Advancing family business science through context theorizing: The case of the Arab world

Abstract The Special Topic of Interest Series aims to promote research that pays greater attention to context in family business studies. In this editorial, we focus on family business in the Arab world to exemplify the benefits of better contextualizing family business research to further our understanding of heterogeneities among family businesses from diverse regions. To produce more useful knowledge, we propose that family business research has to shift from classical contextualizing to context theorizing by encouraging the use of a context-sensitive approach. To achieve this goal, the present article introduces the embeddedness framework of family business contexts to be used as a context-sensitive instrument to recognize how context shapes family firm behavior and performance. By using a context-sensitive approach, we present three articles that focus on family firms in the specific context of the Arab world. We conclude this editorial by proposing a research agenda for context-sensitive approaches to family business research and specifically discuss the facets of context in Arab family businesses.