Family Business Review 25(1) 16–32 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0894486511418489 http://fbr.sagepub.com Articles 1 University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 2 Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, USA Corresponding Author: Allison W. Pearson, Mississippi State University, P.O. Box 9581, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA Email: apearson@cobilan.msstate.edu Charting the Future of Family Business Research: Perspectives From the Field Reginald A. Litz 1 , Allison W. Pearson 2 , and Shanan Litchfield 2 Abstract The authors provide insights concerning the current state of family business research through a survey that included input from more than 80 family business scholars. Findings suggest two general conclusions: first, a collective sense that significant progress has been made; second, a widespread conviction there is still much work to be done. The authors conclude with several recommendations for the field’s continued evolution, which include greater use of family sciences research, the development of innovative measures, the adoption of rich longitudinal methodologies, and inclusion of more diverse subjects and samples. Keywords survey, research, past achievements, future directions The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new land- scapes but in having new eyes. —Marcel Proust, “The Captive,” Remembrance of Things Past It has often been said that there are at least two ways of looking at things; according to Mintzberg (1995), there are at least seven. Writing on the nature of strategic thinking, he proposes that effective strategists are able to enact multiple ways of “seeing,” which include see- ing ahead and behind, seeing above and below, seeing beside and beyond, and finally, what he calls “seeing it through.” Whereas seeing behind means understanding the pattern of past achievements, seeing ahead is ori- ented to a linear extrapolation of the past. In a similar way, although seeing above is about a macro view from 30,000 foot, seeing below is about appreciating the micro significance of the smallest details. In contrast, his third pair of perspectives, seeing beside and beyond, involves expanding the scope of one’s perspective to perceive factors that might in one way or another be excluded by conventional perceptual boundaries. Finally, in consideration of the importance of all this “seeing” resulting in tangible outputs, he included one final kind of perspective—what he called seeing it through. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Family Business Review (FBR), we seek to take a strategic look at family business research using Mintzberg’s (1995) framework. Rather than simply extrapolate as to what might be ahead by looking at what has gone before, or behind (to use Mintzberg’s terminology), we seek to offer a variety of perspectives, which together provide a richer under- standing of where the domain of family business research might potentially be heading. Our investigation comes at an interesting time; after being overlooked by most academics for most of the 20th century (Litz, 1997; Miller & Le Breton-Miller, 2007),