Finnish, French and British family SMEs Facing New Institutional Environments - a literature review

In the context of international business, a firm seeking to internationalize its operations to a foreign country will almost inevitably face a new institutional environment and local actors that follow certain logics of behaviour based on certain cultural and material practices of that system. In the side of international management, scholars have tried to identify how cultural differences influence management and business strategies (Soares, Farhangmehr, & Shoham, 2007). However, our understanding of such influences in the context of SME internationalization have been touched to a limited extent (Leppaaho & Pajunen, 2018). The aim of the present study is to discuss how firms originating from three different countries, Finland, France and the United Kingdom, face new institutional logics. More precisely, we conduct an analysis of the cultural dimensions in each the three countries, later on followed by an analysis of how the managers in family SMEs have faced a new, culturally different institutional environment. We specifically focus on how the managers within family SMEs form social capital in the internationalization to institutionally different environments and if the cultural features influence on their behaviour.