The Adulthood of Family Business Research Through Inbound and Outbound Theorizing
回顾家族企业研究从初创到成熟的发展阶段，提出该领域已进入成年期，通过内向和外向理论化，不仅应用主流理论解释家族企业异质性，还利用家族企业情境反哺主流理论，推动理论发展。
The Adulthood of Family Business Research Through Inbound and Outbound TheorizingSince the early 1980s, the rapid growth of family business research has led to the establishment of the academic field of family business.Concurrently, the nature of the research conducted in the field has evolved through a number of developmental stages.Early studies, when the field was young and in its primary stage, tended to highlight the differences in the actions, behaviors, and performance of family and non-family businesses.This effort was justified and necessary, in part, in order to establish family businesses as unique organizational entities worthy of scholarly investigations (e.g., Sharma, 2004).As the field matured, gained legitimacy, and moved towards its adolescence stage, research on family business shifted to applying mainstream theories born in other disciplines (which we refer to as inbound theorizing) to show how and why family businesses are not only distinct from non-family businesses, but how family businesses are distinct from each other (e.g., Chua, Chrisman, Steier, & Rau, 2012).In this stage of development, researchers cast aside the monolithic view of family businesses and developed theories and insights that focused on their heterogeneity (e.g., Brune, Thomsen & Watrin, 2019).This Review Issue provides evidence that the family business field has evolved further and reached the next stage -its adulthood.The four articles in this Review Issue not only highlight distinct processes among family businesses, as well as between family and non-family businesses, but actually go one step further: They review and inquire how the context of family business creates opportunities to give back to mainstream theories and thereby contribute significantly to revise, adapt, and develop existing theories and redefine their boundary conditions from other fields of study (which we refer to as outbound theorizing).Each of the four articles in this Review Issue does so in a unique way, highlighting the immense opportunities of (1) doing research in the context of family business and (2) contributing to significant theory development.In this editorial,