Inspecting the Achilles heel: a quantitative analysis of 50 years of family business definitions

Despite numerous attempts by academics from many disciplines and various regional contexts, there is still no agreement on a definition of family business. Subjecting 258 definitions found in work published over the past 50 years (1964–2013) to the bibliometric techniques of consensus and co-word analysis to uncover intellectual structure, we identify the key terms used to underpin the concept of family business and to track the progress made...