CFP: Business History Issue on “Business Longevity”

The journal Business History has issued a call for papers for a special issue on "Theoretical and Empirical Research on Business Longevity." Guest editors will be Maria Rosaria Napolitano (University of Sannio, Italy), Vittoria Marino (University of Salerno, Italy), and Jari Ojala (University of Jyväskylä, Finland). The call for papers explains:
    The special issue, with a targeted publication date of April 2014, is aimed at investigating firms’ longevity factors. The importance of longevity has been highlighted in earlier studies on family business by focusing on their difficulties in enduring through the third generation. Hence the strong focus in the literature, on the one hand, on business succession in family enterprises, and, on the other, on the identification of enduring firms’ distinctive features. In order to fill both a theoretical and an empirical gap, several contributions have attempted to model the values of longevity and their role in the entrepreneurial transition processes of succeeding family businesses through cross-national comparisons and by using the localization variable as a cultural activator for longevity. The stream of studies on firm longevity has gradually expanded the research perspective to SMEs and entrepreneurial orientation, processes of organizational learning in global strategic alliances, growth paths of large firms through alliances and networking, and the relationship between longevity and financial crises. Moreover, the study of firm longevity has been enriched by the fertilization of multidisciplinary approaches that have been continuing to investigate the phenomenon through conceptual matrices of different cultural backgrounds, contributing to the development of knowledge on the subject.
    We are inviting papers, both empirical and theoretical, that examine longevity in a wide range of enterprises of different types of ownership, activities, and sizes. Internationally comparative papers and those exploring longevity within particular regional and national contexts are particularly welcome.

Subject Coverage:  Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Sources of competitive advantage and firms’ longevity
Business and longevity
SMEs’ longevity factors
Corporate Entrepreneurship and longevity
Internationalization processes and longevity
Corporate reputation and longevity
Country-specific succession processes in family business
Succession phases and business survival
Entrepreneurial transition processes toward the descendants 

Guidelines for Submissions: Submitted papers should not have been previously published or be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers will be refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submitting papers are available at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0007-6791&linktype=44. For more information, contact Maria Rosaria Napolitano (napolitano@unisannio.it) or Vittoria Marino (vmarino@unisa.it).

Conference in Italy: Authors of selected papers will be invited to present the results of their research at the Conference, “Historic Companies and Histories of Companies,” to be held at University of Sannio (Benevento, Italy) in December 2013.
  
Submission: Submissions should be sent in the form of a PDF file attached to an email to the following: Maria Rosaria Napolitano, Professor of Strategy

Department of Economics, Law and Social Studies
Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences
University of Sannio, Italy
E-mail: napolitano@unisannio.it

Vittoria Marino, Professor of International Marketing
Department of Management
Faculty of Economics
University of Salerno, Italy
E-mail: vmarino@unisa.it

Jari Ojala, Professor of History
Department of History and Ethnology
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
E-mail: jari.ojala@jyu.fi

Please include in the subject line of your submission the title of the Special Issue. The deadline for submission of final papers is September 30, 2013.