Leading Across Generations: How Succession Can Drive Family Business Growth

encing their continuity, governance and long-term success. This chapter provides a foundational overview of succession in family businesses, exploring its core definitions, conceptual underpinnings and unique char acteristics. To this end, we identified, synthesized and systematized the most influential recent research on the topic. We selected articles that were published between 2015 and 2023 in leading management journals, focusing on those appearing in the 25 scientific journals ranked 4 and 4* in Academic Journal Guide (2021) of the Charted Association of Business 1 In addition, due to their relevance in the field of Family Business Management, we also included Family Business Review and Journal of Family Business Strategy. As a result, a total of 27 scientific journals were included in our sampling process. We then used Web of Science to select articles published in these jour nals that examined succession-related issues in a family business context. As such, we looked for research articles that contained the following key words within the abstract: family business, family firm, family enterprise, family owned, Family ownership, family management, family manager, family leader, family controlled. We obtained a raw sample of 557 articles. From this initial set, we selected only the articles that in the Web of Science keyword field contained the terms “succession” and “generation”. We thus obtained 75 articles, which we used as the knowledge base for the investigation of family business succession. reviews, 1 editorial, 1 commentary and 60 empirical studies. Among these, 30 articles adopted a quantitative methodology, 5 applied mixed-methods and 25 were qualitative investigations. The majority of these articles (53; 71%) were published in just two journals: the Journal of Family Business Strategy (30; 43%) and Family Business Review (21; 28%). The remaining 29% was published in eight highly ranked scientific outlets (see Fig. 1.1).