Abstract

Family businesses, in various forms, have existed since societies began to be created. However, family business research has a decidedly shorter tradition. In favorable conditions, family enterprises develop for many generations, and their fate is intertwined with the fate of the families. The topics of family businesses are raised by researchers around the world. Estimates regarding the number of family businesses are a frequent subject of scientific disputes. Differences in the results of scientific research result, among others, from a different understanding of the concept of family accessibility. This requires uniformity in decisions regarding the definitions of this term. Most family businesses are micro and small service companies, but there are also many large family enterprises in the world (e.g. Anderson R., Reeb D 2003: in the US, families control 1/3 of the richest companies comprising the S&P 500 index). The averaged international stock exchange estimates show that about 44% of the listed companies are in the hands of families. In the USA and Canada, the share of family businesses in the population is estimated at 80–90%, while in Europe — at around 75%. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the directions of research in the field of family businesses with particular attention to the process of succession. This goal will be achieved through a review of articles dedicated to family businesses as well as through the usage of bibliometric analysis tools. The work starts with a general review of the literature concerning the issues of family businesses, in order to indicate the main trends of research. Next, the results of reports dealing with the problem of statistics of family enterprises are presented, focusing on the succession issue. Bibliometric research has been used for the synthetic analysis of publications addressing the succession and made it possible to search for the regularity in the structure of scientific achievements in this field. The author used two bibliometric methods. On the basis of standard indicators generated by the tools offered by Scopus, a descriptive analysis of the publication structure was made. Next, in order to identify the main research topics, the analysis of the co-occurrence of words was carried out using the Vosviewer tool.

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