Family Firms and Sustainability. A Longitudinal Analysis

Two-thirds of the world’s private companies are family owned. It is an organizational model that, despite the arrival of large corporations, remains and is still totally in place. The survival of these organizations is not easy, and is conditioned by multiple factors. The research that addresses the sustainability of family businesses is numerous and has been conducted from multiple disciplines. This document investigates the trends in scientific production related to family businesses and their sustainability, using bibliometric techniques and SciMAT software. A total of 286 articles were analysed between 2003 and 2019 from the journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). The results suggest that, although there is a growing interest in the study of the sustainability of family businesses, there is instability in the centrality of the topics, which denotes the existence of a wide margin of development. The most influential and trend-setting themes emerge mainly concentrated in three lines: those that analyse factors that drive sustainability, such as socio-emotional wealth and stakeholders; those interested in knowing about methods or practices that favour sustainability, such as CSR, performance, management or innovation; and those that investigate factors that endanger survival, mainly intergenerational succession processes. The contribution of this work is that, through bibliometric techniques, it sheds light on the groups of topics that condition the sustainability of family businesses, which will help the scientific community in the orientation of future work in this field of research.