Purpose This perspective article argues that cybernetic epistemology can help family business and business family research address problems that are difficult to capture through entity-based categories, linear causal explanation and insufficiently reflexive accounts of observation. It shows that cybernetics is particularly suited to phenomena in which family and business recursively constitute, irritate and transform one another through communication, feedback, conflict, paradox and observation. Design/methodology/approach The article reviews family business and business family research for explicit and tacit uses of cybernetic concepts and reconstructs these uses as indications of an underdeveloped cybernetic sensibility in the field. Building on second-order cybernetics, it then outlines abductive cybernetic theorising as a way of developing viable explanatory models of recursive family-business dynamics. Findings The article shows that cybernetic concepts such as circularity, feedback, double bind, schismogenesis, coevolution, paradox and communication patterns already inform parts of family business research, often without being explicitly recognised as cybernetic. Making this epistemological background explicit allows researchers to move from static distinctions between family and business to relational models of recursive coupling, conflict escalation, succession, governance and identity formation. Originality/value The article contributes by reframing cybernetics not as an additional conceptual vocabulary, but as a distinct mode of theorising family business phenomena. It specifies how cybernetic epistemology can generate new research questions, distinctions and explanatory models, and how it can support more reflexive research and practice in a field marked by circular causality, paradox and observer-dependent realities.
Wilkening et al. (Mon,) studied this question.