Purpose

In this study, we investigated the dilemma of devising an operational family business definition in the SME context. The existing family business literature mostly agrees with the validity of a theoretical model called F-PEC, which identifies family businesses by evaluating three dimensions: power, experience, and culture. Nonetheless, empirical studies on family SMEs still use just one or a few elements with many different thresholds to operationally define family SMEs, highlighting an unsolved definitional divergence among scholars, which limits the possibility of investigating the potential effects of family attributes on firms’ goals, structures, processes, and performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Employing ancestry searching, online databases, and issue-by-issue searches from two decades (1990–2019), we analyzed 255 empirical studies that specified a family business’s operational definition (despite posing different research questions) and used a sample of small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Findings

Results showed ownership and governance/management are the most used elements in the operational definitions provided in the literature to date, but that there still is not a universally adopted operational definition of family SMEs in use today.

Originality/value

This paper is one of the first to comprehensively analyze and review the operationalized use of family SME definitions in the literature.

中文翻译：

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在运营中定义家庭中小型企业：重要审查

目的

在这项研究中，我们调查了在中小企业环境中制定经营性家族企业定义的两难境地。现有的家族企业文献大都同意称为F-PEC的理论模型的有效性，该模型通过评估权力，经验和文化三个维度来识别家族企业。尽管如此，有关家族中小企业的实证研究仍仅使用一个或几个具有许多不同阈值的要素来对家族中小企业进行操作性定义，突显了学者之间尚未解决的定义分歧，这限制了研究家族属性对企业目标的潜在影响的可能性，结构，流程和性能。

设计/方法/方法

我们使用祖先搜索，在线数据库和二十年来（1990-2019年）的逐个问题搜索，我们分析了255个实证研究，这些实证研究指定了家族企业的运营定义（尽管提出了不同的研究问题），并使用了小型样本中型企业（SME）。

发现

结果表明，所有权和治理/管理是迄今为止文献中提供的操作定义中使用最多的元素，但是，目前仍没有普遍使用的家庭中小企业的操作定义。

创意/价值

本文是第一篇全面分析和审查文献中对家庭中小企业定义的可操作使用的文章之一。