“That’s Interesting!” in Family Business Research

Abstract

It has long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his [sic] theories are true, but this is false. A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting.

—Davis (1971, p. 309)

Social science research on family businesses surely should be attracting a great deal of attention today, perhaps even occupying a central role in research on economies, institutions, and organizations. After all, family-based firms have persisted as an organizational form into the 21st century across a wide variety of capitalist economies, despite repeated forecasts of their inevitable demise. From Marx to Schumpeter, theorists have predicted the long-term triumph of large publicly held firms at the expense of closely held family firms. Nonetheless, family businesses have refused to go quietly into the night. Rejecting critics’ labeling them as anachronistic, family businesses live on, as does scholarly research on them. However, can we truthfully say that their remarkable persistence has enlivened family business research? Or, has such research succumbed to the fate of other intellectual fads and fashions and become just one more blasé domain in which academics publish their work? If family business research fails to live up to our expectations, what could be done about it?

In this editorial, we consider the question “What makes family business research interesting?” to both scholars actively involved in the field and any other potential audience. Given the intriguing paradox represented by the survival of this form, can authors, reviewers, and editors do anything to raise its profile among readers? What are current and potential audiences looking for? What key dimensions of scholarly work in family business will attract the attention of those reading and studying it, encourage its acceptance for publication, and even motivate non–family business scholars to pursue such work? In addressing these questions, we follow the lead of social scientists in other fields who have already addressed them in insightful ways (e.g., Bartunek, Rynes & Ireland, 2006; Davis, 1971). In line with these efforts, we do not provide our own definition of what makes family business research interesting. Rather, we inspect existing literature and investigate scholars’ opinions about what dimensions of family business research attract readers’ attention because they are rather exciting or unusual, prompting them to learn or hear more about it.

The question of what constitutes interesting research has become relevant to the field of family business because of changes over the past several decades. In the early days of family business as a scholarly field, publication opportunities were so abundant that few people seemed to care about the issue. Given the almost complete lack of scholarly work on family enterprises, publishers welcomed any well-crafted study or conceptual piece shedding some light on this underexplored form (Lansberg & Gersick, 1993; Sharma, Chrisman, & Gersick, 2012). However, publication opportunities in the family business field have greatly expanded in recent years. Concomitantly, editors and reviewers—and perhaps readers—have begun to question whether we truly need yet another unexciting (though often beautifully crafted) piece on an overworked (though undeniably important to theory and practice) family business issue.

In addition, family business has attracted the attention of an increasing number of closely allied fields (Craig & Salvato, 2012), further catalyzing the quest for interesting family business research. In this editorial, we offer some informed thoughts on what makes family business research interesting, drawing inspiration from similar attempts in other fields of social science, such as management (e.g., Barley, 2006; Bartunek et al., 2006; Das & Long, 2010), and marketing (e.g., Shugan, 2003; Smith, 2003; Voss, 2003). To this end, we first offer arguments for why interesting family business research matters and then consider the general question of what constitutes interesting research on business. Next, we summarize the outcomes of a survey addressing Family Business Review (FBR) board members on what constitutes “interesting” research. We conclude by offering suggestions to editors, reviewers, and authors on how to make research on family business more interesting.

Why Does Being Interesting Matter to the Family Business Field?

We acknowledge that being “interesting” is not all that matters to a scholarly field and to a scientific journal such as FBR. In particular, we concur with Bartunek et al.’s (2006) statement that “the importance of the research question and the validity of a study’s conclusions are [. . .] more central elements of high-quality research than is being regarded as interesting” (p. 10). In addition, scholarly work, whether conceptual or empirical, should be “well crafted,” along the lines of broadly accepted scientific and academic practice (Craig, 2010). In a number of recent editorial contributions, the FBR Board has affirmed the centrality of importance, rigor, and validity by clarifying the standards of “good family business research” (Craig & Salvato, 2012; Pearson & Lumpkin, 2011; Reay & Whetten, 2011; Sharma et al., 2012).

