Dear colleagues in the AOM OB Division,
I would like to warmly invite you to submit to EURAM 2026 (Kristiansand, Norway, 16–19 June 2026) and, in particular, to Track T04_07: "Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Value-Based Strategic Decision-Making in Small Family Firms and SMEs." The submission deadline is 7 January 2026.
In this track, I focus on how entrepreneurial action and strategic decision-making emerge in value-laden, informally governed contexts-where ownership identity is strong, leadership is personal, resources are constrained, and choices are often shaped as much by values, ethics, legitimacy, and identity as by economic rationality. The track explicitly aims to bridge family business research, SME studies, and entrepreneurship theory, with a strong emphasis on contextual sensitivity.
I particularly welcome conceptual and empirical contributions that examine, for example, how values at multiple levels shape strategy and entrepreneurial behaviour; how informal governance and kinship-based logics enable or constrain action; how intergenerational shifts in value systems reshape long-term strategy; how firms legitimise value-driven decisions in contested stakeholder or institutional environments; how local and regional ecosystem integration affects opportunities and resilience; and how owner-managers' cognitive frames and risk interpretations influence opportunity recognition and decision-making under uncertainty and change.
The track encourages methodological diversity, and I am especially interested in comparative, processual, or configurational designs, including work that contrasts family and non-family SMEs.
Co-chair team (Proponents): Sandra Fiedler, Anne Heider, Petra Moog, Maksim Belitski, David Audretsch, and Christian Neusser.
If you are working on topics such as effectuation, bricolage, socioemotional wealth, opportunity framing, stakeholder tensions, ecosystems, values, and ethics in entrepreneurship, I would be delighted to see your work in Kristiansand. You can share this call widely within your networks.
Warm regards,
Christian Neusser
University of Reading | Henley Business School
Proponent, EURAM 2026 Track T04_07
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Christian Neusser
Research Associate
University of Reading
Erlangen
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