Family Business Research: A Strategic Reflection

As research on family business continues to grow, six key trends have become evident. These trends include a continuing pursuit of a few research topics such as succession, a strong preference for practice-oriented research methods, a tendency to borrow heavily from other disciplines without giving back to these fields, and a strong preference to talk to other researchers conducting research on family firms—failing to communicate with scholars from other disciplines. Therefore, we suggest strategies to expedite the growth of family business research toward better understanding the paradoxes faced by family business managers, deepen insights into the problems they encounter, improve rigor in reported research, find ways to promote a dialog with scholars in sister disciplines, and give back to the disciplines from which we borrow heavily.