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Dozens of peer‐reviewed, English language journals are currently published in our field. How ought we to evaluate them? This paper seeks to answer this question.

The paper utilizes both relevant literature and data on entrepreneurship journals. The literature derives from both information science and other research areas that reflect on their journals. The data derives from six citation measures from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science.

The paper finds that there are 59 currently published English language, peer reviewed journals in entrepreneurship. Contestable judgments based on their impact measures suggest that one of these 59 could be considered as “A+”, four as “A”, five as “AB”, eight as “B”, four as “BC”, 23 as “C”, thirteen as “barely detectable”, and one as “insufficient data but promising”.

Journal rankings affect the resources and prestige accorded to business schools, disciplines and subdisciplines, and individual scholars. However, the need to fit evaluations to school strategy implies that no rating system, ours included, is definitive. Multiple measures are needed, letter grades are misleading, and journal rankings should match the institution's strategy and priorities in stakeholder service. A wider purpose of this study is to alert readers to the range of current methodologies and the limits of conventional rankings.

The conclusions presented in this paper appear innocuous, but standard practice is to use restrictive measures, to employ letter grades, and to prioritize only one stakeholder: scholars. These practices are poorly suited to the entrepreneurship field.

For most of us in the industry, and certainly the members of CEMA, 1992 could have been much better. To look back over the black spots would serve only to remind us that we are not yet out of the woods. Despite the continuing recession with its attendant gloom and despondency, the Association has had some high points during the past year.

The decision of whether or not to start a new business is a question pondered by many people and something that about .004% of the U.S. population decides to do every month (Kauffman Foundation, 2005). This decision becomes more complicated with the involvement of family members. One would be hard pressed to find any business enterprise without some sort of family influence and involvement at some point in the start-up or ongoing operations of the business. While most entrepreneurship research points to legal, environmental, regulatory, technological, or demographic changes as triggers that spur individuals into action, the role of family influence in new business founding is often overshadowed or not addressed at all (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003).

The purpose of this study was to explore the couple relationship context within the venture creation process over time. Conservation of Resources and Family FIRO theories were the theoretical foundation, and constructs from these theories were integrated to develop the analytical framework. The sample consisted of couple-level data from 94 start-up businesses at Time 1 with information from entrepreneur and spouse; there were 78 businesses at Time 2. Analysis of spousal resources invested in the newly created businesses indicated that direct and indirect spousal involvement in the business, spousal moral commitment, spousal perception of entrepreneur's business self-efficacy, business communication quality, and emotional support from the spouse were enabling resources during the venture creation process. Work overload and work and family conflict were constraining resources during this process. Couples in a very strong relationship reported significantly more enabling resources and fewer constraining resources than couples not in a very strong relationship.

What does anthropology have to contribute to the study of family enterprise and entrepreneurship? The answer to this question seems obvious: lots. As an anthropologist who has written on kinship and money, I applaud any effort to disseminate the insights my discipline offers on these topics (see Rutherford, 1998, 2001). We anthropologists certainly have poached shamelessly from other fields of inquiry, and we should be willing to give back. But my enthusiasm for this exchange comes with a proviso: anthropology is often not the enterprise that others imagine it to be. Anthropologists these days have a tendency to roam widely, off leash, exploring all sorts of unlikely nooks and crannies. As a result, anthropology's role in this emerging field, based mostly in business schools to date, may prove unpredictable. Anthropologists would be as interested in the value accorded to entrepreneurship as they are in its role in family enterprise. They would be as interested in the fact that scholars at business schools are seeking to unsettle assumptions about the relationship between kinship and capital as they are in this relationship per se. But one thing is for certain: if we are going to further this conversation, we have to include the right interlocutors. In this brief essay, I would like to offer some reflections on recent work by anthropologists who speaks to the study of family enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Family shareholders expecting to fulfill their responsibility of aligning management interests with shareholder priorities and holding management accountable need a thorough understanding of financial statements. They need to be able to make sense of what the numbers say about the firm and its competitiveness. Financial literacy is, therefore, essential knowledge for every shareholder, not just the ones active in the management of the company. Without it, the desirable alignment of management and shareholders is at risk. Without it, family-business shareholders can easily become just as indifferent or impatient, fickle, and greedy as hedge fund managers and investors on Wall Street. The latter, aided by analysts and the media, often pressure well-managed publicly traded companies into short-term thinking.

Research in the field of family enterprise is entering its second generation – the earliest scholarly research being in the late 1980s with the publication of the first volume of Family Business Review. Since then, research in the field has moved back and forth from almost exclusively conceptual research at the beginning, toward empirical and statistical research in the mid-1990s, and now, in the early part of the 21st century, trying to find new paths into qualitative research.

There is no sense trying to develop a new area with no support. You need at least some colleagues who acknowledge the importance of the topic and who, better yet, show an interest in pitching in. You need some institutional support too, from the dean, program director, and someone. Additionally, some students with a genuine interest are a must. Even with this beginning, you must promote the field all over your organization, get the resources you need, and find people who are committed and enthusiastic about what you're doing. All this while bearing in mind that small is “beautiful,” at least at the beginning.

Students of kinship or of gender have to confront a similar problem. Their inquiries are made possible by the hard fact that human beings reproduce sexually. The two sexes have complementary and immutable functions in the reproductive process; that is, men impregnate and women gestate and give birth to infants. Therefore, each human child owes her existence to and, we say, is related by birth to, at least two other persons, who are, we say, his or her parents, and who themselves have two parents each, and so on ad infinitum. These relations are the stuff of kinship, which is often described by anthropologists as the social recognition or reinterpretation of the facts of biological reproduction.