This article critiques several taken-for-granted assumptions in family business research. We recommend the use of sociological theories to problematize the phenomenon of family business and to push beyond dichotomies in the field. To begin, we complicate the very definition of family—implicitly defined in most family business research as a heterosexual, conjugal family—by discussing socio-legal, socio-biological, and role-based ways of defining “families.” Next, we suggest critical ways to research value and worth beyond the financial wealth-socioemotional wealth (SEW) trade-off, by considering major themes in the sociology of value and evaluation (SVE), including: the intergenerational transmission of various forms of capital, conflict over equivalent systems of accounts, and the blending of the intimate and the economic. The groundwork presented here through a focus on the family, provides important theoretically complex questions to help launch transformative research to move the field of family business forward.

本文对家族企业研究中的一些公认假设进行了批判。我们建议使用社会学理论来质疑家族企业现象，并超越该领域的二分法。首先，通过讨论定义“家庭”的社会法律，社会生物学和基于角色的方法，我们使家庭的定义（在大多数家族企业研究中隐式定义为异性恋，夫妻家庭）复杂化。接下来，我们通过考虑价值和评估（SVE）社会学的主要主题，提出了研究价值和价值的重要方法，以超越金融财富-社会情感财富（SEW）的取舍，包括：多种形式的资本的代际传递，同等会计系统之间的冲突，以及亲密和经济的融合。