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Family Business in India

Authors

Vedant V. Pandya ORCID icon for Vedant V. Pandya

Department of Business Administration, M. K. Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar (India)

Article Information

DOI: 10.51584/IJRIAS.2026.11080006

Subject Category: Management

Volume/Issue: 11/8 | Page No: 105-124

Publication Timeline

Submitted: 2026-08-14

Accepted: 2026-08-19

Published: 2026-08-27

Abstract

Family business constitutes one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of economic organization in human history, yet its recognition as a distinct field of rigorous scholarly inquiry is a comparatively recent phenomenon that has matured substantially only since the late 1980s. This paper undertakes a synthesis of the body of knowledge on family business, tracing its intellectual origination, its theoretical evolution and its ongoing development as a legitimate and increasingly rigorous sub-field of management and entrepreneurship scholarship. Drawing upon foundational and contemporary literature, the paper examines the definitional and measurement controversies that have historically fragmented the field (Astrachan et al., 2002; Chua et al., 1999; Litz, 1995), explicates the principal theoretical models scholars have deployed to explain family business phenomena, including the three-circle systems model (Tagiuri & Davis, 1996), the resource-based and familiness perspectives (Habbershon & Williams, 1999; Habbershon et al., 2003), agency and stewardship theorizing (Schulze et al., 2003) and the socioemotional wealth approach (Berrone et al., 2012; Gomez-Mejia et al., 2007) and articulates the principal typologies along which family firms are classified. The review protocol reported using a PRISMA-informed identification-screening-eligibility-inclusion structure adapted for narrative synthesis (Page et al., 2021; Tranfield et al., 2003), draws on 45 sources identified across six databases and screened against explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. A comparative cross-national analysis, grounded in scholarly criteria of legal origin, ownership concentration and cultural embeddedness (La Porta et al., 1999; Faccio & Lang, 2002; Claessens et al., 2000), briefly situates family business across selected countries before the paper turns to its central contribution: a focused, empirically updated and analytically distinctive examination of family business in India (Sarkar, 2010; Sarkar & Selarka, 2021; Renuka & Marath, 2023). This India-specific analysis develops an original comparative conceptual framework mapping Indian institutional, cultural, governance and social-capital characteristics onto established family-business theories, supported by comparative tables of ownership structure, governance mechanisms and succession challenges. The paper concludes by identifying persistent unanswered questions and an agenda for future scholarly inquiry.

Keywords

family business, family firm, familiness, socioemotional wealth, three-circle model, corporate governance, social capital, business groups

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