Who Could Best Complement a Team of Family Business Researchers-Scholars Down the Hall or in Another Building?

Abstract

This study explores which fields might potentially collaborate in family business research. It compares 14 research fields for their structure of topical attention. The most convenient collaborations, such as those between entrepreneurship, family business, and strategy researchers, prove to be the most appropriate for some research purposes. However, less common collaborations, particularly with scholars from law, history, and anthropology, appear to be the most appropriate for other projects. Family and marital therapy prove to be a less promising collaborator than one might expect because of their strong skewing to familial rather than commercial topics. Correspondingly, entrepreneurship also proves to be an outlier field, skewed to the commercial rather than the familial, with surprisingly little in common with the topical interests of family business researchers.