Despite the prevalence of family businesses around the world, research on their contribution to the digital economy is still needed. A primary appraisal of the characteristics of the family business and the features of digital entrepreneurship suggests that the two phenomena are conflicting. Indeed, the most common descriptions of family businesses convey the idea that they favour stability to change and slow evolutions to upheavals and disruptions. This article attempts to answer the question: How could family businesses embrace the values and overcome the hindrances to digital entrepreneurship? To this end, this article suggests a conceptual model of digital entrepreneurship adoption in family firms. Based on the socioemotional wealth logic, we first describe the main variables influencing digital entrepreneurship adoption and then analyse the moderating influence of family involvement in the firm on the relationships between these variables and digital entrepreneurship adoption. Theoretical contributions and practical insights are presented.

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While the goals of long term sustainability and survival were thoroughly studied in family firms’ literature, to the best of our knowledge, rare studies had investigated the influence of values on the capacity of family firms to be resilient. In addition, this likely relationship is highly contingent on cultural and national contexts, as family values – on which family business values are dependent – are not the same across countries and World regions. These theoretical and empirical gaps motivated the present research which aims at investigating the probable influence of family firms’ values on the resilience of these firms in the unique context of Tunisia. This qualitative research is based on a body of discourse collected from nine managers belonging to five Tunisian family businesses. Our research allowed us to highlight some key family business values in a new underexplored setting that is an oriental country with a culture driven by Islamic and Arab values. More importantly, our analysis shows that family values underlie both community and business values. Finally, our results underscore the importance of business values, community values and family values in the resilience of the firms studied.

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