Nonetheless, we believe that making our studies “interesting”—besides important, valid, and well crafted—could enhance the future of the family business field along multiple dimensions (Litz, Pearson, & Litchfield, 2012). First, interesting family business research will have a pervasive influence on germane fields in social science, helping family business specialists break out of the narrow confines of their field and carry their message to adjacent fields (Gedajlovic, Carney, Chrisman, & Kellermanns, 2012). Second, interesting scholarly works will attract, motivate, and retain talented and enthusiastic doctoral students and more seasoned scholars who have so far overlooked the “family” dimension in their research activities. Third, interesting family business research can spur increasingly creative contributions. As Bartunek et al. (2006) noted, interesting scholarly works promote higher degrees of learning. Scholars who feel “interested” in a topic become emotionally committed to its investigation, fostering intrinsically motivated behavior and stimulating long-term commitments (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Beyond cognitive awareness, experiencing positive emotions spurs agents within institutions to “go the extra mile” in conducting creative work that is essential to the reproduction of institutions and fields (Fong, 2006; Voronov & Vince, 2012).

Thus, we are convinced that making family business research more interesting, when coupled with asking important research questions, assuring methodological rigor, and crafting impeccable works, carries several benefits. It will enhance the visibility and impact of family business research as an autonomous scholarly field and possibly trigger new lines of investigation within other social science fields. Motivating scholars from other disciplines to be more engaged with family business issues is a particularly important aspiration for FBR. As the journal of the Family Firm Institute, FBR is expected to have an impact on both its traditional readership and interested practitioners and scholars from related fields. As stated by the current editor, Pramodita Sharma, FBR should continue to “be a journal of choice for family business scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds who are interested [italics added] in conducting rigorous research and disseminating it not only to other interested [italics added] scholars around the world but also into the practitioner communities” (Sharma, 2009, p. 8).

What Do We Already Know About Interesting Business Research?

What makes conceptual and empirical scholarly work in management and organization theory “interesting”? According to several authors, a common thread in “interesting” contributions is that they “stand out” in some way (Bartunek et al., 2006; Daft, 1983; Das & Long, 2010; Davis, 1971). How is that accomplished, conceptually and empirically?

In the case of conceptual works, “standing out” is usually regarded as an outcome generated by questioning commonly held assumptions. Davis (1971) first made this important point in an influential article in which he argued that the most common feature of scholarly work regarded as interesting is that it disconfirms some of the assumptions held by its readers:

All interesting theories [. . .] constitute an attack on the taken-for-granted world of their audience. This audience will consider any particular proposition “worth saying” only if it denies the truth of some part of their routinely held assumption ground. (Davis, 1971, p. 311)

Assumptions may relate to both theoretical and practical dimensions of the “assumption ground.” If work fails to challenge prevailing theories, an audience will probably regard the contribution as uninteresting because it is already part of their taken for granted theoretical framework. This outcome is captured by sayings such as “of course,” “that’s obvious,” “everybody knows that,” and “it goes without saying.” If work fails to challenge assumptions concerning practical dimensions, readers will question the interest of the contribution by rejecting its utility, saying things such as “so what?” “who cares?” “why bother?” and “what good is it?” (Davis, 1971, p. 311). On a more profound level, Davis suggested that interesting propositions are always the negation of accepted ones, taking the form of “what seems, or is accepted, to be X is in reality non-X” (p. 313). Stated differently, “interesting” propositions strive for a deeper truth behind the phenomenological appearance of investigated phenomena that others have taken for granted.

In the case of empirical works, challenging established assumptions and theory through counterintuitive research questions is also regarded as central in making an article interesting. However, several other features enhance the interest of empirical scholarly works (Bartunek et al., 2006; Das & Long, 2010). First, interest is heightened by a study’s quality, including well-crafted theoretical backgrounds, doing a good technical or methods job, assuring a good fit of data and theory, and putting together a great sample or empirical base. Second, a work’s interest is enhanced by how well the article is written, including the article’s framing, a clear and engaging style, the presence of good examples and rich descriptions, and, overall, “emotive communication” (Das & Long, 2010) and an article’s capacity to “build momentum” in the reader. Third, work benefits from the emergence of new theory and findings, including synthesizing previous theories and integrating multiple perspectives. Fourth, practical implications increase interest in a work if they focus on a subject that is very relevant to the “real world” and provide useful new knowledge. Finally, an article’s perceived impact amplifies its interest, meaning that it is cited or quoted a lot, stimulates new empirical or theoretical work, and opens avenues for research in new areas. Table 1 summarizes the main reasons provided by management scholars for rating an article as “most interesting.”

