Legacy in Family Business: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

This article maps and integrates research on legacy in family business using a sample of 140 articles. After describing the process of arriving at a corpus of legacy articles, we propose a systematic literature review that summarizes current literature based on five overarching questions: (a) What is legacy? (b) Who sends and receives legacy? (c) Why is legacy sent and accepted/rejected? (d) How is legacy sent and received? and (e) In which contexts? Based on this review, we identify gaps in the literature and suggest theoretical perspectives and research questions to guide future research on legacy in family business.