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Family Members’ Salience in Family Business: An Identity-Based Stakeholder Approach

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Abstract

The paper builds on the stakeholder salience framework and applies a social identity approach to explain family firm dynamics and how these could impact on family firm governance and ethics. In particular, we consider the family as the main stakeholder for family firms and we refer to the recent approaches to stakeholder theory based on ‘names-and-faces’ and on social identity to focus on family members at the individual and organizational level. Family businesses offer an opportunity to study stakeholder salience in settings with multiple logics. Our paper acknowledges how the attributes of legitimacy, power and status, for family business members, can derive from three different institutional settings (family, business and local community) and how these attributes are assigned and gained by family members on the basis of the stakes they put (or could put) on the business. From the analysis of these dynamics specific ethical considerations emerge.

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Notes

  1. Notwithstanding the fact that communities built on interactions and common interests (like communities of interests or communities of practice) are playing an increasingly important role in the business world and on the identity of participants, for all the reasons we mention above, in this paper we use the concept of community to refer to a “community of place” that is a geography or place-based community (on the concept of community as stakeholder see Dunham et al., 2006).

  2. We owe this observation to an anynomous reviewer.

  3. We owe some of these sentences to one of the anonymous referees of our paper to whom we are very grateful.

  4. We owe this idea and the formulation of this paragraph to an anonymous referee of our paper, to whom we are very grateful.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gianfranco Rusconi, Francesco Scarpa, the editor and the five anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments; also the participants of the Rencontres de St-Gall and of the Center for Young and Family Enterprise (CYFE) meetings at the University of Bergamo, in particular Thomas Zellweger, Alfredo De Massis and Anita Van Gils for their suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

This research was funded by the University of Bergamo (Italy) “Progetto ITALY® & Project STaRs Supporting Talented Researchers—Azione 2: Visiting Professors” and a travel grant of CYFE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, University of Bergamo, Via dei Caniana, 2, 24127, Bergamo, Italy

    Silvana Signori

  2. Department of Marketing, Innovation and Organization, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Tweekerkenstraat, 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Yves Fassin

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  1. Silvana Signori
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Both authors contributed equally to the development of the paper.

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Correspondence to Yves Fassin.

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Appendix

Appendix

Freeman’s Graphical Stakeholder Model and Taguiri and Davis’ Three-Circle Model: An Integration

The family can be integrated as a generic stakeholder in Freeman’s stakeholder graphical model applied to family firms by adding a special oval for the family as a generic stakeholder (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
figure 5

The family as a stakeholder of family business

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Individual family members may assume different positions in the firms as shareholders, managers, employees, etc. Even if the situation in reality is more complex than that shown in a simplified graph, as discussed by Fassin (2008), these shortcomings can be presented in a graphical way by superposing different levels of the analysis. If we consider “only” the three dimensions of ownership, management and family and their overlappings in the various roles that a single individual member of a family can assume, we find the well-known Tagiuri and Davis’ three-circle model integrated in the stakeholder graphical model (Lansberg, 1983; Tagiuri & Davis, 1992) (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
figure 6

The three overlapping circles of stakeholders

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In this map with the firm still at its centre, the focus is on the relationships between the firm and its stakeholders: in other words, it means that we are looking at the world from the company’s point of view. To emphasize the central role that a specific stakeholder assumes in a firm, Freeman et al. (2007) suggest placing this stakeholder at the centre of the graphical representation. This means that we are looking at the world from the perspective of that specific stakeholder. Considering the peculiar role that the family assumes in family business, we suggest positioning the family at the centre of the graph (Fig. 7). In this case, the reciprocal relationships between the family and other stakeholders are much clearer and will represent the core of any further analysis. This adapted stakeholder map represents quite well the perspective of many studies on stakeholder management and family firms that concentrate on the influence this particular type of firm has on the management of the relationships with the various different stakeholders: employees, customers, local communities, etc.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Family at the centre of the stakeholder map

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We would like to emphasize that by integrating the well-known three-circle-model of Tagiuri and Davis into Freeman’s graphical stakeholder model, we contribute towards integrating stakeholder theory with the theoretical underpinnings of the classical model for family business.

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Signori, S., Fassin, Y. Family Members’ Salience in Family Business: An Identity-Based Stakeholder Approach. J Bus Ethics 183, 191–211 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04998-8

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