New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations, 46(1): 68-87 68 Family businesses and employment relations: Review and suggestions for future research PAUL WOODFIELD * , ERLING RASMUSSEN ** and YASHIKA CHANDHOK ** Abstract This paper seeks to identify and summarise the big issues at the intersection of family businesses and employment relations business literatures. Family businesses have additional complexities compared with non-family businesses. Thus, the aim of this paper is to throw light on why this intersection is of interest in New Zealand and rationalise the need to research employment relations in the context of family businesses. We first present family businesses as an area for research by outlining the landscape of family businesses in New Zealand, followed by a review of the foundations of family business and employment relations research. We then highlight and discuss three overarching themes: familiness or family dynamics; formalisation/professionalisation; and incorporating employment relations perspectives. Finally, we conclude with future research directions and canvas potential research questions to introduce ways researchers can enhance our understanding of employment relations in family firms. Keywords: Employment relations; family business; family firm; governance; long-term orientation; human resource management, HRM. Family business as a context for research Family business research has been an area of interest for decades; however, it is still a young discipline which is now distinguished and explored separately from its contemporary disciplines (Neubaum, 2018a). Family business research was originally considered a subset of the entrepreneurship research, but over the past few years, this research area has developed organically with overlapping literature from the field of behavioural sciences, particularly as part of organisational behaviour (Neubaum, 2018a; Payne, 2018; Teixeira et al., 2020). With family business research becoming a distinct area to study, researchers have been working toward developing a definition of a ‘family business’ which encapsulates all its attributes (Tagiuri & Davis, 1996). While there is no agreed definition which encompasses the totality of family businesses, the following definition by Chua et al. (1999) creates the base of this review in that family businesses are defined as: * Senior Lecturer, AUT Business School, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand ** Professor and PhD student, AUT Business School, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand Contact: paul.woodfield@aut.ac.nz