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Purpose: The aim is to explore how family relations are affected by societal changes in relation to informal and formal caregiving and self-determination of older adults.

Design/methodology/approach: Care managers (CMs)/social workers (SWs) (N = 124) participated in a comparative vignette study including Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. Systems theory was used.

Findings: Japanese CMs/SWs clearly describe their efforts to create networks in a relational way between formal and informal actors in the community. South Korean CMs/SWs balance between suggesting interventions to support daily life at home or a move to a nursing home, often acknowledging the family as the main caregiver. In Sweden, CMs/SWs highlight the juridical element in meeting the older adult and the interventions offered, and families primarily give social support. Regarding self-determination, the Japanese priority is for CMs/SWs to harmonize within the family and the community. South Korean CMs/SWs express ambivalent attitudes to older adults’ capability for self-determination in the intersection between formal and family care. Swedish CMs/SWs adhere to the older adult’s self-determination, while acknowledging the role of the family in persuading the older adult to accept interventions. The results suggest emerging defamilialization in South Korea, while tendencies to refamilialization are noticed in Japan and Sweden, albeit in different ways.

Research limitations/implications: In translation, nuances may be lost. A focus on changing families shows that country-specific details in care services have been reduced. For future research, perspectives of “care” need to be studied on different levels.

Originality/value: Using one vignette in three countries with different welfare regimes, discussing changing views on families’, communities’ and societal caregiving is unique. This captures changes in policy, influencing re- and defamilialization.

Notwithstanding the relevance of managerial control systems (MCS) in any organization, as well the distinctive role they can play in family business, due to its specific features, the literature rarely dealt with the role and characteristics of MCS in family business. Taking into account previous contributions from different disciplines (organization, management accounting, and family business), the current work aims to better understand the state of the art about research in the field of MCS in family business in order to identify main research gaps and propose future research directions.

Forty-five articles have been analyzed, which were issued in 29 sources. Research findings show that the literature on MCS in family business is limited and not very conclusive. Some authors focused on the type of controls, other authors outlined the role of MCS in managerialization and the relation with professionalization. A few studies focused on some specific mechanisms, especially strategic planning and compensation. Some contributes dealt with MCS’ determinants and impacts. Differences between family and non-family firms were proposed. However, a clear and organized picture of the features of MCS in family firms, their determinants, and impacts has not yet been developed. Particularly, the impact of the distinctive features of family business on MCS represents an underdeveloped research field along with how MCS can be differently developed and used in different kinds of family firms. In the light of findings of the literature review, we propose a reference research framework on MCS in family business.

Family systems theory has often been applied to the organizational environment. This article presents an overview of family systems approaches to management, with particular focus on libraries and information technology. Some of the family systems concepts that can be applied to the library environment include differentiation, mystification, emotional triangles, and pseudomutuality. Some of the positive aspects of a family system that are relevant to the organizational context include stages of development, family rituals, and family stories. Through examples and vignettes, the author demonstrates the application of family systems theory to the field of library management.

This paper aims to explore the concept of resilience set within a family business context and considers how familiness and the nature of noneconomic factors, such as relationship dynamics influence performance. This paper provides new insights into the nature and impact of familiness as a mediating device, uncovering the potential for reframing resilience theory and practice.

The paper draws on a review of the extant literature in the areas of resilience and familiness as a means of developing a deeper understanding of the social-ecological system of the family firm.

The study reveals family business as a complex interrelationship between complimentary social-ecological systems. It highlights the complexity of family business and the challenges of the relational nature of familiness and how this presents additional layers of complexity in the decision making process and implementation.

The paper draws on literature that is dominated by western culture and may partially or not at all reflect the issues associated with organisational resilience in family firms with such backgrounds and their culturally bound social-ecological systems.

The paper seeks to fill a knowledge gap by exploring the key elements of organisational resilience in the context of familiness. The work calls for further research into the nature of familiness connections mediating the nature of family relational dynamics. It further provides a framework indicating how these elements can shape and subvert day-to-day management events, raising implications for theory and practice and calls for deeper empirical research to be undertaken.

Most researchers overlook the family system in the pursuit of family business studies and research. They mistakenly have assumed that the study of only the family business is sufficient to understand the influence and effect of the family itself. The importance the family system is documented as well as the evolution of family business as a field of study and various family business definitions. Conceptualizations of the family business are critiqued and the Sustainable Family Business Theory (SFBT) is presented relative to its board and detailed emphasis on the family system. This paper aims to address these issues.

