Family businesses : navigating the paradoxes of contemporary transformation

For several decades, family businesses have occupied a central place in academic debates in management and entrepreneurship. Their study is based on a fundamental question that has structured the emergence and legitimacy of this field: do family businesses differ from non-family businesses in terms of resources, behaviour, strategy, and performance? If so, how do they differ and why do they differ (Chrisman et al., 2003)? Pioneering work shows that the interweaving of family and business generates distinctive organizational configurations (Goetschin, 1987; Tagiuri & Davis, 1996). The latter are characterized by the preservation of socio-emotional richness (Gómez-Mejia et al., 2007), a long-term temporal orientation (Le Miller et al., 2003), an orientation towards future generations (Zellweger et al., 2012), and hybrid governance logics that reconcile family control and professionalization (Sharma et al., 2012). However, recent research emphasizes that this specificity cannot be reduced to a simplistic dichotomy. Family businesses are a heterogeneous group, as their behaviour and decisions vary according to the degree of family involvement in the business (Berrone et al., 2012). This involvement, whether in control, direction, or management, produces differences in their strategic trajectories, their capacity for innovation, and their performance. These variations also depend on governance structures and institutional contexts (De Massis et al., 2016; Calabrò et al., 2019; Gómez-Mejia et al., 2025). Family businesses must therefore arbitrate among tradition and innovation, family identity and strategic openness, and owner control and external partnerships. These paradoxes prompt renewed analysis of analytical frameworks to better understand how these organizations mobilize their idiosyncratic resources to develop resilience and strategic adaptation capacities (Firfiray et al., 2018; De Massis & Rondi, 2020; Erdogan et al., 2019).

This track invites us to renew theoretical and empirical perspectives on family businesses by exploring the diversity of their practices, trajectories, and modes of organization in the current environment of profound change. We invite researchers to submit empirical contributions, whether they use quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methodologies, as well as conceptual work that addresses the following questions:

-How do family businesses build their strategic orientations at the intersection of transgenerational legacies, emotional dynamics, and competitive pressures?

-What decision-making processes, governance mechanisms, or organizational arrangements are emerging to reconcile the tensions between continuity and transformation, between identity anchoring and openness to change?

-How do these organizations approach innovation in its multiple technological, organizational, social, or business model forms?

-What resources do they mobilize to develop distinctive innovation capacities? -How do they articulate entrepreneurial creativity and the preservation of family heritage, experimentation and prudence, exploration of new markets, and fidelity to their DNA?

-Faced with the challenges of sustainability, digital transformation, and social responsibility, what strategies are they deploying?

-How do their long-term vision, their territorial anchoring, and their attention to multiple stakeholders influence their choices and performance?

-What learnings and practices can they inspire to think differently about growth, governance, and organizational sustainability?

Track chairs:

Imene ZARROUKI (CEROS) izarrouki@parisnanterre.fr, Université Paris NANTERRE

Céline BARREDY (CEROS) c.barredy@parisnanterre.fr, Université Paris NANTERRE