Table 1.

Reasons for Rating a General Management Article as “Most Interesting”

Reason^a	Description
Counterintuitive	Challenges established theory; is counterintuitive; goes against folk wisdom or consultant wisdom, and so on; creates an “aha” moment
Quality	Includes at least one of the following: well-crafted theory, good technical or methods job, good fit of data and theory, sophisticated methodology, great sample, makes the complex look simple and elegant
Good writing	Is well framed, builds momentum, provides good examples, is clear and engaging, has rich descriptions
New theory/finding	Creates new theory, synthesizes previous theories, integrates multiple perspectives, comes up with an important finding
Practical implications	Generates usable knowledge in the “real world,” addresses a subject that is very relevant to the real world
Impact	Stimulates new empirical or theoretical work, has been cited or quoted a lot, has opened avenues for research in new areas

Source. Adapted from Bartunek, Rynes, and Ireland (2006, p. 13).

Decreasing order of relevance.

To what extent do these considerations apply to family business scholarship? Have the authors of family business papers succeeded in making their work conceptually and empirically “interesting?” We conducted a survey of FBR board members to find out.

What Do FBR Board Members Think About Interesting Family Business Research?

To ascertain what factors make a family business article interesting, we conducted an online survey of all FBR’s editors and members of its advisory and review boards (Bartunek et al., 2006). Through an online survey instrument, FBR board members were invited to “nominate up to three articles related to family business from any academic journal over the past 25 years that [they] regard as particularly ‘interesting’ (regardless of the methodological ‘rigor’ and ‘validity’ of conclusions).” The 25-year frame was selected in light of the commonly held view that the origins of the field can be traced back to the foundation of the Family Firm Institute and FBR (Sharma et al., 2012). We asked respondents to “describe why [they] see each article as interesting” by providing “one sentence per each nominated article” and to indicate “up to three keywords describing the main reasons of interest of the nominated articles.” We received 48 usable responses, which represent nearly 50% of the entire “population” and an apparently homogeneous representation of associate editors, advisory board members, and review board members (disclosing the respondent’s name was discretionary, and a small number of responses were anonymous).

The 48 scholars nominated 54 different articles as exemplars of interesting family business research, supporting existing evidence of the diversity of opinions in the field (Yu, Lumpkin, Sorenson, & Brigham, 2012). Their nominations, and the rationales they provided for them, offer some indication of what it takes for family business journal articles to be seen as interesting, at least according to scholars who systematically review the lead for FBR and occasionally for other management scholarly journals. FBR board respondents nominated a wide variety of articles: 16 of the 54 articles (30%) were nominated two or more times. These are shown in Table 2.

Table 2.

Articles Nominated Two or More Times in the Family Business Review Board Survey on Interesting Research

Article	Number of mentions
Gómez-Mejía, Haynes, Núñez-Nickel, Jacobson, and Moyano-Fuentes (2007)	13
Aldrich and Cliff (2003)	6
Chua, Chrisman, and Sharma (1999)	5
Schulze, Lubatkin, Dino, and Buchholtz (2001)	5
Klein, Astrachan, and Smyrnios (2005)	4
Anderson and Reeb (2003)	3
Arregle, Hitt, Sirmon, and Very (2007)	3
Bennedsen, Nielsen, Pérez-González, and Wolfenzon (2007)	3
Schulze, Lubatkin, and Dino (2003)	3
Burkart, Panunzi, and Shleifer (2003)	2
Chrisman, Kellermanns, Chan, and Liano (2010)	2
Corbetta and Salvato (2004)	2
Habbershon and Williams (1999)	2
Kaye (1996)	2
Lambrecht and Lievens (2008)	2
Sirmon and Hitt (2003)	2

