Brief reflections on family firm research and some suggested paths forward

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Abstract

We reflect on some limitations that seem to have become more common in family business research and propose some paths forward. For fairness, we refrain from listing specific papers in our critiques because 1) no one should be singled out for criticism when the limitations to which we refer apply so broadly; 2) our own work suffers from some of these very same limitations.

Introduction

A late friend of ours, an esteemed Ivy League professor, was once CEO of a major corporation. Although he had raised substantial funds from the business community for his school, this became tougher after donors sampled the faculty’s publications, which they found “obscure and remote from the concerns of business or society”. Today, despite a legacy of relevance, we worry that more family business research is becoming vulnerable to similar criticism, in part due to an excessive embrace of academic patina over novel, practical insight. In this short essay we reflect on this challenge and suggest several ways forward.

Section snippets

Conflicting research on familiar topics

To quote Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again”. It seems that increasingly, so much quantitative family firm research focusses on the same topics – performance, innovation, internationalization, succession, CSR, entrepreneurial orientation, and the links of these characteristics to various aspects of family governance in assorted industry and geographic settings. These are important topics (Astrachan, 2010). However, the many contradictions among such studies cause one to reflect. Some

Some paths forward

As researchers, we both have garnered much of our understanding of family firms by talking with their owners, managers and advisors, and by reading book histories and lengthy case studies on company history and priorities, and how they have dealt with challenges. The fine-grained knowledge that can come from this approach is absent in most quantitative work. We therefore believe that research in the field would be more interesting, more novel, and more relevant if we collectively made some

Acknowledgement

The authors received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant # 435-2014-1778).

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