Kelin E. Gersick

25 Years of Family Business Review: Reflections on the Past and Perspectives for the Future

Since its launch in 1988, the Family Business Review (FBR) has played an integral role in the establishment and development of the field of family business studies. This field is distinguished from its sister disciplines by its singular focus on the paradoxes caused by the involvement of family in business. Today, scholars worldwide recognize both the ubiquity of family enterprises and the complexity of issues faced by these enterprises. However, this has not always been the case. While the field has made impressive progress in terms of the 3Rs of research— Relevance, Reach, and Rigor—much exciting work remains to be done. This introduction to the special issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of FBR discusses the progress the field and the journal have made in the past quarter century and some of the challenges that are waiting for resolution in the future. Family firms represent the predominant form of business organization in the world (LaPorta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999). These heterogeneous and complex enterprises offer a challenging array of issues to study and are beginning to receive substantial scholarly attention. For the past 25 years, FBR has been a catalyst in establishing family business studies as a legitimate field of investigation—a mission defined by its founding editor Ivan Lansberg in its first issue (Lansberg & Gersick, 1993). FBR is currently supported by approximately 200 scholars who are serving as its editors, advisory and review board members, and ad hoc reviewers. With an impact factor of 2.426, it ranks among the top 20 journals in the business category of the Social Science Citation Index. More than 200 submissions from around the world compete for approximately 20 article slots in FBR annually. No wonder there is a “collective sense that significant progress has been made” (Litz, Pearson, & Litchfield, 2012) and that scholars are “united in their appreciation of what has been achieved to date” (Craig & Salvato, 2012). While family enterprise research is moving forward and gaining momentum today, such was not always the case. In this introduction to the special issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of FBR, we pay tribute to the visionaries who laid the foundation for the field of family business studies and contributed substantially to the consulting profession devoted to these enterprises. To accomplish this purpose we provide a brief history of FBR and the owner of the journal, the Family Firm Institute (FFI), followed by observations on the field’s domain and notable developments regarding the progression of family business studies in terms of three 3Rs of research: relevance, reach, and rigor (cf. Sharma, 2010a). Our aim is to provide an overview of the major developments in the past two and half decades, while offering some suggestions on how the future aspirations of the journal and its stakeholders might be achieved. This introductory article draws heavily from three sources: (a) our own experiences as consumers and producers of knowledge related to family enterprises, (b) previous editorials and review articles published in FBR and other venues (e.g., Bird, Welsch, Astrachan, & Pistrui,

Stages and Transitions: Managing Change in the Family Business

The Three-Circle Model and Transitions For the past decade and a half, the three-circle model has been the primary conceptual model of family business. This model views family enterprise as a complex system comprised of three overlapping subsystems: ownership, business, and family. The three-circle model is an excellent tool for understanding the dynamics at work in any family company at a particular point in time. In our more recent work, we found it useful to transform this three-circle concept into a developmental model in which each of the three subsystems moves through a sequence of stages over time (Gersick, Davis, Hampton, & Lansberg, 1997). For example, in our developmental theory, family business ownership moves from a Controlling Owner (CO) stage to Sibling Partnership (SP), and then to Cousin Consortium (CC), or the company itself changes from a Start-Up and passes through other stages to Maturity. Many of our colleagues have offered similar elaborations. In fact, the most recent World Conference of the Family Business Network was organized around three stages in the development of family business ownership. There is no doubt that specifying the stages of family, ownership, and business development enhances our understanding of any family business. Although we continue to learn more about the special nature of each stage, we are now particularly interested in the periods of change between stages: the transitions. Every stage theory must describe some mechanism that takes a system from one stage to the next. The transition periods are the most critical and challenging moments in the development of family enterprises. Transitions are often periods of uncertainty when the decision makers feel most anxious and vulnerable. Such feelings are understandable, given that transition periods are when an organization makes fundamental choices that will profoundly shape its future. By calling attention to the transitions, we do not mean to imply that periods of stability within each stage should be taken for granted. The transitions are opportunities for reassessment of the course the business is following and for fundamental change; the periods in the middle of a stage, when the firm is committed to a particular ownership structure or organizational design, present the major opportunity for focus and growth. Both change (transition) and growth (stability) are essential for success and continuity, although they require different kinds of work. The tasks of transition periods are exploratory and strategic; the tasks during periods of stability are operational and tactical in nature. Put another way, during transitions we may consider all options and decide which mountain to climb—often while the army cools its heels in the valley and waits. Then, during the stable Stages and Transitions: Managing Change in the Family Business

Essay on Practice: Advising Family Enterprise in the Fourth Decade

Researchers and advisors in the field of family business have focused on a sequence of topics over the 30 years since the first dedicated conferences and the emergence of Family Firm Institute, Inc. (FFI) and family business review. This essay reviews the issues that have received the most attention from family business advisors across this time period (succession, governance, and intergenerational family dynamics). Then the author proposes a particular focus for intervention in the coming decade—family human capital utilization—and discusses four areas of consultation that may be increasingly valuable to client families.

A key informant needs assessment of an adult population: Application to consultation and prevention programs

Sixty-three key informants first identified the four most important problems confronting adults between the ages of 30 and 40 years and then responded to a series of open-ended questions in relation to the two most important problems identified. Respondents then rated a list of life events and problem areas as to their seriousness and prevalence and identified those they viewed as most important. Respondent-generated problems, in order of importance, were financial, employment, parenting, health/mental health, and marital. As examples of the qualitative outcomes of the open-ended questions, responses are summarized in this article for two problems: financial and parenting. The two most important problems identified from the rating scales were financial troubles and divorce, followed by a number of items pertaining to mental health, child-rearing, and marital problems. The discussion focuses on considerations of reliability and validity and on implications of the findings for the design of services.