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This editorial aims to provide an overview of the current state of research in the UK and proposes some future directions for research for family business scholars.

This article is an editorial with commentary about recent developments in understanding research gaps in the field of family business research.

The paper discusses the areas where future research in family business is required focusing on three levels: the organization; the individual; and the community.

The paper suggests that there are many unanswered questions which merit further and future research.

The future of family business research is not in question. The paper posits that there are areas of study in family business which may particularly benefit from taking a cross‐disciplinary approach and suggests that family business researchers might consider exploring theory in the entrepreneurship, small business, sociology, economics and industrial relations areas to gain insights and support for theoretical development in family business.

This article highlights recent UK‐focused discussions regarding the future research directions and gaps in family business research. It suggests there are some emerging areas which require renewed focus particularly related to strategic decision making in family businesses from the organization, individual and social/community perspectives.

Pauline Boss is Professor, Department of Family Social Science, University of Minnesota; and a family therapist in private practice. Her research interests are in the area of family stress, specifically when there is ambiguous loss or boundary ambiguity in families. Her research has included various types of ambiguous loss ranging from loved ones physically missing after war or terrorism, to those psychologically missing due to Alzheimer’s disease or other chronic mental illnesses.Bertram J. Cohler is Professor, the Committee on Human Development, the College, and the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. His research interests include study of continuity and change across the course of adult lives, the family, narrative and writing the life story, social change and sexual identity, and the study of nostalgia in personal and popular memory.Frank Fincham is a Distinguished Professor and Director of Clinical Training at University at Buffalo. His interests include forgiveness, cognition in relationships, and the impact of interparental conflict on children.Karen Fingerman is Associate Professor and Berner Hanley University Scholar at Purdue University. Her research focuses on positive and negative emotions in relationships. Her work has examined mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren, friends, acquaintances, and peripheral social ties.Elizabeth Hay is a Doctoral Student in Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in intergenerational relationships and how they contribute to health and well-being throughout adulthood.Lori Kaplan is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago, Illinois. Her research focuses on family systems and relationships across the life cycle. She has published articles on child custody arrangements after divorce, chronic illness and its effects on family relationships, and family caregiving to an elder with Alzheimer’s disease.David M. Klein is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His current research interests include intergenerational relations, romantic relationship formation, and the sociology of science with an emphasis on the development of theoretical and methodological perspectives in the family sciences.Frieder R. Lang is Professor of Human Development at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His research interests are processes and mechanisms of the development of social and family ties over the life course, motivational psychology of human development and successful aging.Frank Lettke is Assistant Professor in the department of History and Sociology at the Universität Konstanz (Germany), Fachbereich Geschichte und Soziologie and directs the Research Center “Family and Society.” He is interested in intergenerational relations and the diversity of family forms. His current research focuses on family relationships in the context of inheritance.Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research interests include institutional and practical arrangements of intergenerational relations, and gender equality in the enlargement process of the European Union.Kurt Lüscher, Ph.D., held a chair in Sociology at the Universität Konstanz (Germany), Fachbereich Geschichte und Soziologie until 2000, where he was also director of the research center on “Society and Family” (he is now professor emeritus). He has longstanding research interests in the family, the life course, and intergenerational relations. He has also worked extensively in the areas of socialization, child and family policy, and the relationship between family and the legal system.Greg Maio is a Reader in Psychology at Cardiff University. His research interests include attitudinal ambivalence, attitude change, relationships, and social values.Francesca Giorgia Paleari is Lecturer at Catholic University of Milano, Italy. Her research interests include family relationships, forgiving, and research methodology.Karl Pillemer is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, where he also directs the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute. His research interests include the impact of life course transitions on family relationships, the causes and consequences of parent-child relationship quality, and the interaction between families and community institutions.Andrejs Plakans is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa; and editor of The History of the Family: An International Quarterly (Elsevier). His research interests focus on post-1800 eastern Europe, and include historical demography, rural family structures, and kinship.Camillo Regalia is Professor of Social Psychology at Catholic University of Milano, Italy. His research interests include family relationships, self-efficacy beliefs and forgiving.Harry Segal is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Psychology and Human Development at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA. His research interests include the clinical assessment of narrative, the implicit processes involved in the imagination, computational modeling of early experience, and the cognitive-affective aspects of transition from early to mid-childhood.

