Institutionalising Entrepreneurial Capital: Theoretical Foundations, Integrative Framework, and Conceptual Propositions

Abstract

Entrepreneurial families in post-Soviet emerging markets face a specific wealth-management challenge. They must navigate weak domestic institutions while also moving, cognitively and organisationally, from entrepreneurial control to investor logic. Existing frameworks discuss institutional quality, behavioural biases, socioemotional wealth, family governance, wealth-management trust, and international financial centres, but they usually do so separately. This paper develops the Swiss Wealth Integration Framework (SWIF), a sequential four-stage conceptual model – Structure, Stability, Investment, Governance – that brings these streams into one decision architecture. Drawing on institutional economics, behavioural finance, socioemotional wealth theory, family governance research, wealth-management trust research, and financial-centre theory, the paper identifies six propositions for empirical investigation. It extends the institutional voids literature from firm-level FDI decisions to private wealth internationalisation, introduces risk normalisation as a post-Soviet-specific behavioural mechanism beyond classical home bias, and interprets Switzerland's post-2023 compliance-based repositioning as a potential institutional legitimacy advantage rather than a simple retreat from secrecy. The framework addresses a documented geographic gap in family office and wealth-management research and provides a conceptual basis for studying the structuring decisions of Kazakhstani high-net-worth entrepreneurial families.