Family Business Review

Examination of family firms’ interactions with institutional contexts has been a major research stream within family business scholarship. This study reviews three decades of research at the intersection of family firms and institutional contexts. Our review sample includes 124 articles published in 24 top-level journals across several disciplines. We adopt an institutional theory lens to synthesize this literature and explicate main understandings about how family firm behaviors/outcomes are influenced by or may influence formal and informal institutions in their institutional contexts. Moreover, we discuss major research gaps and unproductive biases in this research area and provide directions for future research.

The study of the roles, impact, and challenges associated with nonfamily members in family firms has generated considerable attention in the literature. To gain an appreciation of this body of knowledge, we systematically review 82 articles on nonfamily members in family firms that were published in 34 journals over the past three decades. We synthesize the literature according to three broad, yet overlapping themes: preemployment considerations, employment considerations, and outcomes of nonfamily employment. We then offer a future research agenda that integrates these themes to guide the advancement of knowledge on nonfamily members in family firms.

Academic research on family business advising is gaining momentum; however, the internal structure and mechanisms of advice giving and taking remain a black box. We conducted a systematic review that integrates findings from family business advising with those from psychology. Advising research in psychology has focused on understanding the subjective constructs and theoretical concepts composing the internal structures of advising. We develop an input–process–output framework to categorize and integrate both streams of literature on advising, introduce new concepts and variables from psychology that inform family firm advising, and identify important gaps to delineate avenues for future family firm research.

Socioemotional wealth (SEW) research has been criticized for not directly assessing the locus and drivers of family members’ SEW. We propose that a social psychological approach to SEW can help address these concerns, conducting analyses on 421 articles published across 25 journals during the first decade of SEW research. We therefore assess how SEW has been used and identify various inherent complexities that SEW poses for researchers. Altogether, our analyses afford us opportunities to better understand SEW scholarship’s social psychological roots and to propose an agenda that can help further build and extend the psychological microfoundations of family firms.