Family-controlled business and shareholder orientation: degrees of framing alignment in management control practices

This paper explores how shareholder orientation (SHO) shapes management control practices in an Italian family firm over an eighteen-year period. Drawing on the social movement literature and adopting a longitudinal field case study, the paper examines how the influence of the shareholder orientation on managerial practices takes the form of a protracted framing process where an emerging SHO-focused frame interacted with the extant frame embedded by socioemotional wealth (SEW) objectives of family business. Particular attention is paid to how this interplay fosters varying degree of frame alignment, denoting the extent to which shareholder-focused frame is often transformed into a more context-specific frame moving from a shifting to a blending frame. The results is a study that highlights how the shareholder-focused frame challenged extant control practices and how it is also complemented by extant frame to enable organizational action by shifting and blending the management control system. This longitudinal case study leads us to reflect on the alignment processes which stimulate hybrid control practices.