the incidence of learning and development programs greater among non-family compared to family firms. Further differences exist, with a significant increase in learning and development practices across the small business growth development pathways in non-family SMEs. These results suggest that as non-family businesses progress through growth development pathways, they adopt a more 'strategic' approach to learning and development, characterised by an increasing degree of commitment of resources to formal learning and development initiatives. In family small businesses, commitment to management learning and development also increases with enterprise growth. However, once moderate growth is achieved, there is a strong divergence of family vis-à-vis non-family firms, with significantly more moderate than high growth family small businesses adopting a range of learning and development practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the responses of family companies to the emerging environment of mergers and acquisitions, specifically within the international wine industry. At issue is the question of how the family perspective influences responses of a family firm to the prospect of merger or takeover. We examine the issue through a case study of the takeover of an Australian wine producer and family firm, Peter Lehmann Wines. The case study demonstrates ways in which the family perspective is critical in driving responses, for example, in the strength and forms of opposition to one of the potential acquirers in the case, indicating just how important the preservation of a family legacy was to key family members. However, the case also illustrates how in a takeover fight the dynamics of the takeover process itself become important in determining outcomes. In addition, the case demonstrates that family involvement and influence can be maintained in spite of takeover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which explored work and family management in small copreneurial ventures in Australia. Advantages and disadvantages of copreneurship; Dynamics of leadership and management in small copreneurial businesses; Conclusions.

The article presents information about Mammon Commission that was established in Australia in response to the concern over the escalation of cost and diminishing quality of after-life care services provided by a department known as Department of Salvation. The department began as a family business and later transformed into a bureaucracy maintained at pubic expense. The management strategies had not kept pace with the growth of the organization. The commission also observed another after life care provider in private sector Eternal Warmth Pty Ltd. It provided the same services as did Department of Salvation at a fraction of cost. Eternal Warmth had also been subjected to a sustained campaign of misleading advertising orchestrated by the Department.