As a discipline, the study of family businesses is still in its infancy and the academic and business community have yet to uniformly define what exactly constitutes a family business. John Davis, a leading expert in family businesses, reviewed an abundance of definitions that abounded in the literature in the early noughties. Based on his analysis he ended up clustering the varying definitions into two major categories: structural definitions and process definitions (Davis, 2001). The main premise of the structural definition is that it focusses on the ownership or management arrangements within the family business, for example, ‘51% or more ownership by members of the family’. The process definition of a family business centres around the amount of involvement the ‘family’ has in the business. Davis (2001, p. 1) provides an example of the process definition based on how much influence the family has on the policy of the business, and the desire to perpetuate the family in terms of its control in the business. Table 1 provides definitions posed in the literature by some of the world's leading researchers on family business and we have applied Davis's (2001) principles of structural versus process lens to them.