Existing reviews of research on voluntary childlessness generally take the form of narrative summaries, focusing on main topics investigated over time. In this chapter, the authors extend previous literature reviews to conduct a systematic review and content analysis of socio-historical and geopolitical aspects of knowledge production about voluntary childlessness. The dataset comprised 195 peer-reviewed articles that were coded and analysed to explore, inter alia: the main topic under investigation; country location of authors; sample characteristics; theoretical framework and methodology. The findings are discussed in relation to the socio-historical contexts of knowledge production, drawing on theoretical insights concerned with the politics of location, representation and research practice. The shifts in the topics of research from the 1970s, when substantial research first emerged, uphold the view of voluntary childlessness as non-normative. With some regional variation, knowledge is dominated by quantitative, hard science methodologies and mostly generated about privileged, married women living in the global North. The implications of this for future research concerned with reproductive freedom are outlined.

This article provides a personal response to the questions raised by Ratten et al. (2023) on what family business researchers have learnt about the family business field and tips for the future.

This viewpoint article takes an autoethnographic reflective approach to address the five questions posed to distinguished family business researchers in Ratten et al. (2023).

In family business research, scholars must address key intersectionalities. These include evolving gender dynamics, global reach, the impact of technology and the growing importance of sustainability. Women's roles in family businesses need thorough examination, while family business definitions must account for global operations. The influence of technology demands exploration, and sustainability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Scholars should offer theory and practical guidance, bridging the gap between research and real-world application in this evolving landscape.

This article highlights the critical intersectionalities shaping the family business field. Through the autoethnographic reflective approach, the article provides both verbatim advice and future-oriented tips, delivering original and innovative insights into the needs of the family business management domain.

This article provides commentary from well-known family business researchers on what they have learnt about the family business field and tips for the future.

Well-known family business management researchers were contacted in order to provide their feedback on the field of family business management. Their responses were then curated into an article that can help others learn from their advice.

The family business management researchers provided suggestions on how to succeed in the field of family business management and advice for current and future researchers. Thereby helping to advance the field and provide new novel research ideas that can help science as well as practice.

This article is amongst the first to provide verbatim advice from the leading family business management scholars. Thus, providing original and innovative ideas about what is needed in the field of family business management.

The purpose is to provide a brief summary on the current research development regarding the role of in-laws in family firms’ continuity. Additionally, I provide a perspective on the trends on the research regarding the in-laws involvement and influence in preparing future generations of family firms’ owners/managers. At the end, I conclude on what should be the relevant issues to be explored and researched in the future.

In this paper, I review the literature on the role of in-laws on the family business continuity, particularly, I emphasize the involvement of in-laws in family firms. I found that this topic of family business continuity has not widely researched and the role of in-laws on the future of the family firm has been underestimated in the extant literature. I provide a brief summary on the trends related the involvement of in-laws in the family business continuity and, at the end, I give my conclusions on what should be a research agenda regarding this topic.

Despite previous research, the question of the role of in-laws in family firms remains unanswered from the business-owning family perspective, nor from the in-laws’ perspective. The previous research has raised more questions on this topic. Clearly, the research landscape is vast, and scholars’ callings to find better ways to identify family members are totally justifiable.

Based on the literature review, it can be argued that one of the topics with high potential for future research and development is related to the role of in-laws in the family business continuity, either because they are passively included as part of the family group, without acknowledgment on their involvement or because governance policies have formally excluded them. In this review, I highlight the influence of the in-laws in the family business continuity; particularly, their role in preparing future generations of family firms owners/managers and imprinting them with the family values, culture and believes.

This study aims to underline the importance of addressing gender issues in family firms. It reinvigorates research in this field by revealing its current state, identifying research gaps and suggesting future agendas.

