Setting new directions for the management discipline through family business research

•The family business context can bring new insights to problems in strategic management.•Much empirical strategy research has had family firms as the majority of the sample.•Family-firm-only samples likely can provide special insights into difficult issues.•These issues include: short-termism, multidimensional performance, and context contingencies in governing firms.•Now is the time for family business researchers to “light the way” for other macro researchers.

Family business researchers are well-positioned to build important new knowledge in, and even set new directions for, general management research. We show in this commentary how the family business context is especially rich in opportunities for contributing new knowledge concerning otherwise-intractable strategic issues. Such issues include: the need for temporal depth in strategic decision-making; the complexity of multiple sub-goals for strategic decision-makers; and the often-unseen variety and contingent effectiveness of corporate governance structures and processes. Carefully examining these issues in the family business context will likely give all organizational researchers new insights. This new knowledge from family business research may clarify the ongoing problem of managerial short-termism, may prod other researchers to move beyond single measures of firm performance, and may help move the corporate governance literature beyond the idea that one-size-fits-all “best practices” are desirable or even possible. Given the opportunities, now is the time for family business researchers to light the way forward.