This article is a review of previous family business research including specific conceptual models developed in the literature, particularly relevant to the inclusion of the family system.

Few researchers examine the family system in detail but those that do are reviewed and discussed.

Research, teaching and practice must be conducted with the recognition of the family system relative to the family business.

Recognizing the family system for its unique social contributions will have impact on future research, teaching, and practice.

This review of previous research offers researchers a broader and comprehensive view of the family business, which is inclusive of the family system, as well as the business system and their respective interactions. Researchers, educators, and practitioners will benefit from this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of how conflicts, caused by the specifics of family businesses – the familiness – impact change in family businesses.

The analysis is based on 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews of German family business members. The authors followed the grounded theory approach.

This study gives evidence for family business-specific conflicts and family business-specific change and outlines how conflict impacts change. Findings show that a family system works like a recursive catalytic converter in family businesses.

This paper offers researchers a broader understanding and a comprehensive view of change in the family business. Although still limited by its exploratory approach, its insights can be valuable for researchers, practitioners and policy makers. The findings offer an operational base for future quantitative studies.

Using the new system theories approach the authors develop an understanding of how conflicts impact change in family businesses. The study explains how conflicts are managed in family business practice.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative study with a twofold focus: on highly escalated family business (FB) conflicts and on the interactions between conflicts and the failure of the company as FB. The authors devoted this paper to the question of how family-related conflicts are connected with the demise of FB. Conflicts constitute an essential part of every FB and may definitely have the power to superimpose the performance of the FB as well as the family life in a destructive way. Especially, highly escalated so called relationship conflicts can be seen as one reason for the failure of FB.

The research aims at analysing the meaning of conflict in FB with respect to the failure of the FB. Therefore, the authors use an explorative case study approach. The study is based on a total of five case studies. As the authors use theory of social systems as a theoretical background, the authors focused in the analysis in all cases on patterns rather than on individual characteristics.

As an essential part of the study the authors formulated eight hypotheses describing specific patterns of the conflict process as a communicative system. These hypotheses convey a comprehensible impression of the effects conflicts may have within FB and present a number of new facets of conflict dynamics and patterns of escalation in FB.

In particular, the authors provide new insights into the dynamics of highly destructive forms of conflicts in FB and the relationship between family-related conflicts and the failure of FB. The authors also pave the way for future research that aim to develop a more holistic understanding about when and why the outcomes from family and business systems will conflict or be harmonious.

Family businesses consist of a family system, a business system, and an ownership system. Current undergraduate business education only prepares family business students with business system education, thereby leaving the student with a misconception of the environment in which they will work. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Business education must change to provide these students with an integrated curriculum that allows them to make connections across disciplines, and provides the additional soft skills and hard skills needed to accomplish the task.

The authors propose a conception focussed curriculum to accomplish this task and make suggestions on how such a system might be implemented.

This approach provides family business educators with a model that they can implement, thereby better preparing family business students for their return to their family work.

As host to over one million Syrian refugees, Lebanon continues to experience challenges addressing the needs of refugee families. This research examined the experiences of Syrian families with the refugee support system in Lebanon. The purpose of this study was to better understand the strengths and gaps in existing mechanisms of support for these Syrian families, including informal support from family, neighbors and community and more formalized support provided through entities such as nongovernmental organizations and United Nations agencies.

Data were collected from 46 families displaced by the war and living in Lebanon (N = 351 individuals within 46 families). Collaborative family interviews were conducted with parents, children and often extended family.

The data identified both strengths and gaps in the refugee support system in Lebanon. Gaps in the refugee support system included inadequate housing, a lack of financial and economic support, challenges with a lack of psychosocial support for pregnant women and support for disabled youth. Despite these challenges, families and community workers reported informal community support as a strong mediator of the challenges in Lebanon. Furthermore, the data find that organizations working with Syrian families are utilizing informal community support through capacity building, to create more effective and sustainable support services.

This study provides an overview of strengths and gaps in supports identified by refugees themselves. The research will inform the development and improvement of better support systems in Lebanon and in other refugee–hosting contexts.

A systems approach to the family as a self‐regulating, goal‐directed system is developed. It is viewed in terms of socio‐legal boundaries delimiting certain role relationships and interactional patterns or action‐strategies, which are regulated by a hierarchy of steering principles and meta‐principles. Steering principles include adaptation, self‐regulation, control of interaction and morphogenesis, while meta‐principles include values, identity and meaning. The applicability of systems theory to family policy is discussed; its predictive possibilities should not be used to control, but to facilitate morphogenesis.