IFERA 2023 Krakow

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Addressing paradoxes and ambiguities in family business research

Family Business research has been growing significantly over the last three decades. Recent bibliometric analyses of the field indicate that more than 1400 papers have been published since 1988 (Brigham et al., 2022; Rovelli et al., 2021). The field matures, encouraging us to move from empirically accumulated knowledge toward developing solid theoretical frames, connecting with broader conversations in management and related fields, and paving ways for new and meaningful theorizing. To do so, it seems warranted that the field should go back to the fundamental paradoxes and ambiguities thar make family business a unique and intellectually stimulating research subject.

It is difficult to fully understand family businesses, their characteristics, behaviors and performances, without embracing paradoxes, commonly referred to as “contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time” (Smith & Lewis, 2011, p. 382). Indeed, paradoxical tensions are inherent to virtually all forms of organizing (e.g., Poole & Van de Ven, 1989; Schad et al., 2016) and are, perhaps not surprisingly, central to some of the most alive theoretical debates in the field, such as the seemingly contradictory theoretical positions of agency and stewardship theory (e.g., Chrisman, 2019; Le Breton-Miller & Miller, 2018). Also, competing institutional demands from the business realm and the family system are well known to create ambiguities as to the legitimacy of strategy and decision-making processes (e.g., Greenwood et al., 2010; Miller et al., 2013). Finally, research has started to highlight the links, tensions and inconsistencies between multiple dimensions of family firms’ socioemotional wealth that drive family firms’ strategic behavior (Berrone et al. 2012), revealing multiple paradoxes relative to aspects such as governance (Berent-Braun & Uhlaner, 2012), identity (Shepherd & Haynie, 2009), social embeddedness (Cruz et al., 2012), emotions (de Cunha et al., 2021), or intergenerational relations (Magrelli et al., 2022).

For these reasons, a deeper look at paradoxes and ambiguities in family business research holds the promise to shed new and useful insights about important outcomes on which prior research has produced mixed results, such as innovation (e.g., Calabrò et al., 2019; Chrisman et al., 2015; De Massis et al., 2015), internationalization (e.g., Arregle et al. 2021), succession (e.g., Lee et al. 2003), resilience in face of major crises (e.g., Czakon et al. 2022), and, ultimately, performance (e.g., Irava & Moores, 2010).

We therefore invite scholars to address the tensions between opposite logics, mixed empirical findings, and apparent anomalies pervasive in family business research, starting from, but not limited to, the following questions:

1. What are the underlying sources of paradoxes and ambiguities in family firms? How and why do they emerge?
2. What are the negative and positive dynamics of paradoxes and ambiguities in family firms? What are their consequences on firm- and family-level behaviors and outcomes?
3. When and how can family firms leverage the positive potential of paradoxes and ambiguities?
4. How can we identify, observe and measure paradoxes and ambiguities in a useful way to generate new theoretical knowledge about family firms?
5. How can we productively use the lenses of paradoxical thinking to advance understanding of family firm outcomes such as innovation, internationalization, diversification, governance, and performance, among others?
6. What are the new manifestations of paradoxes and ambiguities that are emerging among in family firms as they transition to the digital era?
7. What are the implications of managing paradoxes and tensions for family business owners and their stakeholders?

We welcome cross-disciplinary, empirical (qualitative and quantitative) as well as conceptual explorations of these topics and look forward to your submissions.