Research on interlocking directorates in family business: evidence from scopus bibliometric data

Abstract

We examined the trend of studies on interlocking directorates in family businesses using bibliometric data mined from the Scopus database. Search terms including “family business” and seven other variant terms (including family ownership) plus a wildcard (interlock*) yielded only 17 peer-reviewed papers written in the English Language, published between 1999 and 2020. We used graphical tools to summarise the data. Pearson’s r was employed to analyse the data on three of Scopus’ bibliometric indicators (CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank, and Source Normalized Impact per Paper) using JASP. The only 17 articles on interlocking directorates in family business poorly compare with the 4,792 articles returned when the wildcard was dropped. Thus, the data show that interlocking directorates in family businesses is a grossly neglected niche in the otherwise steadily maturing field of family business research. The distribution of the scanty literature by country of origin, research purpose pursued, theories employed as explanatory frameworks, the most frequently studied interlocking directorate typologies, and their respective implications were pointed out.