There is no sense trying to develop a new area with no support. You need at least some colleagues who acknowledge the importance of the topic and who, better yet, show an interest in pitching in. You need some institutional support too, from the dean, program director, and someone. Additionally,...

The past decade of empirical research has established a body of knowledge about family business. A summary of this body of knowledge can be a guide for the content of family business instruction. One such summary now exists. A recent study compiled and assembled the dependent variables used in...

Family shareholders expecting to fulfill their responsibility of aligning management interests with shareholder priorities and holding management accountable need a thorough understanding of financial statements. They need to be able to make sense of what the numbers say about the firm and its...

Although the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management includes family businesses within its domain statement, it is important to recognize that these are two distinct domains, although enjoying some overlap (cf. Stewart, 2008 , for comparisons of family business with...

Research concerning family business, from our perspective, is often limited by the theoretical paradigms that the researchers examine or use in their work. From the vantage point of the sociology of knowledge, Thomas Kuhn (1962) popularized the notion of “paradigms” within theoretical and...

What is it that makes something become an academic field in a research university? To answer this, it helps to think of three kinds of knowledge. From a common sense point of view, there are three main types of knowledge: “Know how,” “know what,” and “know why.” “Know how” refers...

Entrepreneurs may wish to be selective about which relatives to include or exclude in their businesses. For example, their child might be inept but their niece might be outstanding. What aspects of kinship systems affect their ability to make these sorts of choices? What enables them to bend...