This article offers a socio-historical view of how families make a living and contribute to business formation. We review the history of family changes that occurred over the last several hundred years in developed nations – decline of the corporate family, increasing occupational opportunities for women, decline of multigenerational families, growing proportion of never-married and childless adults – and suggest the family embeddedness perspective as an approach for superseding outdated conceptualizations of “families” in family business studies. We outline the genesis of the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship and perform a systematic analysis of the literature that has cited the seminal piece by Aldrich and Cliff (2003). We show how this perspective has been used in entrepreneurship and family business research, highlighting a variety of opportunities made possible by placing “families” at the core of future research. Finally, we offer empirical and theoretical directions, rooted in the family embeddedness perspective, for moving the family business literature forward.

本文提供了有关家庭如何维持生计并促进企业成立的社会历史观点。我们回顾了过去几百年来在发达国家发生的家庭变迁的历史-公司家庭的减少，妇女职业机会的增加，多代家庭的减少，未婚和无子女成年人的比例增加-并建议家庭嵌入性视角是取代家族企业研究中过时的“家庭”概念化的一种方法。我们概述了关于企业家精神的家庭包容性观点的起源，并对引用了Aldrich和Cliff（2003）的开创性著作的文献进行了系统的分析。我们将展示这种观点如何用于企业家精神和家族企业研究中，强调通过将“家庭”置于未来研究的核心而带来的各种机会。最后，我们提供了基于家族嵌入性观点的经验和理论指导，以推动家族企业文学向前发展。