Only 4 of these 16 were nominated five or more times. The implicit ranking in Table 2 relates—as we requested in the survey question—to the specific articles listed, and it is hence not necessarily an indicator of how interesting specific authors are in general. For instance, some of the authors of the top-ranked articles were only mentioned in relations to those specific works, whereas other authors were nominated a number of times, but because each specific article received only one nomination, it is not reported in Table 2.¹ Interestingly, 7 of the articles listed as “most interesting” in Table 2 are also included in Chrisman, Kellermanns, Chan, and Liano’s (2010)² list of the 25 most influential family business articles (i.e., Aldrich & Cliff, 2003; Anderson & Reeb, 2003; Klein et al. 2005; Chua, Chrisman, & Sharma, 1999; Habbershon & Williams, 1999; Schulze, Lubatkin, Dino, & Buchholtz, 2001; Sirmon & Hitt, 2003). In a few instances (Arregle, Hitt, Sirmon, & Very, 2007; Bennedsen, Nielsen, Pérez-González, & Wolfenzon, 2007; Gomez-Mejia, Haynes, Núñez-Nickel, Jacobson, & Moyano-Fuentes, 2007), the reason for noninclusion is probably recent publication, in relation to the 2003-2008 time span considered by Chrisman et al. (2010). In all other instances, interest as judged by our respondents was unrelated to the number of received citations, hence opening interesting questions about the relationship between “interesting” and “cited” management research (DeNisi, 1994; Dutton & Dukerich, 2006; Judge, Cable, Colbert, & Rynes, 2007).

Respondents provided a broad palette of reasons and keywords for the nominations. We content analyzed these reasons and keywords with the support of software for qualitative data analysis (QSR NVivo 8) to determine which reasons were most frequently stated. “Reasons” had to pass the threshold of constituting 15% or more of the total coded text to qualify for inclusion in our analysis. We show the qualifying reasons in Table 3, together with exemplary keywords and illustrative quotations.

Table 3.

Family Business Review Board Members’ Reasons for Nominating a Family Business Article as “Particularly Interesting”

Percentage coverage^a	Reason	General domain of reason (and related exemplary keywords)	Illustrative quotations
47	Family-specific issues	Places the controlling family and family-specific issues at center stage in the empirical analysis and conceptual development (affective, culture, essence of family business [FB], family influence, family-specific, interpersonal relations, uniqueness)	“The complex, rich role of family members is placed at center stage”; “The family is the central entity in the analysis, investigating the impact of family-related sociological phenomena.”
28	Particular topics	Focuses on a specific topic that is deemed as inherently interesting (board of directors, careers, continuity, definition of FB, dysfunctional, family capital, governance, leadership)	Family (social) capital, succession, definition of FB, comparative financial performance, professionalization, continuity, pruning, “dark side” of FB, resources, governance, knowledge management, life cycle stages, enterprising families, branding, conflicts of interest
28	Extant theory	Challenges existing theories, extends the boundaries or contents of existing theories, contrasts two existing theories within a family business domain (agency theory, behavioral agency model, contrasting approaches, cross-disciplinary, harmonious/conflicting outcomes, stewardship)	“This article has represented an outstanding example of how general management theories can be used to better understand family firms, as well as how family business research can enrich and help in further extending the predictions of such theories.”
18	New family-specific theory	Advances—or contributes to advancing—a new theory specific to the family business domain (altruism, socioemotional wealth)	“[This] paper [. . .] further raised the interest and the standard of FB research in top journals, suggesting also a new interesting theoretical frame to address it.”
16	Guidance	Provides useful methodological or conceptual guidance to perform research in the family business domain (endogeneity, longitudinal, overview topic/article, relevance)	“This paper is interesting because it provides important elements of discussion for FB researchers. It summarizes in a clear way the theoretical foundations of the discipline and provides new ideas for future research in general”; “Interesting to develop a measurement of family influence.”
16	Counterintuitive	Provides counterintuitive insights, is thought provoking, goes against common wisdom and shared viewpoints (counterintuition, paradox, thought provoking)	“This article challenges the common sense on the risk-averse behavior of family firms”; “I get most excited when reading an article when it provides an elegant explanation for, or alleviates, a dissonance that I have with the domain.”

Source. Table structure adapted from Bartunek, Rynes, and Ireland (2006, p. 13).

Total percentage of text coded on the overall amount of available text. Reasons are reported only if percentage higher than 15%. Codings that did not pass the 15% threshold: “rigorous” (9%), “elegant explanation” (6%), “influential” (2%), “great database” (2%),”compelling story” (1%).

