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Family business: A rich research repository

Volume 15, Issue 3, July 2009 The papers in this Special Edition of Journal of Management & Organization (ISBN 9780-9775742-5-4) highlight that family business is a rich research repository. Ken Moores’ opening interview (2009a) with Danny Miller eloquently emphasized that the family business economy, despite its significance, has received disproportionately lower attention by scholars and researchers in the past. Danny’s comments are both profound and insightful and we feel confident that they will resonate with both academic and practitioner stakeholders. As evidenced in our opening paper Family Business Research at a Tipping Point Threshold (Craig, Moores, Horworth & Poutzouris, 2009), family business as a research pursuit has undergone significant growth during the last decade (Heck, Hoy, Poutziouris & Steier, 2008; Sharma, Hoy, Astrachan & Koiranen, 2007). The issues that have faced family business as a research destination are common among all emerging fields (Moores 2009b). Diverse methods are appropriate when the questions being asked are more common than the answers being provided. Therefore, a range of qualitative and quantitative methods are involved according to the nature of questions. Although not intentional, the collection of papers in this edition reflects this. Important to note is that the authors’ questions have moved away from debates around ownership succession, which proliferated early research publications, to broader questions that embrace succession but which are inspired by various established theoretical frameworks (Sharma 2004). Here we have presented papers associated with both internal and external family business stakeholders and the issues that such a diverse group brings to the research agenda. Mattias Nordqvist, Annika Hall and Leif Melin’s article Qualitative Research on Family Businesses: The Relevance and Usefulness of the Interpretive Approach (2009) highlights that the interpretive approach to research has high relevance to family business researcher stakeholders. Consistent with suggestions tabled in Danny Miller’s interview (Moores, 2009a), these scholars suggest that research on family businesses is different from research on other organizations in that it means researching a family, and the influence it exerts on the business(es) this family owns and/or manages. In this article, Nordqvist et al. (2009) call for quantitative studies to be complemented by the interpretive approach, which is more able to capture the specific complexity and dynamics unique to family businesses (see Handler 1989; Litz 1997). They discuss central issues, choices, requirements and implications for family business scholars engaged in interpretive research and in so doing, further the conversation around insights necessary for the development of the field of family business in the guest editors’ introductory article. Yi-Chun Huang, Hung-Bin Ding and Ming-Rea Kao then further consider which stakeholders are salient in Salient Stakeholder Voices: Family Business and Green Innovation Adoption (2009) and show that family firms pay much more attention to their internal stakeholders than non-family firms. This finding complements the current discussions on the uniqueness of family business and is very relevant given the global focus on the natural environment in management research (Dibrell & Craig, 2006). Copyright © eContent Management Pty Ltd. Journal of Management & Organization (2009) 15: 392–394.