5. Discussion
The landscape of family businesses is wide and varied. It ranges from single owner startups to complex multinationals; from privately held firms to public corporations; and from mundane to quite exotic business contexts. Several examples show the variety of contexts in family business. The McMahon family of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) controls a $1.3 billion annual revenue diversified conglomerate that focuses on wrestling as entertainment. The Robertson family’s Duck Commander business originally provided supplies for duck hunters, but now has developed into a $500 million reality TV juggernaut in the United States. In a more traditional business, Rupert Murdoch has elevated his sons James and Lachlan to top co-CEO levels in his media empire, the second largest in the world. There is much that can be learned from the vitality and variety in the family business context. The family business context also offers many benefits for business researchers, and many of these benefits are not available for those focusing on nonfamily firms. For example, we have discussed the importance of temporal depth when considering strategic level decisions. Family firms offer a particularly fruitful context for examining temporal depth in strategic decisionmaking. In fact, the family firm context can examine potential conflicts in short-term versus long-term decision-making at multiple levels, including the intra-generational level, the intergenerational level, and the transgenerational level (De Clercq & Belausteguigoitia, 2015; Jaskiewicz, Heinrichs, Rau, & Reay, in press; Kellermanns & Eddleston, 2004). Essentially, the expanded temporal depth that often can be found in family firms provides an extremely useful context in which to examine the temporal depth construct, with potential implications for decision-makers at all firms.
