While entrepreneurial families often expand their activity over multiple businesses and patrimonial assets, this complexity is rarely addressed in mainstream family business research, where the predominant focus is on the family business or, at best, on the family controlling the operational business. We advance a more holistic understanding of entrepreneurial families that contemplates the variety of assets they create or acquire over time that jointly generate financial and socioemotional wealth for the family, and call for attention to the variety of organizations that entrepreneurial families establish to preserve, manage, and/or administer such assets. We theorize that each of these organizations can be devised as a family boundary organization (FBO), which operates at the interface of the entrepreneurial family and other systems, and such FBOs form a family-related organizational ecosystem. We propose a new framework that extends the scope of research beyond the family business and focuses more directly on entrepreneurial families and on the boundaries between the entrepreneurial family, its multiple assets, and the FBOs in the family-related organizational ecosystem. This framework paves the ground to extend the three-circle model, broadening the scope of family business research to consider a wider range of organizations besides the family firm, such as family foundations, family business foundations, family offices, family holdings, family academies, and family museums. Drawing on the organizational boundaries literature, we integrate organizational boundaries in the theory of the family firm and propose a research agenda to examine the entrepreneurial family and its assets in a broader way.

虽然创业家族经常将其活动扩展到多个企业和世袭资产，但主流家族企业研究很少涉及这种复杂性，其中主要关注家族企业，或者充其量是控制运营业务的家族。我们推进对创业家族更全面的理解，考虑他们随着时间的推移创造或获得的各种资产，这些资产共同为家族创造财务和社会情感财富，并呼吁关注创业家族建立的各种组织，以保护、管理、和/或管理此类资产。我们的理论是，这些组织中的每一个都可以设计为家庭边界组织（FBO），它运行在创业家族与其他系统的接口上，这样的FBO形成了一个与家族相关的组织生态系统。我们提出了一个新框架，将研究范围扩展到家族企业之外，更直接地关注创业家族以及创业家族、其多重资产与家族相关组织生态系统中的 FBO 之间的界限. 该框架为扩展三环模型奠定了基础，扩大了家族企业研究的范围，以考虑家族企业以外的更广泛的组织，如家族基金会、家族企业基金会、家族办公室、家族控股、家族学院、和家庭博物馆。借鉴组织边界文献，我们将组织边界整合到家族企业理论中，并提出了一个研究议程，以更广泛的方式研究企业家家族及其资产。