What can the corporate world learn from the cellarer?: Examining the role of a Benedictine abbey’s CFO

an article by Martin R.W. Hiebl and Birgit Feldbauer-Durstmüller (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria)published in Society and Business Review Volume 9 Issue 1 (2014)

Abstract

Purpose
Benedictine abbeys are highly stable organisations that have existed for almost 1,500 years. The extant literature ascribes this stability in part to the notion of Benedictine governance, which centres on the Rule of St Benedict (RB). An integral part of Benedictine governance is the cellarer, who plays a role comparable to that of a chief financial officer (CFO) in a traditional corporation. Unlike corporations, however, in which the CFO has emerged into a more important role over the past few decades, the cellarer has been an official position in Benedictine abbeys since the introduction of the RB in the sixth century. The present paper aims to explore the cellarer’s role and assesses which parts of it could be reasonably transferred to the corporate world.

Design/methodology/approach
Informed by organisational role theory, the authors conducted a single case study in an Austrian Benedictine abbey. The authors used group discussions and semi-structured interviews as the main research instruments.

Findings
The authors find that the cellarer’s behaviour shows strong signs of stewardship, which could serve as a role model for corporate CFOs. However, because of the studied abbey’s situation of financial distress, the cellarer also experienced severe role conflicts rooted in his obedience to the abbot, the high involvement of the abbey in the local economy, and the cellarer’s conscience as a Christian monk. From these findings, the authors describe those aspects of the cellarer’s role that should thus be avoided for corporate CFOs.

Research limitations/implications
The presented findings are based on a single case study. Therefore, because of the contextual factors idiosyncratic to the abbey under investigation, the results must be interpreted with care. Nevertheless, the findings explain the cellarer’s role and depict its potential benefits for the corporate world, which should induce further research.

Originality/value
This is the first paper to explore in-depth the cellarer’s role as well as one of the first to transfer the potential benefits of single roles rooted in Benedictine governance to the corporate world.

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