Family business as a longstanding hybrid organisation: Logic revision as a strategy for maintenance

Hybrid organisations, organisational forms that combine multiple institutional logics, have recently attracted substantial scholarly attention. Ongoing maintenance of hybridity has been identified as a key challenge for hybrid organisations. This paper puts forward family businesses that integrate family and business logics as the world’s oldest and the most pervasive form of hybrid organisation, and explores their organisational maintenance strategies for sustaining such hybridity. Based on an oral history study of longstanding family businesses in Scotland, we propose ‘logic revision’, i.e. a socially constructed and evolving reinterpretation of logics, as another strategy for organisational maintenance in the hybrid organisational context. As opposed to the known strategies of decoupling, compromising, structural separation and selective coupling that rely on the deterministic properties of institutional logics, this strategy draws on their socially constructed nature.