Editorial: Family enterprise: Significant and different

This special issue of Small Enterprise Research (SER) is dedicated to family business, a topic which, although sometimes mentioned in passing in the journal, has not previously been the subject of a special issue. A comparative lack of attention to the special nature of family firms is typical of business scholarship generally where the non-family (or widely-held) corporate form dominates both the business research literature and business education. Family business has also been slow to attract public policy attention, perhaps because family businesses are stereotyped as small, despite the international prominence of huge family-based enterprises such as Newscorp.