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The author synthesizes research at the genesis of the field of family entrepreneurship, allowing to distinguish it from the field of family business. Indeed, family entrepreneurship is at the intersection of family, entrepreneurship and family business and is dedicated to the understanding of entrepreneurial behaviors of family, family members and family businesses. Here, the author emphasizes the importance of context as well as bidirectional relationships to grasp the multiplicity of behaviors and their antecedents and outcomes. The author offers an overview of possible futures: how family entrepreneurship can be instrumental in understanding and taking action in face of ecological, economic and societal issues.

The author synthesizes, critically assesses and integrates extant research, offering a state of the art of the field of family entrepreneurship accessible to a wide audience of readers.

The author reviews and integrates the literature that undergirds family entrepreneurship, flushing out its idiosyncratic value relative to family business. The author underscores how framing situations and issues with family entrepreneurship is a promising avenue to better understand and navigate pending ecological, economic and societal stakes.

This perspectives paper distinguishes family entrepreneurship from family business, the former building on and expanding the latter. It highlights how the augmented view is useful to understand entrepreneurial behaviors of families, family members and family businesses because it triangulates family, entrepreneurship and family business. Consequently, the present state of the art provides a useful synthesis and perspectives of possible futures. The originality of this research relies in offering a snapshot integrating prior research at the genesis of the field and demonstrating how the field can fruitfully support future research and practice, in particular to address grand challenges and wicked problems.

This paper aims to examine how gender diversity and women’s empowerment influence the performance of family entrepreneurships and explores the role of firm characteristics as a moderating factor.

The study used a structured questionnaire as the survey tool to collect data from 91 women managers working in family entrepreneurships, which originated from entrepreneurial initiatives, located in various Lebanese regions. The validity of the construct was assumed using the fitness of extracted index, incremental fit-index, non-normal fit-index, root mean square of residuals and standard root mean square residual. Composite reliability, Cronbach's alpha and value confirmatory factor analysis were used to measure the internal consistency. Data were analyzed using the structural equation modeling method.

This study reveals that gender equality, education level and family support significantly affect women's empowerment while an insignificant association was found between empowerment and earning social status and achieving financial independence. This paper also showed a significant interaction between women’s empowerment and the performance of family entrepreneurships. Additionally, the results showed that women holding managerial positions in family entrepreneurships is positively associated with firm performance. Finally, it was concluded that the location of the family firm moderates the relationship between gender diversity and firm performance.

This research contributes to theory and practice regarding the role of women in family entrepreneurships and sheds light on gender differences influencing family entrepreneurships and women empowerment issues.

Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

Given the limited understanding of the process of transgenerational entrepreneurship and that knowledge is a fundamental antecedent of entrepreneurial endeavors, this study aims to shed light on how entrepreneurial families (EFs) nurture entrepreneurship across generations, which knowledge is required within the EF to spur new entrepreneurial activities, and how is this knowledge acquired.

Considering the paucity of empirical evidence on the topic under investigation and the related exploratory nature of this study, the authors adopted a qualitative approach by conducting a case study on an Italian wine-making family business.

The case analysis reveals that EF members are required to acquire different types of knowledge at different generational stages to spur new entrepreneurial activities, specifically technical knowledge in the second generation and business knowledge in the third generation. Moreover, the data analysis shows two mechanisms, namely, trust among generations and role separation, that, during both generational transitions, enabled and empowered the younger generations to exploit their knowledge to explore entrepreneurial opportunities and engage in new entrepreneurial activities.

This study provides novel insights into the role of knowledge in transgenerational entrepreneurship, particularly looking at knowledge acquired by EF members across generations. Accordingly, this research contributes to the literature streams of transgenerational entrepreneurship, knowledge management in family businesses and broader knowledge management research.

How does the family influence individual entrepreneurial entry? The literature does not provide a satisfactory answer. In this paper, we develop an individual entrepreneurial capital perspective to systematically evaluate the impact of current households on entrepreneurship at both theoretical and empirical levels.

