Family Business Studies: an annotated bibliography

This review and annotated bibliography of family business studies is intended to update the previous effort by Sharma, Chrisman, and Chua in 1996. Research on this subject has expanded rapidly in the last 15 years and scholars in a wide range of disciplines such as entrepreneurship, strategic management, economics, finance, organization behavior, organization theory, and family sciences now regularly investigate topics pertaining to the behavior and performance of family firms. As the field expands, however, the communities of scholars in these disciplines do not always interact, thereby losing touch with the work being conducted outside their base discipline. Indeed, with the pace of growth of scholarship on family enterprises, just keeping up with the work done from a single disciplinary perspective is becoming increasingly difficult. Thus, there is a need for a book that covers the most important developments in the field over the past 15 years. This updated review and annotated bibliography consolidates the most cited published research on family business over a 15- year period to provide a source for researchers, students, consultants and practitioners on the progress that has been made in better understanding family enterprises. More specifically, the book is intended to be a reference volume of the most cited theoretical/conceptual, empirical, and practical articles on family business from 1996 to 2010. The annotations for each article consist of a summary of key findings, research questions, contributions, and research implications. They also include a detailed description of the methodologies, empirical data, definitions, and conceptual models used. In addition, the book features chapters that review the literature, discuss how family businesses have been defined, present recent trends in family business empirical research, and provide an agenda for future research.