Governing family businesses: A research map

The chapter aims at developing a theoretical framework of the family business challenges intended to ordering the topics discussed in the previous chapters, namely managerialization and professionalization, succession, internationalization, and relations with financial markets. These topics are seen as challenges a family business has to deal with by managing specific relations between actors distributed in space and time. From this point of view, governance is considered as a unifying topic since its structures need to be assessed in order to facilitate the management of all the other challenges. The concept of governance here proposed is drawn from the management control studies focused on lateral relationships.