Embedded but not asleep: Entrepreneurship and family business research in the 21st century

Abstract

This article offers a socio-historical view of how families make a living and contribute to business formation. We review the history of family changes that occurred over the last several hundred years in developed nations – decline of the corporate family, increasing occupational opportunities for women, decline of multigenerational families, growing proportion of never-married and childless adults – and suggest the family embeddedness perspective as an approach for superseding outdated conceptualizations of “families” in family business studies. We outline the genesis of the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship and perform a systematic analysis of the literature that has cited the seminal piece by Aldrich and Cliff (2003). We show how this perspective has been used in entrepreneurship and family business research, highlighting a variety of opportunities made possible by placing “families” at the core of future research. Finally, we offer empirical and theoretical directions, rooted in the family embeddedness perspective, for moving the family business literature forward.