A bibliometric approach using a co-word analysis of 376 papers from the Web of Science database and their 885 keywords was performed to reveal the thematic structure of gender and family firm research, research topics, associations among them and their evolution over the last 30 years (1991–2021).

This review provides an extensive literature base and suggests research topics that facilitate the adoption of a gendered lens in family firm literature and business practice.

This review demonstrates how gender issues are intertwined with management, leadership and family firm approaches. Our observations inform scholars, policymakers and practitioners on the need to integrate gender issues into organizational culture and to connect empowerment strategies with the sociocultural environment.

This study shows the need to address women’s empowerment in business, considering different sociocultural contexts in addition to a Western focus. It also calls for embracing gender and feminist perspectives in research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the types of ethical challenges and dilemmas researchers face when engaging in family consumption research.

Drawing from the concept of micro-ethics to bridge reflexivity with ethics in practice, the paper provides a reflexive account of the various ethical dilemmas encountered by two family consumption scholars during their fieldwork. Both researchers conducted qualitative research on family meals.

The paper reveals five types of ethical tensions that can arise when doing research on family consumption. These tensions are addressed as display, positioning, emotional, practical and consent dilemmas, all of which have ethical implications. The findings unpack these dilemmas, showing empirical and reflexive accounts of the researchers as they engage in ethics in practice. Solutions and practical strategies for dealing with these ethical tensions are provided.

Despite the growing interest in interpretive family research, there is less attention on the ethical and emotional challenges researchers face when entering the family consumption scape. As researching families involves entering an intimate area of participants’ lives, the field may be replete with tensions that may affect the researcher. This paper brings the concept of micro-ethics to family marketing literature, showing how researchers can do ethics in practice. The paper draws on reflexive accounts of two researchers’ personal experiences, showing their emotional, practical, positioning and display challenges. It also provides practical strategies for researchers to deal with dilemmas in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical reflection on the experience and challenges associated with conducting a family ethnography along with methodological guidance that generates insights for future researchers.

This paper uses a family ethnography as a methodological approach to investigate family consumption in context with a view towards capturing detailed consumption experiences.

A family ethnography is a valuable but challenging methodology to follow in its preparation, practice and publishing. Despite these challenges, they are surmountable with some lateral thinking to conduct methodologically and ethically sound ethnographic research.

The method, challenges and guidance offered here can be used to make the most of ethnography as a methodological approach to family research.

The critical reflection of the experience and challenges of conducting a family ethnography along with the practical advice offered here may guide those considering using ethnographic research.

Contributions include a critical reflection on the experience and challenges of conducting a family ethnography, ethical and methodological guidelines to overcome them and operational guidelines for their use.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and discuss a number of child-centric research methods/stimuli involving young children (5-6 years old) in interviews without, and subsequently with their parents. Existing and new methods were selected and developed for a study which aimed at obtaining insights into parents’ and young children’s understandings of children’s influence and family interaction with regard to family food consumption practices.

A total of 35 children were interviewed using semi-structured interviews in five kindergartens. Subsequently, 13 families were interviewed in their homes. The latter interviews included the same children as were interviewed in the kindergarten. The methods discussed include drawings, a desert-island-choice task, a sentence completion task, photographs, vignettes and a video-clip.

When interviewing young children about family decision making influence, the use of engaging methods contributes to the quality of data achieved and to the participants’ enjoyment of their participation. Care should be taken not to overload children with exercises. Visual rather than verbal methods worked better for engaging the children in the research process; for parents all included methods worked well.

The current study shows that a method developed specifically for the study (desert-island-choice task) was apt at including all family members’ perspectives; future studies should develop methods that capture shared rather than individual experiences. The study was carried out in wealthy areas in Denmark. It would be highly relevant to broaden the sample to other socio-economic and cultural contexts.

The study is based on interviews with children usually deemed too young to interview. The contribution is novel methods that allow for studying the interaction between children and parents and that are not based on reading and writing skills to access the perspectives of 5-6-year old children. Precautions regarding using existing methods are offered.