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More than three decades support the research on the family business. The progress achieved, beyond the disagreements, is considerable. However, significant changes in the macro and microenvironment, and their influence on the companies lead to rethinking new perspectives. This new research agenda is multidimensional to achieve a deeper understanding of the essence of the family business. The objective is to find axes that allow hold up the family business to overcome new challenges. Renowned authors from all over the world have reflected on this and offered us new and high-quality perspectives to enrich debate and promote research.

Family businesses require internal communication (IC) to guide and provide direction, and the unique nature of involving both family and nonfamily employees add complexity. Navigating this complexity helps to ensure effective direction and management of family businesses. This paper explores the existing research concerning IC within family businesses and discusses the lenses and contexts through which it is commonly studied.

This paper provides a concise literature review to identify the most common lenses through which IC in family business has been researched.

IC in family enterprises is mostly studied through the lenses of IC between family generations, IC and the influence on family identity, and IC in times of crises. Existing research is largely focused on the role of family in IC, and limited consideration is given to the role of nonfamily members and family members outside of the business.

The paper synthesizes the direction and findings of existing research into IC within family business and provides avenues for future research. Managerial implications are also presented based on the synthesis of existing literature.

Our purpose is to explore the case of divorce in family business from a legal perspective and highlight the problems of applying family law in the family business context.

We rely on legal analysis and interviews with estate distribution executors to discuss problems with the legal rules and how they are practiced.

Our findings show that the law is ill fitted to the situation where there is a family business included in the division of marital property. In divorce, family law dictates the division of marital property and the family business is reduced to an asset to be divided like any other. Critical issues are identified and elaborated.

Divorce and other disruptions to the family system should be considered in family business consultancy among other threats to the business. The legal perspective on divorce in the family business offered here primarily concerns ownership issues. The impact of divorce on management is equally in need of exploration, which is our suggestion for further studies.

Our paper illuminates in which ways the business is hampered from divorcing owners and discuss critical issues with applying family law in a family business context.

New light is shed on the practical problems of interpreting family law in a family business context advancing our understanding of family aspects in family business management.

It has long been known that family firms have a high mortality rate and that increasing these firms' survival rate is one of the most difficult challenges faced by both public policies and scholars. While most policies and researchers have focused on the business side, in recent years, more attention has been paid to the family sphere. This chapter goes one step further by not focusing on one side or another of this binomial, but on the relationship between both. In particular, we analyze the paradoxes emerging between the different inter- and intragenerational dyads that coexist in family firms (mother-daughter, father-son, mother-son, father-daughter, brother-sister, wife-husband, etc.) to open new lines of debate and propose new basis for the establishment of family firms-targeted public politics. We propose policies that will help family decision-makers to manage unique paradoxes that characterize family businesses.

Justice perceptions describe an individual's evaluation of whether decisions or actions are fair or unfair. These perceptions are important because they affect individual attitudes and behaviors in different situations. Family firms develop and implement governance policies and structures (i.e., governance systems) to diminish the problems that can arise from the overlap between the business, the family, and the ownership systems of a firm. Governance systems help family firms have a clear structure of accountability and a clear understanding of the rights and responsibilities that family and non-family members have toward the family enterprise. Research on governance to date has focused on the practices and policies that exist and their effects on the family firm. However, in the governance context, individual perceptions are important because they are likely to affect the attitudes that family and other members have toward the family enterprise and the likelihood that they will follow the different policies when they are implemented. This chapter takes a receiver perspective to explain how individuals create justice perceptions based on governance mechanisms and the effects of these perceptions. The goal is to understand how we can use this information when developing governance practices in family firms.

Taking as reference a sample of around a hundred biographical materials on entrepreneurs in Mexico and Colombia, the purpose of this chapter is dual. Both to show the relevance and varied modalities that the biographical approach has enjoyed in business history research since the 1990s, and to display the intrinsic potential this modality of scholarship entails for entrepreneurship endeavors. In particular, it discusses the prospects to incorporate this body of empirical works into the large Latin American audience attending undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs in business, economic history and related fields. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first two are devoted to illustrate relevant patterns in the entrepreneurial trajectory of individuals and entrepreneurial families studied in each of the two countries under consideration. The last section identifies some conceptual issues that may impact current debates on Latin American business development as exemplified in recent business and economic history journal venues and scholarly conferences.

This paper aims to explore the innovation performance of Serbian family firms, the differences in the innovation performance between family and non-family firms as well as different family firms, and the relationship between business process innovation and customer satisfaction among family firms.

The sample consists of 207 valid responses from young Serbian companies from various industries founded in 2015 that published their financial statements in 2017. The statistical analysis involved descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, and correlation analysis.

The study results indicate that family businesses in Serbia are innovation-oriented and that they introduced a number of innovations in business processes related to the production and distribution of goods or services and the development of products and business processes. The results also suggest that family and non-family firms are equally committed to introducing innovations in business processes. In addition, the study did not confirm significant differences in the performance of business process innovations among family firms in the manufacturing, trade, and service sectors. Finally, the results demonstrate that introducing business process innovations is positively associated with customer satisfaction and customer retention rate in Serbian family firms.

This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of the innovation performance of Serbian family firms and can help policymakers assess the contribution of innovation to economic goals.

Most research concentrating on family and non‐family businesses with firm performance is conducted overseas with little research actually taking place in Malaysia. Thus, this study focuses on the relationship between family controlled businesses and corporate governance mechanisms with firm value among Malaysian companies. The sample size of this study is 896 companies that were listed on Bursa Malaysia from 2000 to 2003. The findings reveal that corporate governance mechanisms do have an influence on firm value in Malaysia. However, not all elements of governance mechanisms are significant, and the effects differ between family‐businesses and non‐family businesses. The results indicate as expected that board size and leadership structure affect the firm value for all companies. Further analysis shows that family businesses do practice separate leadership structure whilst board size contributes positively towards better performance in non‐family companies. More importantly, family and non‐family businesses are different in terms of corporate governance practices. Thus, regulators need to give additional attention to the unique setting of the family companies.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the preferences of parent founders within family businesses in selecting a suitable successor with the increase in life expectancy.

The study presents alternative decision-making preference models of a suitable succession for parent founders based on the models of microeconomic theory in the context of family businesses.

The theories and models of economics in the current study illustrate that the increase in the life expectancy of the parent founders with their decisions toward the preference of a suitable successor under the age constraint may restrict the sustainability of their family businesses. As a result, the opportunity cost theory appears as to be at the ahead of the other theories in microeconomics in order to support the decision making of parent founders on selecting the suitable successor for the future of the family business.

The paper illustrates the models on the preferences of the parent founder for the future of the family businesses with their perception toward the increase in overall life expectancy. The current study is limited to the perspectives of founder entrepreneurs toward an effective succession decision. Future research may consider the perspectives of in-family as well as non-family successors.

In the light of alternative preference decision-making models for parent founders for choosing a suitable successor under the age constraint, this study will make a noteworthy contribution to the sustainable growth of their family businesses. The approach of this study through the microeconomics not only methodologically contributes to the body of knowledge in aging and employment in general, but also to the intergenerational relationships of parent founders, especially their succession-related plans at their early stages of career.