This study explores the roles of women—specifically daughters—in family businesses in the Middle East, a context marked by pronounced structural gender inequality and limited scholarly attention. Drawing on identity theory and a multiple case study approach, we examine how daughters in 17 family firms construct and navigate their professional identities. Our analysis identifies 26 distinct roles, which cluster into six categories: (1) management and leadership, (2) transformative and innovative, (3) ownership and succession, (4) facilitative and social responsibility, (5) identity, continuity and sustainability, and (6) operational and executive roles. The findings reveal that daughters often adopt multiple, layered, and context-dependent identities, and must engage in continuous negotiation to attain visibility, influence, and authority within the family and firm. This study contributes to the literature on family business and identity by illuminating the complex role enactment and identity work of women in patriarchal settings.

After Shane’s seminal work in 2000 which highlighted the importance of entrepreneurial opportunities, the number of studies focusing on entrepreneurial opportunity increased rapidly. Different definitions of this concept were provided in the field, ranging from subjective to objective ones, which gave rise to a lack of consensus among researchers and this, in turn, was an obstacle that slowed down theorizing in entrepreneurship. Taking into account the past trends in management sciences, it seems to be the right moment to re-conceptualize the core construct of opportunity. The major critique of existing definitions is their operationalization. To provide a better operationalization, the present study aimed to offer a more accurate conceptual definition. To this end, the study first examined current debates on opportunity, which revealed the major problem causing the debates. Then, through a systematic literature review, from among more than seven thousand documents in the Scopus database containing opportunity keywords, 74 papers were selected following different phases of filtration. The papers were analyzed in detail to extract different constructs. Then, using the framework of Hansen et al, they were classified along six dimensions. The concepts under each dimension were examined to finally provide a bigger picture of the construct of opportunity and offer a re-conceptualization. The results of this study highlight the gaps for future research and pave the ground for other systematic literature reviews in the field.