25 Years of Family Business Review

Since its launch in 1988, the Family Business Review (FBR) has played an integral role in the establishment and development of the field of family business studies. This field is distinguished from its sister disciplines by its singular focus on the paradoxes caused by the involvement of family in business. Today, scholars worldwide recognize both the ubiquity of family enterprises and the complexity of issues faced by these enterprises. However, this has not always been the case. While the field has made impressive progress in terms of the 3Rs of research— Relevance, Reach, and Rigor—much exciting work remains to be done. This introduction to the special issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of FBR discusses the progress the field and the journal have made in the past quarter century and some of the challenges that are waiting for resolution in the future. Family firms represent the predominant form of business organization in the world (LaPorta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999). These heterogeneous and complex enterprises offer a challenging array of issues to study and are beginning to receive substantial scholarly attention. For the past 25 years, FBR has been a catalyst in establishing family business studies as a legitimate field of investigation—a mission defined by its founding editor Ivan Lansberg in its first issue (Lansberg & Gersick, 1993). FBR is currently supported by approximately 200 scholars who are serving as its editors, advisory and review board members, and ad hoc reviewers. With an impact factor of 2.426, it ranks among the top 20 journals in the business category of the Social Science Citation Index. More than 200 submissions from around the world compete for approximately 20 article slots in FBR annually. No wonder there is a “collective sense that significant progress has been made” (Litz, Pearson, & Litchfield, 2012) and that scholars are “united in their appreciation of what has been achieved to date” (Craig & Salvato, 2012). While family enterprise research is moving forward and gaining momentum today, such was not always the case. In this introduction to the special issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of FBR, we pay tribute to the visionaries who laid the foundation for the field of family business studies and contributed substantially to the consulting profession devoted to these enterprises. To accomplish this purpose we provide a brief history of FBR and the owner of the journal, the Family Firm Institute (FFI), followed by observations on the field’s domain and notable developments regarding the progression of family business studies in terms of three 3Rs of research: relevance, reach, and rigor (cf. Sharma, 2010a). Our aim is to provide an overview of the major developments in the past two and half decades, while offering some suggestions on how the future aspirations of the journal and its stakeholders might be achieved. This introductory article draws heavily from three sources: (a) our own experiences as consumers and producers of knowledge related to family enterprises, (b) previous editorials and review articles published in FBR and other venues (e.g., Bird, Welsch, Astrachan, & Pistrui,