Building bridges between gender and family business literature to advance women’s empowerment

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to underline the importance of addressing gender issues in family firms. It reinvigorates research in this field by revealing its current state, identifying research gaps and suggesting future agendas. Design/methodology/approach A bibliometric approach using a co-word analysis of 376 papers from the Web of Science database and their 885 keywords was performed to reveal the thematic structure of gender and family firm research, research topics, associations among them and their evolution over the last 30 years (1991–2021). Findings This review provides an extensive literature base and suggests research topics that facilitate the adoption of a gendered lens in family firm literature and business practice. Research limitations/implications This review demonstrates how gender issues are intertwined with management, leadership and family firm approaches. Our observations inform scholars, policymakers and practitioners on the need to integrate gender issues into organizational culture and to connect empowerment strategies with the sociocultural environment. Originality/value This study shows the need to address women’s empowerment in business, considering different sociocultural contexts in addition to a Western focus. It also calls for embracing gender and feminist perspectives in research.

Learning to be entrepreneurial: Do family firms gain more from female leadership than nonfamily firms?

“…As such, we contribute to research characterizing entrepreneurship as a gendered process Poggesi et al, 2016) and answer calls in the literature to explore differences in how men and women lead family versus nonfamily SMEs (e.g., Jennings & Brush, 2013;Maseda et al, 2023;Powell & Eddleston, 2013). Our study suggests that while women have an advantage in leading family SMEs, gender biases hamper female leaders' ability to transform learning into greater EO in nonfamily SMEs.…”

“…Rather, the few studies that exist offer conflicting results, with some depicting women leaders as contributing to their firm's innovation and entrepreneurship (e.g., Foss et al, 2022;Lyngsie & Foss, 2017;Nair, 2020) and others depicting women as less entrepreneurial and innovative than their male counterparts (e.g., Greene & Brush, 2018;Gupta et al, 2014;Marvel et al, 2015). However, recent research suggests that family firms may offer an environment that is more conducive to developing and supporting women as leaders (EY, 2017;Maseda et al, 2023;Montemerlo et al, 2013). Family SMEs, defined as SMEs "owned and managed by a nuclear family" (Chua et al, 1999, p. 22), may therefore be more effective in capitalizing on women's leadership than nonfamily firms (Eddleston & Sabil, 2019;Paustian-Underdahl et al, 2014).…”

Exploring Challenges Forefront to Family Business Leaders: A Perspective of Family Business Owners

“…For instance, employment or promotion decisions may be tainted by family linkages and hence there can exist issues of nepotism in the firm. This could affect staff morale and how effective, overall, the organization is (Maseda et al, 2023). Keeping the family together even as tough calls are taken on finances that put long-term survival ahead is a kind of fragile balancing act.…”

New Research Trends in Sustainability in Family Businesses: A Bibliometric Literature Review

“…Co-word analysis aims to identify relationship and s connections between keywords in a research domain (Ding et al, 2001). The doctrine behind this analysis is that keywords represent the content of an article (Maseda et al, 2023).…”

“…; RQ4: What is the conceptual structure of the SFB research area along with the main research themes?. This study follows the structure and methodology of other literature reviews in family business research field (Brito-Ochoa et al, 2020;Maseda et al, 2023) in combination with the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews protocol (SPAR-4-SLR) by Paul et al (2021). While Section 2 describes the details of the methodology, Section 3 presents the results of the analyses.…”