If theories of family enterprise really do matter, so does change in management education.

This article focuses on family business as an emerging field within management studies. Drawing on a purposive sample of 10 articles presented at a recent academic conference as illustrative of current research in family business, we contend that one of the most salient implications for practice is management education. Subscribing to a logic that good scholarship should inform what is taught in business schools, the article further establishes family business as a field of study by developing a research-based heuristic useful for ongoing curriculum inquiry and development.

Introduction

There is much evidence to suggest that family business is emerging as a significant field of inquiry. For example, in recent years there have been an increasing number of dedicated conferences in Asia, Europe, and North America and the topic has begun to receive attention in a small number of mainstream management journals. The 10 invited articles presented at the June 2005 Theories of the Family Enterprise conference at the University of Alberta are illustrative of this activity. Several of these conference articles are published in this special issue. (1) This article is premised on the notion that, collectively, the conference articles provide a valuable sample from which to offer useful commentary on the emerging field of family business even though we recognize that 10 articles is a small empirical base and do not cover the field.

Family firms differ from nonfamily firms along important strategic and organizational dimensions. As the term "family business" implies, the most important differences have something to do with how a family influences the behavior of a firm. This largely consists of gaining a better understanding of how the noneconomic concerns of family stakeholders affect business decisions and how those decisions affect economic performance. Another set of issues that distinguish family firms is how the business decisions and economic performance of a family firm affects family relationships. Until recently, much of the attention was on the latter set of issues but the former potentially offers even more promise. Importantly, we believe that the study of family businesses, and how they might differ from nonfamily businesses, deserves greater attention in the curricula of business schools. The purpose of this article is to provide a preliminary explanation of why family business studies should be taught as well as a research-based heuristic outlining what should be taught and how such teaching might be integrated into business school curricula. We deal with each of these issues in the following sections.

Theories of Family Enterprise: Reconceptualizing the Management Education Curriculum

Family firms play an important role in most economies (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1999; Morck & Steier, 2005). Although actors from a variety of fields have begun to legitimize family business research, this scholarship has much unrealized potential to further inform what is taught in business schools. We subscribe to the view that maintaining relevance through a strong connection to managerially relevant knowledge should be a perennial quest for all business schools (AACSB, 2002). Collectively, emerging theories of family enterprise research comprise an important ingredient in the business school recipe for relevance.

Some underlying themes of the conference articles include: Family firms are pervasive throughout the world; they matter in most economies, and they are different from nonfamily firms. This reality suggests glaring incongruities in prevailing business school curricula. Presently, U.S. business schools "dominate the business school landscape" globally and their curricula provide a template that is imitated worldwide (Pfeffer & Fong, 2004, p. 1150); however, they pay scant attention to family businesses and often devote an inordinate amount of time to Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies. Albeit significant, these firms represent a "miniscule fraction of the 23 million American companies and even a small minority of the 60,000 publicly traded ones" (Miller & Le Breton-Miller, forthcoming). Even fields such as entrepreneurship--that purportedly deal with the creation of new enterprise--illustrate curriculum deficiencies relative to family enterprise. For example, entrepreneurship tends to overemphasize "lone-wolf" or "atomistic actor" models of organizational creation, completely ignoring familial subnarratives even when they powerfully exist (Steier, 2003).

There also exists a very pragmatic case for greater inclusion of family business related topics in management and business school curricula. Given the sheer number of family firms throughout the world, the reality is that many business students will someday work in a family business (as a family member or nonfamily manager), will found a firm using familial resources, will found a firm that becomes a family firm, or will act as a consultant to a family business (formally, informally, or as a trusted professional advisor such as a lawyer or accountant). Also, in this era of globalization, if you do business anywhere--particularly outside of the United States or the United Kingdom--the chances are good that you will be doing business with a family business (Morck & Steier, 2005).

If management and business schools purport to serve the needs of students, they are well advised to consider greater inclusion of family business related topics in their curricula. The current emphasis on a very narrow population of firms and managerial activities is an organizational failing that needs to be addressed. In terms of preparing students to work in, work for, or work with, organizations having a familial element, we could do better. We are aware that a small number of schools do offer courses in family business; however, they tend to focus on harmony, generations working together, boards of directors, and executive succession. Similar to Chrisman, Chua, and Sharma (2003), we believe it is important to find enhanced ways of supplementing traditional topics that focus largely on relationships.

Overall, increased recognition of the important role of family enterprise throughout the world combined with new theories of family enterprise provides the catalyst or necessary "precipitating jolt" (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002) necessary to instigate change. In this case, recent research prompts fundamental curriculum questions: What is it that future managers and business people need to know? What are the best methods for delivering this knowledge? For business schools everywhere, these questions should be an integral part of ongoing curriculum development and renewal (AACSB, 2002). In the following section, we address these questions by developing a general heuristic for curriculum inquiry and development in family business.

A General Heuristic for Curriculum Inquiry and Development in Family Business

All disciplines and fields exhibit a heuristic structure--speculative formulations about relative knowledge that serve as guides for research inquiry and curriculum development (Schwab, 1962). The articles presented at the Theories of Family Enterprise conference provided a useful starting point for developing a general heuristic useful for crafting curriculum in varied contexts. In addition to patterns of organizing, central features of this model include a focus on performance, conceptual underpinnings in related and respected fields, adaptability to varied learning contexts, and ancillary concepts important to development of the field.

Each of the 10 articles introduced distinct variables to an overall contingent model of family business behavior and performance. Broadly speaking, family businesses can be used to illustrate best and worst practice. Collectively, the 10 articles highlight strengths and weaknesses that can be linked to performance outcomes such as idiosyncratic knowledge, strong noneconomic mission, long-tenured leadership, stewardship, and devoted employees. These strengths can foster positive performance outcomes including lower agency costs and concern for long-term performance and societal well-being. On the other hand, family businesses can illustrate certain weaknesses: risk avoidance, resistance to change, less transparency, altruistic nepotism, and shareholder conflict. These weaknesses have negative consequences including immoral, corrupt self-interested behavior, and pyramid ownership schemes that do not work in the interest of social good.

Clearly, understanding the economic and social role of family business is very difficult. However, we suggest that societies benefit from diversity in the business ownership mix, rather than depending mostly on one form or another. New entrepreneurial ventures, private equity holdings, widely held companies, associations or cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, and family-controlled firms all bring different advantages to an economy and a society. Within this context, we are interested in the performance and the dynamics of family business success and failure. We note that performance has at least four dimensions: societal, national, family vs. nonfamily, and determinants of success at the firm level. Each of these deserves attention and these elements can be found in the articles presented at the Theories of Family Enterprise conference, from which we draw ancillary concepts useful for understanding performance dynamics in family firms.

Ancillary Curricular Concepts