ABSTRACT
Family businesses, especially the enterprises of married couples or copreneurial businesses, are a unique, but largely ignored, context in which work and family domains are intrinsically intertwined. Indeed, scholars from other disciplines who study copreneurial and family businesses have called for investigations from multiple perspectives including communication. We review the literature linking work and family life within the arena of married couples’ (copreneurial)businesses in order to lay the foundation for a research agenda for marital, family, and organizational communication scholars and for researchers in other disciplines in which family businesses and work-life integration are central. Specifically, we examine work-family linkages of copreneurs through the frameworks of relational dialectics, boundary, work-family border, and structuration theories. We also highlight findings from marital communication research—marital schemata and equity, conflict patterns, and stress contagion effects—to guide future research. Entrepreneurial, technological, and international issues are also discussed. In so doing, we set a research agenda in the area of work-family life and copreneurial family businesses for scholars in many sub-fields in communication and other disciplines.
