Abstract
Family businesses are characterised by the entanglement of the family and the business; this entanglement creates a unique connection between the heritage of the past, the present identity and future development. Despite the critical role of time, some claim it has suffered a “quiet perseverance” since being planted in the very first issue of the Family Business Review, and it is still commonly overlooked (Sharma, Salvato, & Reay, 2014). Numerous articles in the family business literature assume a long-term perspective across different areas of research, such as succession (e.g., Sharma, Chrisman, & Chua (2003), strategic goals (Miller & Le Breton-Miller, 2006), patient capital (Zellweger, 2007), the role of CEOs and decision-making (Lumpkin, Brigham, & Moss, 2010), inherited culture and identity (Salvato, Chirico, & Sharma, 2010), R&D investment (Chrisman & Patel, 2012), etc. Although these studies address a long-term horizon, many of them include time as a control variable without implying process ontologically. The family business field has a strong focus on variancebased theory (Sharma, 2004; Chrisman, Kellermanns, Chan, & Liano, 2010; Reay & Whetten, 2011), and it has primarily focused on the antecedents and consequences of phenomena analysed through dependent and outcome variables (Chrisman et al., 2010; Sharma, 2004). Unfortunately, according to Bergson (1946, cited in Tsoukas & Chia, 2002, p. 571), this type of analysis is a fictional representation of change where processes are studied through static events, subordinated to speculation about the facts and logic-mechanisms depicted to understand causation. Change is often described by being broken down into stages through developing process models that convert the temporal progression of activities into a series of static positions (e.g., Craig & Moores (2010). However, as stated by Tsoukas and Chia (2002), decomposing a process into steps as static snapshots reduces it to a series of immobilities, which are antithetical to the concept of flux. Dawson and Hjorth (2012) directly address this issue by claiming that family business research has not been very receptive to processual theorising, thereby losing the opportunity to analyse phenomena under a process perspective. Thus, despite the claimed relevance of analysing the temporal pattern of phenomena, process theory has been scantily applied in organisational studies in general (Langley, 2007) and in family business research in particular. Currently, as shown by Bartunek, Rynes, and Ireland (2006), there is an increasing interest in process thinking. In a survey, these authors asked the editorial board of the Academy of Management Journal to assess the most interesting articles in management, and among the 17 most frequently mentioned, 10 were clearly process studies (the data and theorisation developed were temporally embedded). A process perspective calls for the analysis of events and a deep understanding of how actors interact in shaping the family enterprise. The family business field emerges as a unique ground on which to implement process thinking to develop a deeper understanding of the process of change, enabling us to answer the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about flux and the movement of evolving phenomena (Langley, 2007; Van de Ven & Poole, 1995). My purpose is to show the potential of process thinking as a unique vessel for improving the understanding of processes in family businesses. Furthermore, studying family firms through a process perspective may offer a contribution to the knowledge of sister disciplines and of process theory itself. This chapter is structured in the following way: the first section addresses process theory’s key elements, investigating the primary ontological and epistemological assumptions. Section two provides an analysis of how this perspective has been used in previous family business research to show the topics, methods and techniques that have been examined. In the third section, I examine how process theory and the family business field may mutually benefit and suggest directions for future research. Finally, the chapter concludes by providing some implications for process thinking and family business research.