In Table 4, we report quotations from the nine articles that received three or more nominations. These quotations illustrate the main thesis emerging from each study, in a way that we believe reflects our respondents’ reasons for finding something “interesting.”

Table 4.

Quotations From Most Nominated Works Illustrating the Article’s Main Thesis

Article	Quotes
Gómez-Mejía, Haynes, Núñez-Nickel, Jacobson, and Moyano-Fuentes (2007)	“This paper challenges the prevalent notion that family-owned firms are more risk averse than publicly owned firms. Using behavioral theory, we argue that for family firms, the primary reference point is the loss of their socioemotional wealth” (p. 106).
Aldrich and Cliff (2003)	“Our primary objective is to encourage scholars to embrace a family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship, in which family factors figure more prominently in conceptual models and empirical investigations” (p. 575).
Chua, Chrisman, and Sharma (1999)	“In this paper, we first review the literature on the definitions of a family business. We then propose a theoretical definition based on a firm’s intention and vision. We believe that this definition captures the essence of a family business” (p. 20).
Schulze, Lubatkin, Dino, and Buchholtz (2001)	“Drawing on agency literature and on the economic theory of the household, we argue that private ownership and owner management expose privately held, owner-managed firms to agency threats ignored by Jensen’s and Meckling’s (1976) agency model. Private ownership and owner management not only reduce the effectiveness of external control mechanisms, they also expose firms to a ‘self-control’ problem created by incentives that cause owners to take actions which ‘harm themselves as well as those around them’ (Jensen 1994, p. 43)” (p. 99).
Klein et al. (2005)	“For a solution to the family business definition dilemma, we propose the application of a scale that assesses the extent and the quality of family influence via the measurement of three dimensions: Power, Experience, and Culture. The Family Influence on Power, Experience, and Culture (F-PEC) scale is tested rigorously, utilizing a sample of more than 1,000 randomly selected companies, through the application of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic techniques” (p. 321).
Anderson and Reeb (2003)	“We investigate the relation between founding-family ownership and firm performance … Contrary to our conjecture, we find family firms perform better than nonfamily firms . . . the relation between family holdings and firm performance is nonlinear and . . . when family members serve as CEO, performance is better than with outside CEOs. Overall, our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that minority shareholders are adversely selected by family ownership, suggesting that family ownership is an effective organizational structure” (p. 1301).
Arregle, Hitt, Sirmon, and Very (2007)	“We develop and extend social capital theory by exploring the creation of organizational social capital within a highly pervasive, yet often overlooked organizational form: family firms. We argue that family firms are unique in that, although they work as a single entity, at least two forms of social capital coexist: the family’s and the firm’s. We investigate mechanisms that link a family’s social capital to the creation of the family firm’s social capital” (p. 74).
Bennedsen, Nielsen, Pérez-González, and Wolfenzon (2007)	“Overall, our results cast doubt on the benefits of promoting a CEO from within the ranks of the controlling family of a corporation. These findings are important for the governance of both public and private firms around the world. Controlling families that enjoy the private benefits of control might select a family CEO even when performance is negatively affected as a result. Other stakeholders, from minority shareholders to creditors or workers, might not share in these benefits and would therefore be negatively affected by family successions” (p. 650).
Schulze, Lubatkin, and Dino (2003)	“Our thesis is that agency relationships in family firms are distinctive because they are embedded in the parent–child relationships found in the household, and so are characterized by altruism. Altruism compels parents to care for their children, encourages family members to be considerate of one another, and fosters loyalty and commitment to the family and firm. Altruism, however, has a dark side in that it can give both parents and children incentive to take actions that can threaten the welfare of the family and firm alike” (pp. 473-474).

A surprising result of our survey is that the reasons making a family business work “interesting” (Table 3) differ markedly from those making business research in general interesting (Table 1), as we reviewed in the previous section. The only clear overlap between family business–specific and “general management” reasons for interest relates to the “counterintuitive” quality of an article, which is listed as the least salient among those we report in Table 3. In contrast, the five most cited reasons relate, in different ways, to highly family business–specific interest motives.

