Despite the proliferation in research efforts, family firm (FF) internationalization scholarship suffers from fragmentation, theoretical limitations, and empirical indeterminacy, leaving important facets unexplored. This article’s purpose is to unpack how this body of research has evolved over time and interfaces international business (IB) theory. We conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering the last 30 years of research and comprising 134 articles. Our study contributes to this corpus of knowledge by identifying and discussing four evolutionary waves of FF internationalization research. We further advance an integrative framework that offers a comprehensive understanding of the state-of-the-art as well as promising avenues for future research at the intersection of IB and FFs.

尽管研究工作激增，但家族企业（FF）的国际化奖学金仍然受到支离破碎，理论上的局限性和经验不确定性的困扰，这使得重要的方面尚待探索。本文的目的是揭示这一研究机构如何随着时间的推移而发展，并与国际商业（IB）理论联系起来。我们对相关的理论和实证研究进行了系统的文献综述，涵盖了过去30年的研究，共有134篇文章。我们的研究通过识别和讨论FF国际化研究的四个进化浪潮，为这一知识库做出了贡献。我们进一步推进了一个集成框架，该框架提供了对最新技术的全面理解，以及在IB和FF交叉点上进行未来研究的有希望的途径。