Digital Adoption in The Family Business: A State-of-the-art Review

Abstract

The high-volume rise of digital technology is restructuring every side of the business and profoundly impacting how the business works. The concept of management and leadership are vividly changing. However, no business can avert the implications, challenges, and opportunities that originated from the digital revolution. It pushes companies to transform their setup. Against this background, many businesses are not ready to transform. The family business is not an exception. It is expected to adopt digitalization as a keenly prevalent business practice worldwide. Furthermore, its involvement in the digital economy is still essential. However, studies on digital adoption in the family business remain limited. At the same time, family businesses have unique characteristics that make them different from other forms of business in general. It is perceived that the two issues are opposing. The family business is commonly viewed with slow evolutions. On the other hand, digitalization is characterized as a rapid action. This research is a theoretical review that aims to fill the gap by exploring the state-of-the-art digital adoption literature. In addition, it develops areas for future research primarily related to family business topics. This article carried out a systematic literature review. It employed a Prisma approach on a Scopus database with all the articles written in English. The results showed that most digital adoption literature mainly focuses on two contexts: (1) general business and (2) academic institutions. Moreover, it provides geographical trends in this domain, the most cited authors, and the top journal on this topic. This study further found that very few discuss digital adoption even in the literature on the family business. Thus, many family business areas can be explored. To this end, this study provides propositions associating digital adoption with the family business areas. At the same time, it further provides several future research agendas.