Expanding the Temporal Dimensions of Family Enterprise Research

One of the distinctive features of family enterprise – both as an empirical and as a scholarly field – is time. The key role played by a continuum of events which succeed one another from past through present to future is an often implicit assumption of family business decisions and investigations. It seems that the presence of family and succeeding generations automatically expands the temporal frame that family business managers and researchers alike assume in their choices and analyses. The temporal dimension is foreshadowed in family enterprise research on either positive—e.g., culture, tradition and reputation—or, more often, negative path-dependent phenomena—e.g., the founder’s shadow, inertia and commitment entrapment. Yet time is not a highly debated issue in organization studies. Besides the often criticized prevalence of cross-sectional analyses, even longitudinal studies and conceptual models seldom place time at center stage as a driving force capable of explaining and predicting family business phenomena. The main objective of this special issue is hence to feature articles that explicitly point to the role of time as a crucial organizing principle in family enterprises and entrepreneurial families, and of their entrepreneurial choices. Attention is focused on why and how time, and the way it is interpreted by entrepreneurs and scholars, directs key family business processes and outcomes, or is an outcome itself. This underlying theme can be investigated with different lenses, either jointly or in isolation. Placing time at center stage in family enterprise research first has methodological implications. While calls for longitudinal studies are a norm, rarely are such studies done. What novel insights on old topics may emerge from studies based on time-sensitive methodologies? Therefore, this special issue welcomes studies that explicitly incorporate time as a key variable, both through qualitative and quantitative research methods. Other important implications of the centrality of time refer to choice of units and levels of analysis. A common assumption is that long tenures of key individuals will result in a long-lasting impact of the family on the firm’s longevity, typically within the boundaries of the founder’s business. But what if the temporal evolution of these units—key individuals, family, enterprise, industry—follow different paths? This special issue prompts studies addressing the complex interweaving of different time patterns at different levels of analysis, by investigating the mutual influence of the life courses of individuals, families, business entities, industries and societies. A further implication of expanding the temporal boundaries of family enterprise research refers to the outcomes influenced by the time variable. Family business scholars often assume that longevity is a desirable outcome for the family enterprise. But what if continuous family control leads to stagnation of the business entity, or if a permanently failing organization negatively affects the well being of the controlling family? The special issue aims at encouraging studies that creatively question the often held assumption that longevity and continuity are always good, by thoroughly investigating the underlying value assumptions and their boundary conditions.