Social identity and familyowned banks: exploring the role of identity in family philantropy

The context of philanthropy in family business has received increasing attention since a number of ultra-high-net worth individuals have taken the center stage in philanthropy (Frumkin, 2008). The phenomenon though is not new. The philanthropic involvement of wealthy entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie (Harvey et al., 2011) and J.D. Rockefeller (Chernow, 1998) has been largely documented. What is new is the magnitude of the actual giving. Philanthropy has become a large-scale doing. Recent research has how entrepreneurial families achieve their philanthropic goals. In focusing on how family enterprises practice philanthropy, Gersik and Feliu (2014), for instance, claim that family members have different combination of choices when engaging in philanthropy. Accordingly, the authors propose that family members can engage as separated individuals or as family members as a group, or even through the family business as a corporate engagement, or through a combination of these options. Several other authors have also studied contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy (Acs and Phillips, 2002;Anheier and Leit, 2006; Bishop and Green, 2008; Dees, 2008; Shaw et al., 2003). Audretsch and Hinger (2014) particularly examined if the personal characteristics that conduce to the development of an entrepreneurial self are the same of similar to those that favor the development of an individual that engages in philanthropy. Additionally, Maclean et al. (2015) examine the benefits of the giving of entrepreneurial philanthropists within the context of their life stories, evaluating the benefits the entrepreneurs claim to stem from their hilanthropy acts. Growing attention to contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy makes for the importance to advance the understanding of the field in the context of family firms. Yet, the topic is under-researched and under-theorized (Taylor et al., 2004). Current research has not yet considered the construction of a philanthropic identity as the main unit of analysis. Moreover, the use of narratives to model the process of constructing a philanthropic identity has not yet been employed in the context of family business research. This is the gap that we aim to address. Following McAdams (2015), we employ a life-story model of identity construction to conceptualize how and under what conditions a philanthropic identity is prompt to emerge in a family business context.