This study explores which fields might potentially collaborate in family business research. It compares 14 research fields for their structure of topical attention. The most convenient collaborations, such as those between entrepreneurship, family business, and strategy researchers, prove to be the most appropriate for some research purposes. However, less common collaborations, particularly with scholars from law, history, and anthropology, appear to be the most appropriate for other projects. Family and marital therapy prove to be a less promising collaborator than one might expect because of their strong skewing to familial rather than commercial topics. Correspondingly, entrepreneurship also proves to be an outlier field, skewed to the commercial rather than the familial, with surprisingly little in common with the topical interests of family business researchers.

It is assumed that over the generations family businesses inevitably face greater family complexity. The increasing family complexity can have repercussions for the family and the business. To counteract these negative effects of an increase in family complexity, it has been recommended that business families utilize conventional family and corporate governance methods. Pruning the family tree is an alternative method of handling family complexity. However, this alternative way has been largely ignored in research. This article explores the research question: Why and how do business families prune the family tree, thus simplifying the ownership, governance, and/or management structures of the family business? The research findings indicate that introducing simplicity by pruning can be a worthwhile path to family harmony and business performance and that there is no contradiction between pruning the family tree and governance of the family and the business.

Research on family businesses has undergone rapid development in the past two decades. Broadly speaking, such companies perform better than nonfamily businesses, as recent investigations in Japan support. To obtain a more precise result, this research has applied to the Japanese context a research methodology that has proven its worth in Western cases. On the basis of data covering the years 1998 and 2003, we found better performance among family businesses in Japan.

Research on the performance of family firms is growing, but results are mixed, especially for nonlisted companies. Thus, on the basis of the co-presence of benefits and disadvantages of family involvement in ownership and management, we explored the presence of nonlinear effects of these two variables on performance. We run regression analyses on data drawn from 620 privately held family firms in Italy: A negative quadratic relationship between family involvement in management and performance was found, but we did not find any association between family involvement in ownership and performance. Our results suggest that in privately held firms the positive effects that previous literature associates with the presence of family managers do not appear strong enough to compensate for the disadvantages deriving from a nonmonetary goal orientation, nor do they compensate for the costs deriving from the need to solve conflicts between family managers and the impossibility of enlarging the company's social and intellectual capital through the employment of nonfamily managers. Moreover, the quadratic nature of the relationship calls for greater attention to be paid to these effects by family business owners, especially in those cases where family involvement in management is high.

This article examines how owners of firms subjectively value their ownership stake in monetary terms. We utilize endowment and possession attachment literature to investigate how emotional benefits and costs related to organizational ownership affect emotional value. We define emotional value as that part of willingness to accept unexplained by the financial value of the ownership stake and the private financial benefits of control accruing to the owner. Our research provides new insight into firm owners’ psychology and value considerations where an owner values nonfinancial aspects of the ownership stake.