The Adulthood of Family Business Research Through Inbound and Outbound Theorizing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Adulthood of Family Business Research Through Inbound and Outbound TheorizingSince the early 1980s, the rapid growth of family business research has led to the establishment of the academic field of family business.Concurrently, the nature of the research conducted in the field has evolved through a number of developmental stages.Early studies, when the field was young and in its primary stage, tended to highlight the differences in the actions, behaviors, and performance of family and non-family businesses.This effort was justified and necessary, in part, in order to establish family businesses as unique organizational entities worthy of scholarly investigations (e.g., Sharma, 2004).As the field matured, gained legitimacy, and moved towards its adolescence stage, research on family business shifted to applying mainstream theories born in other disciplines (which we refer to as inbound theorizing) to show how and why family businesses are not only distinct from non-family businesses, but how family businesses are distinct from each other (e.g., Chua, Chrisman, Steier, & Rau, 2012).In this stage of development, researchers cast aside the monolithic view of family businesses and developed theories and insights that focused on their heterogeneity (e.g., Brune, Thomsen & Watrin, 2019).This Review Issue provides evidence that the family business field has evolved further and reached the next stage -its adulthood.The four articles in this Review Issue not only highlight distinct processes among family businesses, as well as between family and non-family businesses, but actually go one step further: They review and inquire how the context of family business creates opportunities to give back to mainstream theories and thereby contribute significantly to revise, adapt, and develop existing theories and redefine their boundary conditions from other fields of study (which we refer to as outbound theorizing).Each of the four articles in this Review Issue does so in a unique way, highlighting the immense opportunities of (1) doing research in the context of family business and (2) contributing to significant theory development.In this editorial,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".