2012 Theories of Family Enterprise Conference

May 23th-25th, 2012
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Overview

The Theories of Family Enterprise conference, now in its 10th year, brings together leading scholars from mainstream disciplines such as strategic management, organization theory, finance, and entepreneurship with leading scholars in family business to explore theories, research, and interdisciplinary perspectives on family business.

Background

The conference serves to address the scant attention paid to family firms in the mainstream academic literature.  This neglect is puzzling for two reasons. First, family businesses represent a dominant form of economic organization worldwide, thus scholarship that neglects to consider the vast majority of business enterprises cannot hope to be generalizable to any but a small segment of the population of organizations.  Second, the neglect is unnecessary because many of the theories that have been developed have applications to family firms. The failure of scholarship to recognize, embrace and deliberately incorporate family businesses may lead to factors being missed that would make existing theories more robust and valuable to family and non-family firms alike.

Topics

Each year, conference topics are determined by importance as well as by the interests of the invited presenters.  Papers presented at the conference cover a wide range of perspectives, including agency theory, institutional theory, organizational ecology, the resource-based view of the firm, stakeholder theory, transaction cost theory, procedural and distributive justice theories, and network theory, which all potentially inform our understanding of family enterprise. Likewise, family business is also viewed from the conceptual lens of fields such as strategic management, entrepreneurship, organization behaviour, economics, and sociology.  For each paper, a leading academic from family business or a related discipline is asked to prepare commentaries to further illuminate and explore the contributions of these theoretical approaches to the study of family business.

Sponsors