Family Diversity and Business Start-Up: Do Family Meals Feed the Fire of Entrepreneurship?

Abstract

Integrating the family embeddedness perspective with research on commensality and family meals, we develop a framework that explains why some families are more likely to fuel entrepreneurship than others. Inspired by the diversity literature and the role of the Chinese Confucian culture in shaping family dynamics, we explore how two demographic (i.e., age and gender) and two knowledge-based (i.e., education and industry) sources of diversity within family households predict a family member starting a business. We further theorize that these relationships are contingent on the frequency of family meals, as family meals serve as a conduit for how family diversity affects entrepreneurship by providing the setting where socialization and interaction take place. Using data from a representative sample of 8,162 individuals via the China Family Panel Studies in the 2014 to 2018 period, our findings demonstrate that although greater age and gender diversity hamper entrepreneurship, family meals “feed the fire” of entrepreneurship for families with greater industry and education diversity.