History-Informed Family Business Research: An Editorial on the Promise of History and Memory Work

Families are constituted by shared memories and a common history. Research shows that talk about the past constitutes between 25% and 33% of the dinner conversation around the family table (Beals & Snow, 2002; Blum-Kulka, 1993, 1994; Perlman, 1984). Much of this conversation involves sharing experiences of the recent (i.e., “what did you do today?”) or distant past (i.e., “remember our vacation to Niagara Falls?”). More critical to the family constitution, however, are those conversations in which family members recount events outside the lived experience of any of the individuals at the table. These vicarious memories are the foundational elements of collective memory. Shared vicarious memories define the family as a distinct social entity with coherence and continuity over time and space (Pratt & Fiese, 2004). Family business researchers are only beginning to appreciate the theoretical and empirical value of viewing the family business through the lens of family memory and history. We gain considerable insight into the nature and constitution of family businesses by systematically analyzing what, and how, families remember and forget. The collection of papers that comprise this special issue on History-Informed Family Business Research is premised on this assumption. From these articles, we see a broad range of historical methodologies applied to a diverse array of family businesses. We also see how intractable issues that have troubled family business research over the years achieve a new clarity when viewed through the lens of the past and how it is remembered. The intent of this essay is to elaborate on the value of history-informed family business research and demonstrate how it can address persistently thorny issues in our discipline. We organize the essay into three sections, drawing on the studies in this special issue to illustrate points in each section. In the first section, we demonstrate how adopting a historical perspective can help us address the recurring definitional question, what is a family business? Our answer rests on the recursive relationship between historical memory as a practice and the family as a social entity. Like all social entities, families are a product of, and shaped by, their history. However, as active authors of their history, families have a higher degree of agency over how their history is told. It is the dynamic interaction of family practices of remembering and how remembering shapes the sense of family that defines a family business. Defining family businesses as a process of historical reconstruction rather than as a set of static properties (e.g., Chrisman et al., 2012) offers a different ontological perspective that defines a family business by how its members reconstruct family boundaries in ongoing acts of remembering. We elaborate on this recursive dynamic between the past and the family’s construction of the present and future in the first section. In the second section, we show how history and memory can help us address the recurring question of how family businesses balance the demands of being a business, on one hand, and the demands of being a family, on the other. To answer this question, we focus on the processes by which informal memories become 1157491 FBRXXX10.1177/08944865231157491Family Business ReviewSuddaby et al. research-article2023