Fiduciaries and Family Firms: Integrating the Logics of Commerce and Family

Drawing on an 8-year ethnographic study, we analyze 65 interviews with family firm fiduciaries in 18 countries to examine the fiduciary’s role in re-integrating the logics of family and commerce within family firms. Our data identifies two sets of tasks that fiduciaries perform where competing institutional logics are beginning to dis-integrate: rationalization and stabilization. Our findings contribute to family business scholarship by showing that fiduciaries can play the integrative “man in the middle” role, integrating competing sets of assumptions, cognitions, emotions and practices into a functional whole. Moreover, we contribute to literature on institutional logics by mapping out how fiduciaries are able to straddle multiple logics – particularly those of commerce and family – allowing firms to remain robust in the face of change, particularly in leadership.