Reflexive deliberations of family directors on corporate board reforms: publicly listed family firms in an emerging economy

The paper examines the responses of family directors to board reforms. The notion of reflexivity is used to account for family directors’ concerns and subjectivities shaping board practices. To empirically ground the reflexive deliberations of family directors, the paper draws on qualitative data gathered from 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews in combination with archive material and an extensive documentary survey. The paper has demonstrated how family directors deploy the resistance strategies such as organisation of coordinated lobbies, counter-narratives and codification of internal rules to keep the change minimal. The paper contributes to the debate on distorted/symbolic compliance, seen as resistance in this paper, often being reduced to institutional embeddedness or overgeneralised notion of interests/conflicts in family publicly listed companies. The paper also makes a case of a new theoretical dimension – reflexivity – which enables an understanding not only of family directors’ economic but also non-economic concerns relating to board reforms.