The phenomenon of the family firm has received considerable attention in academia over the last two decades. Even though the family business field is becoming increasingly more legitimate, the vast majority of family business research has focused on developed countries, with emerging countries being largely underrepresented. This limitation ultimately restricts our understanding of family firms. Thus, to address this gap, this chapter proposes a conceptual model linking three dimensions: family, business, and context. The model considers the specificities of organizational, institutional, social, temporal, and spatial forces across contexts for studying family and business dimensions in emerging countries. The aim of this conceptual model is to capture the complexity of the connectivity among contextual, family, and business dimensions. Exploring, understanding, and predicting these connectivities is particularly relevant in emerging economies because of the economic and social importance of family firms. Therefore, this chapter contributes to our understanding of the family business phenomenon by presenting a brief literature review on what we know about the topic so far, proposing a conceptual model that presents the relevant dimensions for researching family businesses in emerging economies, and highlighting future lines of research to further expand the family business field.
Family generation, leadership, and performance: The role of outside directors in Indian family firms