A visual overview of key developments of international family business research in the past three decades

Abstract

The family business is an important form of economic organization. In 1988, the authoritative aca- demic journal of the research field, the Family Business Review, marked the official formation of the family business research field. With the development of the research field, it is particularly important to systematically sort out the research status and development of the field and grasp the development trend of future research. We use the citation visualization software CiteSpace to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the 2054 family research literatures from SSCI sources from 1988 to 2017. The study found that from the perspective of the law of scientific development, the research institute of the family business in 2000 was in the sporadic exploration period, which just started to attract the attention of the academic circles. From 2000 to 2006, the family business field began to learn from the mature theoretical analysis phenomenon of other disciplines in the social science field. The research literature has grown rapidly and entered the development period. After 2007, it entered the emergence period of the paradigm. The new leading research perspective showed the socioemotional wealth framework, and the research results began to show an exponential upward trend. From the research theme, entrepreneurship, succession, and corporate governance are the key areas for family business research. From the perspective of leading theory, the agency theory in the first two decades is the most important mainstream theory in family business research. In the past ten years, the framework of socioemotional wealth has sprung up, which has opened up a new direction for family business research. From the geographical distribution of research literature, the current focus of family business research is in North America represented by the United States and Canada and Western Europe represented by the United Kingdom, Spain, etc. Australia, China and other countries/regions are also widely distributed. Among them, scholars such as Chrisman, Chua and Miller are representative scholars in North America, and Gomez-Mejia and De Massis are representative scholars in Europe. This paper has the following contributions: (1) In terms of methods, this paper uses CiteSpace, a citation visualization software, as a research tool to help readers understand the current situation and development trend of family business research intuitively, comprehensively and deeply. (2) In terms of sample source, the sample papers of this paper come from a wide range of sources, including 2054 articles from 1988 to 2017. (3) In terms of theoretical cognition, this paper identifies families with scientific law theory and four-stage model, and helps researchers to understand the current development stages and development requirements of family business research. This study provides a clear presentation of the results of the research through visualization techniques, providing a basis for family business researchers to quickly and intuitively understand the domain's profile and progress. Regardless of the theoretical aspect or the empirical method, there are still missing "puzzles" in the research field of family business. Therefore, the article provide four recommendations for future research directions. First, family business researchers need to focus on the accumulation of core knowledge. And future researchers can use meta-analysis and other methods to analyze, collate and summarize core knowledge on the basis of many documents that do not reach consensus conclusions, and promote further research. Second, the socioemotional wealth (SEW) of family businesses requires more direct measurement. Call on future researchers to use the grounded theo- ry and other methods to explore more direct SEW measurement methods, and also integrate into the Chinese con- text, further refine the SEW dimensions and explore its unique situation. Third, family business research can be more integrated into Chinese contextual factors. At present, the results of family business research are mainly based on Western research results, most of which are used in domestic research, ignoring some unique Chinese situational factors. Finally, new concepts in this field are difficult to guarantee external validity based on the lack of cross-country research. The future research can add more evidence of transnational research.