Almost half of our sample of family business expert scholars mentioned an article’s focus on family-specific issues, which is the first most cited reason. They considered a scholarly article in the field as “interesting” when it places the controlling family and family-specific issues at center stage in directing and shaping empirical analysis and conceptual development. Nearly 50% of the text used by our informants to describe their reasons highlighted that family business research becomes interesting when some family-specific issue vividly stands out in driving the proposed explanations of conceptual mechanisms and empirical phenomena. Our sample mentioned this reason when describing articles such as Aldrich and Cliff (2003), which centers on the impact of salient sociological family trends on family firms’ entrepreneurial activity, or Arregle et al. (2007), which focuses on the effects of social interactions within and across the controlling family. New concepts such as socioemotional wealth (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2007) and altruism (Schulze et al., 2001; Schulze, Lubatkin, & Dino, 2003) were also deemed as relevant because they revealed some essential family-specific dimension and its powerful role in shaping organizational outcomes, as suggested by recent contributions connecting family business to family theories (James, Jennings & Breitkreuz, 2012).

The second most cited reason is focus on particular topics that were considered by our informants as “hot” in the field. Whereas the previous reason centers on the “depth” with which family issues are leveraged to explain organizational phenomena, here scholarly works are deemed as interesting because of their exclusive focus on topics that are considered as inherently interesting, such as the definition of family business, professionalization, and comparative financial performance. Obviously, mere focus on one of the topics listed in Table 3 was not enough to qualify an article as “interesting”; the work should provide some clear, informed, and novel perspective on the issue.

The third and fourth most cited reasons (extant theory and new family-specific theory) are closely related, but we felt they needed to be put into separate categories. In the case of “extant theory” reasons, scholarly works were considered as “interesting” because they challenge, extend, or contrast existing organizational theories. The focus is not on “borrowing” from existing theoretical frameworks but rather on “giving back” by means of refutation or expansion through the use of theories within family-business specific contexts (Zahra & Sharma, 2004). In the case of “new theory,” articles were seen as interesting because they were among the first to suggest new family-specific theoretical concepts, such as altruism (Schulze et al., 2001, Schulze et al., 2003) and socioemotional wealth (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2007).

Finally, providing useful methodological and conceptual guidance was also a key factor in considering an article “interesting.” Here, again, what qualified articles as “interesting” was guidance on performing research on family-specific issues by, for instance, developing a tailored measure of family influence (Klein et al., (2005) or a focused conceptual framework to apply social capital to family business (Arregle et al., 2007).

To summarize, our informants did not, surprisingly, focus their attention on what previous authors had identified as the key factors making management research interesting, such as rigor, relevance, validity, novelty, and communication (Das & Long, 2010). These dimensions surfaced in our informants’ answers as somewhat “taken for granted.” Instead, our respondents told us that family business research is made interesting by an author’s ability to reveal how the controlling-family entity and related social and psychological phenomena affect—or are affected by—organizational and business issues.

What Can We All Do to Make Family Business Research More Interesting?

Our primary objective is to encourage scholars to embrace a family embeddedness perspective [. . .], in which family factors figure more prominently in conceptual models and empirical investigations. (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003, p. 575)

We offer our suggestions in the spirit of enabling authors to unlock the potential of family business research to make compelling theoretical contributions. We believe that the exponential growth of the field and opportunities to build bridges with other fields and disciplines will require relentless effort at nurturing “interesting” works. Growing scholarly fields face a risk of resting on their laurels, being content with well-trodden research paths and becoming content with investigating increasingly “thin” conceptual and empirical issues. Such risk surfaces in some recently published or submitted family business works, in which authors seem happy to replicate existing family business concepts in different empirical contexts or to explore variations in established conceptual frameworks by casually including some “family” variables as moderators. In contrast, as the outcomes of our survey clearly suggest, “interesting” family business research should place family-specific phenomena at center stage in answering important, counterintuitive research questions. To paraphrase Blake Ashforth, family business academics should avoid taking very exciting, engaging and important family issues and presenting them “in such a way that [they] look like a butterfly squashed between two pieces of glass” (as cited in Bartunek, 2002, p. 203).

