Editor’s Notes

Team

A total of 148 researchers from 25 countries were on FBR’s masthead in 2016 serving on the editorial team (12) and the three boards—Advisory (9), Review (115), and Research Applied (12). In our efforts to continue improving the journal’s reach, every year some new initiatives are taken. This year, FBR created the new position of “Social Media Editor” and named Josh Daspit to this position. Since the creation of this position, we developed an online social media presence on Twitter (@FBRJournal) and gained over 650 followers from October 15 through December 15, 2016. During that same time period, over 50 tweets were sent, more than 200 retweets were received, nearly 1,000 users engaged with the information posted, and the tweets were seen over 133,000 times. Many tweets included insights from the latest journal publications, so if you have not yet followed FBR on Twitter, we invite you do to so. Users do not have to subscribe to Twitter to view the updates as the account is publicly available at http://www.twitter.com/fbrjournal.

While FBR’s editor is a 3-year appointment, and associate editors are appointed for 2 years, members of all FBR boards are appointed annually. All FBR appointments are renewable. After completing their successful terms as FBR’s associate editors, two members of our editorial team—Justin Craig and Alessandro Minichilli—rotated out after serving for four terms and one term, respectively. Both have joined the Review Board and continue to process the manuscripts that were under “their care” when their terms ended. Keith Brigham and Alfredo De Massis are our newest Associate Editors. Members of FBR’s Advisory Board support the editorial team with their counsel and encouragement and take turns serving on the Best Paper Selection Committee. Michael Hitt rotated out from FBR’s Advisory Board this year as Leif Melin joined this board.

FBR’s annual “Editors Retreat” was held during the Academy of Management meeting. The dedication, high standards of rigor, excellence, and integrity are evident in this meeting as we work together to think of how best to serve our authors and readers. All of us are open to your suggestions on how we can improve the journal for our scholarly community.

Every fall, the editorial team carefully goes through the contributions of its review board members and ad hoc reviewers to determine the changes needed. At FBR, we are distinctly privileged to have an amazing level of support from the scholarly community. When we invite reviewers, we ask the review be turned within 21 days. The average reviewer turnaround time of 18 days speaks for itself. While some journal editors worry about getting enough reviewers to read the manuscripts submitted, we have to keep an eye to ensure all members of our review board and interested ad hoc reviewers are duly engaged during the year. I realize part of this can be explained away by the exponential growth of family business studies. But we are cognizant of the many opportunities scholars have to contribute to the profession. Thus, it is humbling for us to be the recipients of consistent high levels of support from our scholarly community.

Process

During 2016, FBR received 264 submissions with first authors located in 43 countries. This is the highest number of submissions received by FBR thus far, indicating a continuous increase in interest in the field and journal.In 2016, about 30% of the submissions came from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom (9%), Germany (8%), and Spain (7%). France and Italy followed with 5% and 4%, respectively. Overall, the submissions continue to be dominated by the Western world though it is encouraging to see the geographic diversity of authors and data used in accepted papers.

The average turnaround time from first submission to final decision was about 42 days, which is higher than previous years but still among the most efficient turnaround times in management journals. Of the 233 manuscripts processed to decision in 2016 (others are in process at the moment), 128 decisions (55%) were sent out in less than 30 days, 93 (40%) in 31 to 60 days, and 12 (5%) in 61 to 90 days. Our editorial team continues to work hard toward our collective aim that every author who submits his/her work to FBR receives constructive and developmental reviews and feedback regardless of the outcome. Thus, each received submission, including those that are desk rejected, receives careful reading from at least two scholars, before a decision is made. As with most scientific journals, we rely heavily on the expertise of our review board and beyond.

One of the more challenging yet rewarding tasks of our editorial team is the selection of Best Reviewer Award recipients. Winners were announced at the FBR meetings during the Academy of Management conference in August, and the awards were presented at the annual conference of Family Firm Institute (FBR’s owner) in October. To qualify for these awards, a reviewer must have completed at least three reviews with a minimum rating of four out of five, or at least two reviews with a rating of five out of five. In addition, the average turnaround time must not exceed 21 days.

Evelyn Micelotta was the top reviewer of the year. She reviewed five manuscripts for two different action editors and received the perfect score on all her reviews. Her average turnaround time was 18 days. Other excellent reviewers recognized this year were Keith Brigham, Andrea Calabro, Carole Couper, Cristina Cruz, Bart Debicki, Rocki-Lee DeWitt, Josip Kotlar, John Perry, Amedeo Pugliese, Philipp Sieger, and Vanessa Strike. It is interesting to note that our top reviewers are from seven countries indicating the wide geographic interest in FBR. When an associate editor position opens up, we first turn to our best reviewers to identify the potential candidates to join our editorial team. Both of our newest associate editors—Keith Brigham and Alfredo De Massis—have been on this coveted list, as have several other members of our editorial team—Nadine Kammerlander, Alessandro Minichilli, Wim Voordeckers, and Justin Webb.

