Family firms are often associated with the notion of greater stability. The goal of this article is to explore the differences in privately held family and nonfamily firms in various types of stability, including stability in the number of employees, revenue, earnings and assets. Using multiple linear regression analysis in a sample of 384 family and 1 795 nonfamily firms from the Czech Republic, we found that family firms tend to be more stable in terms of revenue and number of employees, but only during times of crisis. However, their greater employment stability results in worse labour productivity and their earnings become more volatile. During the post-crisis period, there are no significant differences in stability between family and nonfamily firms. Moreover, family firms have been found to grow less during both the economic downturn and the recovery. We suggest that the feature of stability that is so often attributed to family firms by popular, but also academic papers, should be used with caution.

No abstract

Humanitarian workers operate in complex environments with various challenges and demanding working conditions. These challenges put aid workers in a range of risks and under the pressure. However, human resources are crucial for success of humanitarian operations in general. At the same time, each humanitarian operation is reliant on logistics and logistics activities are always connected with logistic staff. Understanding what motivates logisticians to join the humanitarian sector is essential information for humanitarian organizations and for recruiters within. Also, knowing which factors influence motivation and job satisfaction of humanitarian logisticians could help the organizations to struggle with the extremely turnover they have to face. Up to this moment, needed skills and the performance of humanitarian logisticians were examined. Also, the motivators of humanitarian workers are covered in previous research. Therefore, the additional aim of this research is to extend the knowledge about the human resources in humanitarian sector as well.

From the research viewpoint, conflicts in family firms belong to very challenging research areas. At the same time, the literature is fragmented, and it is not easy to identify and articulate a clear research question in this research domain. Based on Faff’s (2015, 2019) pitching research template, we develop a real pitch and describe our experience with its use from the student’s and supervisor’s viewpoints. The research question is: “What is the role of non-family managers in family conflicts in family firms?” This pitching research letter also presents personal reflections on the pitching template application.

In Western countries, there is a growing number of children raised by same-sex couples. The meaning of the term "family" has been evolving over the past decades, as well as the meaning of "family business". Based on the Faff's (2015) pitching research template, we present a pitch related to the postmodern family businesses. The intersection of family business socioemotional wealth perspective and queer studies presents an exciting area of research. The main research question is "Do gay-owned family businesses follow the same set of goals as traditional family firms?" In this letter, we also present our reflections on how the pitching research template can be used to prepare a research project related to this topic.