The importance of family organizations in Brazil is undeniable in various spheres: economic, political, social, cultural etc. The purpose of this article is to examine the scientific production in the field of Administration with regard to studies which address such organizations, either directly or indirectly. To this goal, the main concepts of "family business" were presented and all articles published in the annals of all the meetings organized by the National Association of Post-Graduate and Research in Administration (Anpad) during the period of 1997 to 2007 were identified and examined. In the end, the contents of 83 articles were categorized under the following criteria: distribution per year and per meeting, thematic categorization, nature of the analysis, economic sector, type of approach, key-techniques for collecting and analysing data, base theoretic-epistemological, origin of bibliographies consulted, types of national bibliographic materials consulted and institution of author's origin (or the first author of articles with co-authors). Besides being one of the first meta-studies on family organizations in the Administration, this article contributes to the Organizational Studies to indicate weaknesses, gaps and loopholes for new research in the subject in question.
Family organizations; Scientific production; Meta-studies; Organizational studies; Succession
