Abstract
Due to the importance of family firms for the economy, researchers have begun to embrace family firms as a research object. This article seeks to summarise and to structure family firm research based on an extensive survey of the literature. Important research foundations such as the definition of family firms, a theoretical foundation in the resource based view and in entrepreneurship and research topics such as performance differences of family firms, their goal structure, psychological ownership and business succession are outlined and discussed. © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.