Family entrepreneurship as a field of research: Exploring its contours and contents

This research note presents some food for thought about linking and relating the family, family business and entrepreneurship fields. Although each field has developed an important body of knowledge and some work has been done at the intersections, we show that many important questions remain unanswered. We first offer a brief review of the main research streams and perspectives in the topic areas, shedding light on the significant contributions and highlighting some outstanding research questions. We then examine the intersection of all three fields and offer recommendations on how these might be researched. We propose theories, perspectives, methods, epistemological stances as well as interesting questions for further investigation.