Corporate Ownership Structure and the Evolution of Bankruptcy Law in the US and UK

The past decade has seen intense academic debates over possible explanations for the different systems of corporate ownership and control that exist in developed economies. Yet the role of bankruptcy as a mechanism of corporate governance has received relatively little attention. Furthermore, many theories have failed to account successfully for events occurring in the UK, notwithstanding its similarity to the US. In response, this paper offers an account of the complementarities between bankruptcy law and ownership structure, which it is argued can explain developments in both the UK and the US. By identifying the effects of concentration or dispersion in firms' capital structure (across both equity and debt), and by analysing implications of these capital structure choices for bankruptcy, the paper develops a richer account of the corporate governance patterns we see in different nations.Bankruptcy, Law and Finance, Ownership Structure, Debt Concentration

Financial diversification before modern portfolio theory: UK financial advice documents in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century

The paper offers textual evidence from a series of financial advice documents in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century of how UK investors perceived of and managed risk. In the world’s largest financial centre of the time, UK investors were familiar with the concept of correlation and financial advisers’ suggestions were consistent with the recommendations of modern portfolio theory in relation to portfolio selection strategies. From the 1870s, there was an increased awareness of the benefits of financial diversification - primarily putting equal amounts into a number of different securities - with much of the emphasis being on geographical rather than sectoral diversification and some discussion of avoiding highly correlated investments. Investors in the past were not so naïve as mainstream financial discussions suggest today

The Concept of Governance in the Spirit of Capitalism

Through combining insights from political economy and sociology, this article explains the early genesis of the policy notion of governance in relation to ideological changes in capitalism. Such an approach has tended to be neglected in existing conceptual histories, in the process, undermining a sharper politicization of the term and how it became normalized. The argument dissects how the emergence of governance can be understood in light of a relationship between political crises, social critique and justificatory arguments (centered around security and justice claims) that form part of an ideological ‘spirit of capitalism’. Through a distinctive comparison between the creation of ‘corporate governance’ in the 1970s and the formulation of a ‘governance agenda’ by the World Bank from the 1980s, the article elucidates how the concept, within certain policy uses, but by no means all, can reflect and help constitute a neoliberal spirit of capitalism

Does law matter? The separation of ownership and control in the United Kingdom

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9349.2269(172) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Becoming self harm, theodicy and neo‐primitive organizing – necessary evil or evil of necessity?

The self has emerged as integral to how we comprehend the ethos of contemporary post‐bureaucratic – or what will be termed neo‐primitive – organizing. In juxtaposition, and immanent, are multiple requirements for the self to be harmed, in various ways, for the purposes of achieving organizational progress. This post‐structuralist composition explores how these requirements are inscribed, and desired, in different ways during ontotheological and neo‐primitive processes of sacrifice, neomasochism, simulacra, exclusion, and theodicy. These processes permit the possibility that the harming of the self can be justified (utility/include) and also discounted (diminish/exclude). It is argued, that relations of self and harm constantly arise, and change, during non‐integratable affects and events of radical alteration; namely where self questioning (loss of self) and questioning of self (identity) occur. However, it is argued, neo‐primitive organizing constantly refuses ethical responsiveness to self harm, through the inscriptive superimposition of exchange relations of lack, debt and guilt