Introduction
Although family business and regional studies remained unconnected until a few years ago, key thinkers in both fields reminded us early on about the value added by considering space in family firms and the embeddedness of families and their firms in territories. Indeed, just in the second issue of Family Business Review in 1988, referring to family firms and community culture, Joseph Astrachan emphasised that space can act as an integrative factor in the family firmās success: āFamily businesses acquired in a manner that is at odds with the local culture will suffer, while firms that are acquired and managed in harmony with the local culture will have a higher level of morale and long-run productivityā (Astrachan, 1988, 165). Walther Isard (considered the father of regional science) formulated thoughts on future directions for the discipline by saying that a general theory of human society (as a response to Masahisa Fujita) should consider
family, social group, and political decision-making and policy formulation. The optimization type of decision-making involving the family as a basic social organization and the behavior of political groups (parties)[,] which I explored in my General Theory: Social, Political, Economic and Regional (1969) from an economistās standpoint would need to be extended greatly to be made much more realistic.
Family firms are the most common form of organisation around the world, existing in different sizes, sectors, and locations (Basco & BartkeviÄiÅ«tÄ, 2016). Regardless of whether they were investigating gigantic multinational conglomerates in North America, the Middle East, and far-East Asia; small and medium Mittelstand family firms in Germany; or the vast number of family-based micro-businesses in Africa, researchers have observed that family firms (as legal, social, and economic entities) are characterised by family involvement in ownership, governance, and management, which in turn affects firm behaviour and performance (Basco, 2013). In the last few decades, research in family business studies has extended beyond the aforementioned classical internal variables and has begun considering external and/or surrounding variables (Discua Cruz & Basco, 2018; Gomez-Mejia, Basco, MĆ¼ller, & Gonzalez, 2020; James et al., 2020; Krueger, Bogers, Labaki, & Basco, 2020). For instance, context plays an important role when understanding the idiosyncrasies of family firms, including their economic positions (Steier, Chua, & Chrisman, 2009), the cultural imprints of society (Astrachan, 1988), their embeddedness in wider social networks (Le Breton-Miller & Miller, 2009), and their integration into institutional and political frameworks (Berrone, Cruz, Gomez-Mejia, & Larraza-Kintana, 2010). Although every economic entity is somehow situated or embedded in different contexts (Granovetter, 1985) and those different contexts (e.g., organisational, cultural, social, institutional) have been analysed by family business scholars in a variety of ways, the spatiality aspect of context has received little academic attention in this realm (with some exceptions, such as Seaman, 2012, 2013, 2015; Basco, 2015; Stough et al., 2015; Basco, Stough, & Suwala, 2020; Basco & Suwala, 2020).
On the other hand, in regional studies (including regional science, urban and regional economics, economic geography, urban and regional planning and management, etc.), research on firms has experienced a renaissance in the last 25 years (e.g., Dicken & Malmberg, 2001; Taylor & Asheim, 2001; Taylor & Oinas, 2006). The origins of this interest can be traced back to Robert B. McNeeās (1958) seminal contribution āFunctional Geography of the Firmā. The following years were characterised by studies on the increasingly global geography of large inter- and multinational conglomerates (e.g., in the petroleum industry) (Krumme, 1969; Taylor, 1975; Dicken, 1976). The crisis of the Fordist formation in the 1970s and 1980s brought research on firms and regional decline to the fore (Hayter & Watts, 1983; Laulajainen & Stafford, 1984; Malecki, 1985), while paving the way for the resurgence and re-examination of small and medium enterprises in (mature) industrial districts of the Third Italy (Becattini, 1978). Later, firms were seen as a forge of innovation situated in new industrial spaces and technology parks with an accompanied interest in regional entrepreneurship and a new wave of high-tech activities. In this vein, scholars from regional studies also focused on specific types of firms (e.g., new-born, small, medium, large, and foreign firms) when dismantling the role they play in regional and economic development (Scott, 1986; Giaoutzi, Nijkamp, & Storey, 1988; Sternberg, 1989; Fritsch, 1992). Then, the network paradigm took over, which dealt with the increased complexities of horizontal and vertical (dis)integration and the ri...