Based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database from 2010 to 2018, we used logit regression models to examine the relationship between household size and opportunity- and necessity-motivated entrepreneurship.

The empirical results show that with the expansion of household size, the possibility of opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship shows a trend that first declines and then rises, and the possibility of necessity-motivated entrepreneurship shows an upward trend, suggesting that there are two types of opposing mechanisms that affect the relationship between household and entrepreneurial entry.

Family households are the starting point of individual growth and provide initial cognitive and social resources for decision-making. For entrepreneurs, it is necessary to make full use of household-based capital and networks to promote entrepreneurial activities. For the government, it is necessary to explore the development and implementation of household-based entrepreneurial policies.

Through analyses of the U-shaped relationship between household size and opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship and the positive relationship with necessity-motivated entrepreneurship, we reveal the relationship between household and entrepreneurship, reconcile the contradictions in the literature and contribute to the two fields of family studies and entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of family dynamics and women’s entrepreneurship by examining women’s influence on decision-making in family businesses. Business decisions in family firms, in particular, are not free from family influence in terms of goals and strategies, and the role of women in decision-making processes is of particular interest. Consequently, the role of women entrepreneurs in family firms and their influence on business development requires a more fine-grained analysis of the family dynamic within the family and the business.

This study draws on a qualitative study and focuses on the life story narratives of nine women in rural family businesses in rural communities of Småland province in Sweden to empirically examine the decision-making processes. This region is known both for its entrepreneurial culture and traditional gender order. Based on the narrative accounts of women entrepreneurs in family businesses, the data analysis method is thematic, using a Gioia-inspired method.

The complexity of decision-making in rural family firms is further complicated in part due to a closeness with the rural community. Thus, a typology of three decision-making modes in family firms emerges an informal family-oriented mode, a semistructured family/employee consensus mode and a formal board mode with at least one nonfamily member. Moreover, the advantages, disadvantages and strategies that women use to influence decisions within the respective mode are outlined.

This work contributes to the study of women’s agency and its implications in family business and entrepreneurship in the rural context. The study implies that women’s agency shapes the (rural) entrepreneurship context and, likewise, the (rural) entrepreneurship context influences women’s agency. Hence, the author challenges the view of women as only caregivers and sheds light on the practices and processes behind the scenes of entrepreneurial family businesses.

This study is an attempt to explore the determinants of entrepreneurial intentions in the context of family business background. There is a dearth of studies on the relationship between family business and entrepreneurial intentions. Three constructs of social cognitive theory (SCT) have been applied as mediators: self-efficacy, subjective norms and outcome expectations.

To measure entrepreneurial intentions, the data have been collected from the postgraduate students of three universities in Pakistan. The questionnaire was distributed among the respondents, and 416 complete responses were taken from the students. Simple random sampling has been applied, and measurement and hypothesized models are tested by using the structural equation modeling technique in WarpPLS.

The results of this research reveal that family business background significantly affects the three elements of SCT (self-efficacy, subjective norms and outcome expectations), which further develop the individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions (EIs). The results showed that social cognitive elements are the underpinning mechanism that explains the relationship between family business background and EIs.

The similarity of the study is less than 18%.

The purpose of this research is to develop theory, thereby attending to the existing knowledge gap regarding the impact of family firms on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). Reducing such a gap is both timely and relevant given the ubiquity of family firms across the globe and the lack of theoretical development at the intersection of EE and family firm literatures. By employing social capital theory in a propositional theorizing approach, this article presents unique propositions that enrich current understanding of the EE phenomenon.

Our method adopts a three-step propositional theorizing approach. The first step outlines our conceptualization, drawing on social capital theory and identifying multiple levels of analysis pertaining to EEs and family firms. The second step precisely identifies the constructs used for the theorization process, drawing upon relevant literature. The third step involves proposition building, which produces our findings.

As a result of our propositional theorizing method, we developed 10 theoretical propositions to explain interactions between family members, nonfamily entrepreneurs, family firms and new ventures in the EE, thereby focusing on the social elements of the EE and reducing its conceptual complexity while extending the explanatory power of family social capital in the EE.

