Reasoning about Microfoundations of Entrepreneurship in Family Business: A Causal-mechanistic Perspective

The entrepreneurial behaviour of family business has recently attracted a lot of attention on the part of family business and entrepreneurship scholars, the reason being that it is widely acknowledged as essential for the continuous flourishing of family firms in a competitive environment. This area of study, however, is characterized by high epistemic uncertainty and fragmentation both at the empirical and the conceptual level. Recently, several scholars suggested that progress in the field can be made through the adoption of a micro-foundational lens to the study of family business and entrepreneurial phenomena. In this paper, we respond to this call and we argue that the search for micro-foundations can help scientific progress insofar as it aims at the formulation of causal-mechanistic explanations. Causal-mechanistic explanations are a fruitful supplement to current explanatory accounts because they improve them in non-trivial ways. That is, they increase their internal validity, explanatory completeness, and accuracy. Ultimately, the identification of causal mechanisms can tame, and even reduce, fragmentation in this research field.