Embedded but Not Asleep: Entrepreneurship and Family Business Research in the 21st Century

This article offers a socio-historical view of how families make a living and contribute to business formation. In particular, we present an excursus of family changes – decline of the corporate family, higher occupational opportunities for women, decline of multigenerational families, growing proportion of never-married adults – and suggest the family embeddedness perspective as the most appropriate to overrule old-fashioned conceptualizations of families in family business studies. We outline the genesis of the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship, and perform a systematic analysis of the literature that has cited the seminal piece by Aldrich and Cliff (2003). We present how this perspective has been used in entrepreneurship and family business research and highlight the untapped opportunities to further work on family business by placing the family as the core concept. Finally, we offer empirical and theoretical directions, rooted in the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship, to move the family business literature forward.