Despite being increasingly relevant in research, policy and practice discourse, EEs remain under theorized. By theorizing in this context, we provide explanations of the mechanisms to explain social interactions between family members, nonfamily entrepreneurs, family firms and new ventures and how such interactions are likely to provide better access to the untapped resources in the EE. Furthermore, our theorization also identifies underexplored research areas paving the way for future scholars.

This article is relevant to practitioners and policymakers interested in creating balanced, inclusive and effective EE policies and interventions. Our theorization generates insights that complement a bottom-up approach where the state assumes a facilitating role for actors such as family firms to positively impact their EE. This research is both timely and necessary because, if unaddressed, it will lead to ineffective and potentially exclusionary policies and EE interventions.

We contribute to the literature by synthesizing the two domains and thereby advancing knowledge at the intersection of EE and family firm literatures. We strengthen the link between two burgeoning research areas through a propositional theorizing mode of theory development. Under the assumptions of a grand theory, social capital theory, we highlight the benefits that derive from social interactions in the EE between family firms and other EE actors.

This paper seeks to systematically review and synthesise existing research knowledge on African women entrepreneurship to identify gaps for future studies.

The paper conducted a systematic literature review of published studies from 1990 to 2020 on women entrepreneurship in Africa using a 5M gender aware framework of Brush et al. (2009).

The systematic literature review of published studies found the fragmentation, descriptive and prescriptive orientation of studies on Africa women entrepreneurship and devoid of theoretical focus. Further, women entrepreneurship studies tended to be underpinned from various disciplines, less from the entrepreneurship lens, mostly quantitative, and at its infancy stage of development. With a primary focus on development, enterprise performance and livelihood, studies rarely attended to issues of motherhood and the nuanced understanding of women entrepreneurship’s embeddedness in family and institutional contexts of Africa.

The paper questions the view that women entrepreneurship is a “panacea” and unravels how family context, customary practices, poverty and, rural-urban and formal/informal divide, significantly shape and interact with African women entrepreneurs’ enterprising experience and firm performance.

The findings and analyses indicate that any initiatives to support women empowerment via entrepreneurship should consider the socially constructed nature of women entrepreneurship and the subtle interplay of the African institutional contexts’ intricacies, spatial and locational differences which significantly influence women entrepreneurs’ choices, motivations and goals for enterprising.

The paper contributes to a holistic understanding of women entrepreneurship in Africa by using a 5M framework to review the research knowledge. In addition, the paper not only identifies unexplored/or less examined issues but also questions the taken-for-granted assumptions of existing knowledge and suggest adoption of context- and gender-sensitive theories and methods.

The stereotypes of the dodgy businessman and businessman gangster are established typologies in both the criminology and family business literature, but nevertheless, there is still an evident dearth of substantive studies on the topic. Family business scholars have begun to acknowledge the limited nature of such explorations of criminality in family firm businesses. The purpose of this article is therefore to review, synthesise and solidify existing research on this under-researched area of family business management.

This perspective article explores and synthesises the links between acquisitive crime, criminal predation and family business to address an identifiable research gap in the literature of criminology, entrepreneurship and family business. It examines the overlap between criminal activities and business practices, shedding light on how individuals in the family business community may become involved in criminal activities due to various factors, including coercion, addiction and financial gain.

This perspective highlights emerging research trends that have the potential to increase the knowledge about the “dark side” of family business.

Being a perspective paper this brief exploration of the literature can only cover a small cross section of the literature. A conceptual model emerges, which illustrates shared aspects of crimino-entrepreneurial identity between authentic entrepreneurs and criminals.

This perspective article scopes the extant literature covering the links between acquisitive crime, criminal predation and family business to help guide the direction of future research. The piece presents new perspectives on the intersection of acquisitive crime and family business, and its novelty lies in its synthesis of the disparate elements from the diverse literature to contribute to the said literature.