Developing works in which family factors figure more prominently in driving conceptual models and empirical investigations is hence the key to achieving “interesting” family business research. Articles mentioned as “most interesting” in our survey share a common characteristic: They all take the “family” dimension seriously as a magnifying lens that has the power to illuminate puzzling or counterintuitive organizational phenomena. These phenomena revolve around three issues that are central to the development of organization theory these days, and of family business in particular (Gedajlovic et al., 2012): (a) capturing diversity in organizational types and performance outcomes, (b) understanding the unique endowments and different types of resources characterizing each organization, (c) explaining and perhaps modeling the governing mechanisms allowing the development of capabilities and effective resource allocations in pursuit of evolutionary fit. All three may significantly benefit from directing our attention to family and family-related issues.

First, interesting family business research should recognize the tremendous heterogeneity among family businesses and entrepreneurial or controlling families. Scholars often essentialize “family businesses” and “families” as if they were all the same. In contrast, we should pay close attention to the tremendous variety within these entities, and to the evolutionary patterns they are experiencing (e.g., Aldrich & Cliff, 2003). We hence believe that family business research needs to find a way to call attention to understand not only central tendencies but, more interestingly, also the range of variation across family businesses. This variation includes both the underlying traits of family firms and their performance goals and outcomes in different institutional environments.

Second, our survey suggested that one of the most specific, and hence interesting, features of family business is their endowment and use of specialized resources, and the capabilities they seek. A focus on the acquisition, mobilization, and strategic use of various forms of financial, social, and human capital is what most often catches a reader’s attention. It would hence be interesting to further explore questions revolving around the extent to which families shape the accumulation of these kinds of capital by their members and the efforts that controlling families make in support of those capabilities. Are there any advantages that families have over other social units in acquiring and using these kinds of capital? Because they play such an important role in helping their members accumulate financial capital, do families play a role in the increasing level of inequality in highly developed capitalist societies?

Third, the family-specific mechanisms through which family firms—and controlling families—are managed and governed also emerged as attracting our respondents’ interest. This is a very broad area, ranging from setting and assessing family and family business goals to governing the interactions among family and nonfamily actors within and across the business. Are governance structures of family businesses different from those of another kind of business, and how? For instance, claims are often made regarding the importance of trust, communication, and values within businesses, and family businesses are sometimes seen as possessing these to a greater extent than other units. However, family businesses are also often seen as possessing archaic and outmoded governance structures and as wedded to traditional practices rather than embracing a professional orientation (Stewart & Hitt, 2012). Is this a false dichotomy, as some recent works among those mentioned by our informants indicated?

Beyond these three suggestions for authors, what can reviewers and editors do to facilitate the production of interesting family business research? As noted, interesting and thought-provoking ideas are always counterintuitive and somewhat controversial, as they challenge long-held assumptions and well-established knowledge. Therefore, if authors manage to develop and submit interesting works, reviewers and editors need to match that effort by reading with a developmental eye and an open mind. This means two things. First, they must invest a significant amount of time and mental dedication to those works that appear as particularly interesting, albeit perhaps still underdeveloped. This often requires providing detailed suggestions on how to rework the conceptual framework, offering a better logic for propositions and hypotheses, and proposing new methodological and presentational dimensions for the study. Second, a developmental mind-set requires reading and deciding on manuscripts with a fair and impartial attitude, which often means privileging the authors’ perspective even when it counters some of the key assumptions on which our own work has been premised.

Much of the progress of family business as a discipline in the future will hence be grounded on these dimensions: the creative effort of authors striving to unearth and develop counterintuitive arguments in which family factors figure prominently and the tireless dedication of developmental reviewers and of conscientious editors.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge support and suggestions from Pramodita Sharma and Claus Rerup about the structure and contents of this editorial. We thank Alfredo De Massis, Alessandro Minichilli, and Tommaso Minola for their help in refining the survey instrument on which part of this editorial is grounded and the FBR editorial board members who generously contributed their time to answer the survey questions. We are also grateful to the associate editors of FBR for constructive comments on an advanced draft of this editorial.

Notes

Bios

Carlo Salvato is an associate professor of Strategic Management at the Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Italy, where he collaborates with the AIdAF-Alberto Falck Chair in Strategic Management in Family Business. He is also an associate editor of the Family Business Review.

Howard E. Aldrich is Kenan Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Sociology Department, Adjunct Professor of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Faculty Research Associate at the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

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