What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution in Family Business?

Note From Associate Editor, Trish Reay: Since moving into the Family Business Review (FBR) associate editor position about 18 months ago, I found that I was consistently referring authors to Dave Whetten’s 1989 Academy of Management Review article “What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?” as a way to help them understand reviewers’ concerns about a “lack of contribution” in their submitted manuscript. When FBR Editor, Pramodita Sharma, suggested that I team up with Dave to write an editorial about how to make a theoretical contribution in family business, it seemed like a great idea. Our joint comments and suggestions appear below. It is difficult for authors when reviewers (and editors) tell them that “your article doesn’t make a contribution to theory” or that it “doesn’t make a strong enough contribution to theory.” This message may not make much sense. What does it take to make a theoretical contribution? And what distinguishes a strong contribution from a weak one? While those seeking a broad treatment of the subject will find the recent Academy of Management Review article by Corley and Gioia (2011) informative, our focus is on family business scholarship. Every FBR issue carries the following message: “Family Business Review (FBR) provides a scholarly forum to publish conceptual, theoretical and empirical research aimed to advance the understanding of family enterprise around the world.” This statement of purpose clearly indicates the goal to “advance understanding;” and to do that, articles published in FBR must make a theoretical contribution to the literature on family business. But what does it mean to make such a contribution, and how can authors write articles that succeed in this respect? In this editorial, although many of our comments and suggestions apply to all areas of organizational studies, we focus on how authors can make a theoretical contribution to family business. We draw on advice and suggestions from previously published articles and book chapters as well as our own experiences to explain ways in which we believe authors can build their knowledge base and skill set regarding the development of a theoretical contribution. We do this with a strong dose of humility since we too have had articles rejected. As editors, we find ourselves trying to explain (and offer suggestions) to authors where theory development in their paper is weak; as authors, we ourselves often need someone else to point out the shortcomings of our papers. We hope that this editorial will help to improve authors’ success in publishing their work in FBR. Before we direct our attention specifically on manuscripts submitted to FBR, we want to make a few comments about theoretical contributions more generally. It is widely held that theory “explains.” Although an accurate description of a phenomenon (what is it?) is an essential precursor to explanation (why is it? or how is it?), these are logically different forms of understanding. Questions of “why is it?” tend to be answered by variance theory, whereas questions of “how is it?” tend to be answered by process theory (see Van de Ven & Poole, 2005, for a thorough explanation of process theory). Although FBR welcomes either type of theory development, our focus here is on variance theory because it is (so far) the most commonly used form of theory in family business scholarship, as shown in reviews of the literature (e.g., Chrisman et al., 2010; Sharma, 2004). In addition, we note that most theory development pertains to middle-range theory, or propositional theory, as compared with general or paradigmatic theory. Thus, we also focus on middle-range theory, which attempts to