Elites and Role Identity: Narrating Individual Distinctiveness Against Inherited Legacy

Bridget Kustin
Saïd Business School, UK
 

Abstract:

Increasing inherited wealth and private ownership is transforming global economies and governance in ways unanticipated by theories of elite roles and identities in organizational scholarship. This paper explores how elites narrate their role identity to allow for individual distinctiveness, given inherited legacy. Drawing on narrative role identity theory, the paper analyses 64 in-depth interviews with global family leaders of large (annual revenue above USD 1 billion), multigenerational family businesses, both private and publicly listed. The paper identifies three narrative pathways through which elites orient toward either a more distinguished individual self or a more enfolded self: (1) appeals to values, ethics, and role duties; (2) relational positioning vis-à-vis key stakeholders; and (3) temporal orientations toward past principles or future goals. These observations yield three theoretical contributions. First, the introduction of the construct of the ‘principal’ to capture forms of elite power not reducible to formal or delimited leadership roles. Second, the extension of classic role identity theory by specifying pathways of individuation unique to elites. Third, positing that the aspirational register of identity narration highlights the performative nature of elite identity work as a function of power. These findings contribute to research on elites, role identity, legacies, and family firms.

Bridget Kustin is an economic anthropologist (PhD, Johns Hopkins University), Senior Research Fellow at the Saïd Business School, and Director of the global research study, Ownership Project 2.0: Private Capital Owners & Impact. Before studying family offices and family businesses, she researched financial practices of the very poor across three years of fieldwork in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Bridget has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; Fulbright Research Fellow; and Fellow of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. Her research has been supported by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Berlin’s Center for Social Science Research (WZB), and Gates Foundation, and she has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council for Development Finance. At Oxford, Bridget teaches Family Business, Capitalism in Debate, and Impact and Major Programmes. She is Academic Director of the forthcoming Polycapital Academy, offering courses in philanthropic strategy.

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