Abstract

"Rationalizing Family, Updating Social Status: Family Business Governance and Entitlement to Accumulation in Colombia"

Mariana Saavedra-Espinosa, Denison University (saavedraespinosam@denison.edu)

In the last two decades, the families that own some of the largest and most emblematic privately-owned companies in Colombia have been implementing strategies of corporate governance that seek to “rationalize” and “professionalize” business practices. In addition to standard corporate governance measures like setting up boards of directors and convening shareholders meetings, many families have also begun applying rule-based structures and procedures to regulate relationships between family members.
In this paper, I explore this “family business governance” in the context of social stratification in Colombia to inquire on elite families’ sense of entitlement to accumulate. In particular, I am interested in how the rationalization of family businesses “modernizes” these organizational forms and seeks to make them acceptable within broader ideological shifts that favor meritocracy. Both drawing on and reproducing the importance of lineage and family-belonging in this post-colonial elite, family governance reaffirms the family as the unit of wealth-ownership by making it appear to conform to ideals of efficiency, transparency and accountability. In accordance with this I ask: How does the incorporation of family governance justify the rightful “earmarking” of capital and its profits as belonging to the family and not to other stakeholders such as workers, the state or even minority shareholders?