The Adolescence of Family Firm Research : Taking Stock and Planning for the Future

Through its rapid growth during the past decade, family business research has reached its adolescence as a field of study and family business scholars now regularly contribute interesting and though provoking work to top-tier management, entrepreneurship and finance journals. In this review article, we seek to document the growing maturity of family business research and to promote its integration into broader streams of inquiry in the organizational sciences. To do so, we describe two major themes in recent family business research related to the fundamental management questions “How do firms differ?” and “Why do these differences matter?” Based upon our review, we describe the past and potential future contributions of family business based research and conclude that it holds great promise to “give back” and provide meaningful contributions to the more established disciplines that have supported its development and emergence as a distinctive field of study