The Special Topic of Interest Series aims to promote research that pays greater attention to context in family business studies. In this editorial, we focus on family business in the Arab world to exemplify the benefits of better contextualizing family business research to further our understanding of heterogeneities among family businesses from diverse regions. To produce more useful knowledge, we propose that family business research has to shift from classical contextualizing to context theorizing by encouraging the use of a context-sensitive approach. To achieve this goal, the present article introduces the embeddedness framework of family business contexts to be used as a context-sensitive instrument to recognize how context shapes family firm behavior and performance. By using a context-sensitive approach, we present three articles that focus on family firms in the specific context of the Arab world. We conclude this editorial by proposing a research agenda for context-sensitive approaches to family business research and specifically discuss the facets of context in Arab family businesses.

特殊兴趣系列丛书旨在促进对家族企业研究更加重视背景的研究。在这篇社论中，我们将重点放在阿拉伯世界的家族企业上，以举例说明更好地背景化家族企业研究的好处，以进一步了解来自不同地区的家族企业之间的异质性。为了产生更多有用的知识，我们建议家族企业研究必须通过鼓励使用上下文相关方法来从经典上下文化转向上下文理论化。为了实现此目标，本文介绍了家族企业环境的嵌入框架，该框架将用作上下文相关工具来识别上下文如何影响家族企业的行为和绩效。通过使用上下文相关的方法，我们介绍了三篇文章，它们针对阿拉伯世界的特定背景下的家族企业。在本篇社论的结尾，我们提出了针对上下文相关的家族企业研究方法的研究议程，并专门讨论了阿拉伯家族企业中上下文的各个方面。