Toward an Understanding of Family Business Sustainability: A Network-Based Systematic Review

Family business governance is an important issue for the sustainable development of economies worldwide due to its economic contribution. This review aims to offer a systematic overview of how prior studies explore the issue of family involvement within the broader corporate governance literature. By adopting a network-based perspective to visualize the research stream, this study provides meaningful insight into the key topics investigated, the patterns in the connections between critical papers, and the key players building the literature. Specifically, this paper makes three major contributions. First, our systematic review based on network analysis of keywords, citations, and authors enhances the understanding of how research on family involvement in the corporate governance literature is interconnected. Second, a large and extensive pool of corporate governance research on family involvement (947 papers) is employed to encompass research on family involvement from various academic disciplines under the umbrella of corporate governance. Third, by providing answers to questions such as “which journals should I read?”, “which keywords should I look for?”, “who are the leading scholars?”, “which journals are scholars publishing in?” and “what are emerging research trends?”, this study offers valuable implications for future research and meaningful guidelines for future studies in the field.