Family business research has long recognised that the family and the firm shape each other's sense of who they are. A smaller body of work asks the question through the social identity approach: when people come to think of themselves in terms of a group (the family, the firm, the next generation, the nonfamily staff), how does that shape what they do together? This library gathers that work in one place and rewrites each paper the way a family or adviser would want to read it.

It began with a Scopus search in October 2026 that paired family business terms (family firms, business families, familiness, socioemotional wealth and related terms) with social identity terms (social identity, self-categorisation, identity leadership, prototypicality, organisational and family identification, intergroup relations). That search returned 388 records. Each was screened on its title, abstract and keywords, and kept only if family business was the focus or a substantial part of the setting and the paper genuinely drew on the social identity tradition. Work on identity in other senses (role identity, identity work, family firm branding) was set aside, however interesting. 65 papers met that standard.

At this stage every summary rests on the paper's published abstract, and no finding, number or country appears that is not stated there. Where an abstract was thin, the entry says so rather than filling the gap. Screening and first drafts were assisted by AI and then checked against the source abstracts by the FULFIL team. Entries will be checked against the full texts over time.

Where a study measured things at a single point in time, the wording says a finding is linked to an outcome rather than causing it. The field is still young: most of the evidence comes from surveys and conceptual work, and very little of it yet tests identity leadership directly in family firms. Every entry carries a link to the original so you can read it for yourself.