Family Business Research: Roads Travelled and the Search for Unworn Paths

The June 2018 issue of Family Business Review (FBR) featured a collection of discussions of five of the most cited articles in the history of FBR (i.e., articles published more than 10 years ago, but since 2000) that have individually and collectively significantly shaped the boundaries and content of the domain over the past decade. In their accounts reflecting on their original pieces, the distinguished authors retold their personal war stories of the often difficult path toward getting their work published and reflected on how and why their work has had such a significant impact on the field. I had the honor and distinct pleasure of providing feedback on the draft manuscripts some of these scholars provided for the special issue, and with the aid of my colleagues Peter Jaskiewicz and Wim Voordeckers, we provided two brief summaries of this impactful work. Distilling the gained insights from these seminal articles and attempting to convey the extent of their contribution to the domain of family business research was a humbling and deeply gratifying experience. To read their stories and witness, albeit with the benefit of at least 10 years passing, how these researchers conceived, developed, refined, and published their groundbreaking or influential work was truly inspiring. The most impressive, and perhaps defining, aspect of the subsequent influence of these works was the breadth of their theorizing and number of streams of research each paper contributed to or spawned. Multiple fields of inquiry within the domain of family business research benefitted from and built on their pioneering work. Furthermore, these commentaries presented interesting insights by looking back, and looking forward. This experience also led me to think about the domain of our field, how and why it has evolved over the past several decades, and in what new directions we should head. This editorial will attempt to take a similar past and future perspective by presenting some ideas on “how we got here” as well as a few thoughts and suggestions on “where we should be going. ” As part of that issue, FBR Editor Tyge Payne (2018) presented an editorial in which he described the complexities and distinctions associated with the field and offered a number of valuable possibilities for future research. In his editorial, Payne rightly notes that the field of family business research “represents a large set of interrelated subfields that are bound together by the recognition that families, as owners and operators, can have a unique influence on a wide variety of business activities and outcomes” (p. 167). Based on such a view, one can easily envision the field of family business research like a multicolored and multipatterned quilt of constructs, antecedents, and outcomes stitched together by the common thread of the family’s involvement in the ownership, governance, and management of their businesses. However, we know that efforts to advance the theoretical development of a field requires the identification of dependent variables examined within its domain (Chua, Chrisman, & Steier, 2003). As suggested by Chua et al. (2003), the efficacy of family business decisions and actions can only be judged by the extent to which those decisions and actions contribute to the achievement of the family firm’s goals and objectives. By taking inventory of the critical variables within the family business domain, the depth, breadth, and 792948 FBRXXX10.1177/0894486518792948Family Business ReviewNeubaum research-article2018