Governing by Managing Identity Boundaries: The Case of Family Businesses
运用边界理论分析家族企业中家族与商业身份的整合程度，提出“差异渗透性”概念，并探讨高整合、高分割及差异渗透状态的成本与收益，为家族企业治理提供新视角。
In this paper we illustrate how boundary theory can be a useful perspective to understand the dynamics of family businesses. We integrate insights from the family business literature with the work–family and identity boundary literatures to describe degrees of integration between the family and business identities in family firms and outline contingencies that influence this integration. We also develop the notion of “differential permeability” as a state of being both integrated and segmented on various aspects of identity and articulate costs and benefits to this state, as well as to high integration and high segmentation. Finally, we invoke the research on “boundary work” as a means of managing family business boundaries and conclude by outlining additional avenues of research that stem from using such a boundary theory lens.