Familiness in Future Research

In this monograph, we have argued that familiness and its manifestations such as reciprocal altruism distinguish family firms from their non-family counterparts. A perusal of the literature suggests that the role of familiness is recognised in analyses of family firms, albeit much more in the management literature than in the economics and finance literature. However, the literature requires extension in three different directions — with familiness lying at the heart of these extensions — to facilitate a better understanding of family firms. Specifically, there is a need to better understand the nature of implicit and explicit contracts that characterise a family firm and have reliable proxies for these contracts, especially those within the controlling family. Recall that a firm is characterised by a set of contracts among the stakeholders (Jensen and Meckling, 1976).