De Gruyter Handbook of Business Families

The name “family business” suggests an obvious but defining feature of such organizations: what happens in the family affects the business - and vice versa. Despite this linkage, the research on family business is surprisingly deficient of a theoretical framework with which scholars can use to study and understand how relationships and networks in the family and the business impact each other. Drawing from social network theory, the authors suggest that the framework on multiplexity can enable scholars of family businesses to effectively examine relationship dynamics and network structure in both the business and the family. The authors illustrate how deploying the multiplexity framework enables scholars (a) to strengthen their contribution to research on family business as it helps to explain behaviour, relational dynamics, and performance in family businesses; and (b) to make the research on family business more broadly relevant for the fields of social networks and organization theory.