Content

Sixteen articles coauthored by 48 scholars from 11 countries were published in Volume 29 (2016) of FBR. Coauthored articles continue to dominate the field with two to four authors being the norm. Six articles were authored by a team of three, and four each by teams of two and four. One article was single authored and another had five authors on it. This trend of coauthored work continues from the past years indicating the complexities of conducting research in the context of family firms, keeping pace with the continuously increasing volume of literature, and expected sophistication of research methods, among other factors. Smaller family business conferences tend to foster such collaborations.

The growth in interest and impact of family business research continues on an upswing. In response, family business–focused special issues of many highly regarded journals continue to appear. In this context, in order to maintain the nodal position of FBR in family business studies, our editorial team decided to find ways to encourage synthesis research aimed to make sense of the current knowledge in the field and point toward interesting opportunities for future work. Toward this end, the March 2016 issue was FBR’s first Review Issue (with March 2018 as the second Review Issue currently in works). The five review articles published in this issue focused on two perennial subjects that have attracted scholarly attention—succession and governance; two newer topics that are gaining momentum—entrepreneurship and philanthropy; and a fifth article that examined 465 empirical studies on family business to synthesize the state of the field in terms of empirics used and identify fruitful directions for the future (Evert, Martin, McLeod, & Payne, 2016). While this review focused on quantitative research–based articles, another review by Leppäaho, Plakoyiannaki, and Dimitratos (2016) examined 75 case study design based articles published between 2000 and 2014. These two articles signaled a need for a special issue (March 2017) focused on process and variance methods.

Six of the 16 articles published in 2016 were review articles, while the other 10 were empirical studies. Six of these studies used longitudinal data—three were case study–based research from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and the other three used data from publicly listed firms in Germany, Korea, and Taiwan. Spanish and Italian small and medium family firms were the focus of the last four studies. We missed seeing conceptual and theory building works this year, though it is hoped that the reviews provided several ideas for promising research directions to build and test theory aimed to understand the unique dilemmas of family enterprises.

FBR’s Best Paper Selection committee chaired by Becky Reuber was formed of Eileen Fischer, Tom Lumpkin, and Mike Wright. Glover and Reay’s (2015) article that addresses the question of how family firms persist in the face of weak economic returns, and more broadly, what determines how poor performing family firms survive, won the best paper award. The honorable mention went to Bammens, Notelaers, and Van Gils’s (2015) article that advances the conversation on innovation in family firms and shows how family influence in organizations may foster a work climate that is especially conducive to employees’ natural engagement in exploitative innovation initiatives. Warm congratulations to the winners, and our deep gratitude to our efficient, thorough, fair, and hard-working awards committee.

FBR’s editorials focus on practical and timely issues in the field. As I complete my third term as editor, in late 2016 we went into an editor search mode. In anticipation of the editorial transition and in an attempt to shed some light on the multidimensionality of the job of a journal editor, two editorials focused on the overview of an editor’s job (Sharma, 2016; Webb and Kammerlander, 2016). The editorial of the March 2016 Review Issue provided a list of almost 50 special issues on family business published since 2003 reflecting on research possibilities for future (Short, Sharma, Lumpkin, & Pearson, 2016).

In June 2016, we introduced a new format of an editorial essay in which a highly regarded scholar from sister disciplines is invited to focus on a topic that she/he feels needs attention in family business research. In the first editorial essay of FBR, Dean Shepherd (2016) reflects on the important contributions that an emotions perspective can make to advance research in entrepreneurship and in family business. In his précis on this essay, drawing from his extensive experiences with family business leaders and years of thought to the unique dilemmas of family enterprises, John Ward reinforces the importance of questions raised by Shepherd and adds some others as attention to these will likely provide insightful usable knowledge. While the full list of questions is available in the précis posted as “supplemental material” of the article, examples include the following: What are the emotional benefits of the family business? How is the level and makeup of the emotional benefits different for different firms and for different members of the system? How can a family grow its emotional benefits? Are there different business strategies that more or less enhance the family’s emotional benefits? Does great variation of emotional benefits among members create more or less business opportunities? Or more and/or less emotional conflict?

In short, Volume 29 of FBR published in 2016 was dominated by synthesis and theory testing research. We hope you have enjoyed reading these works. Clarity of mission, efficient processing, and focused efforts to disseminate published research in scholarly and practitioner communities helps ensure that the articles published in FBR are well read and cited. We appreciate your continued support and hope you will choose to submit your best work to us. Please share your thoughts on how we can serve you better. Thank you!