The Theory of Fields and Its Application to Corporate Governance

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to introduce the theory of strategic action fields to the law audience. The main idea in field theory in sociology is that most social action occurs in social arenas where actors know one another and take one another into account in their action. Scholars use the field construct to make sense of how and why social orders emerge, reproduce, and transform. Underlying this formulation is the idea that a field is an ongoing game where actors have to understand what others are doing in order to frame their actions. Second, I want to argue that there is a great deal of theoretical leverage to be gained by considering law as a field. To make all of this more concrete, I use field theory to offer a stylized account of the rise of the “shareholder value” movement of the 1980s and the use of agency theory as the dominant theory of corporate governance to justify the shareholder value revolt. I end by considering whether or not field theory has normative implications useful for the law

Fields, Power and Social Skill: A Critical Analysis of the New Institutionalisms

"New Institutional" Theories have proliferated across the social sciences. While they have substantial disagreements, they agree that institutions are created to produce local social orders, are social constructions, fundamentally about how powerful groups create rules of interaction and maintain unequal resource distributions, and yet, once in existence, both constrain and enable actors in subsequent institution building. I present a critique of these theories that focuses on their inadequate attention to the role of social power and actors in the creation of institutions. An alternative view of the dynamics of institutions is sketched out based on a more sociological conception of rules, resources, and social skill

The Theory of Fields and Its Application to Corporate Governance

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to introduce the theory of strategic action fields to the law audience. The main idea in field theory in sociology is that most social action occurs in social arenas where actors know one another and take one another into account in their action. Scholars use the field construct to make sense of how and why social orders emerge, reproduce, and transform. Underlying this formulation is the idea that a field is an ongoing game where actors have to understand what others are doing in order to frame their actions. Second, I want to argue that there is a great deal of theoretical leverage to be gained by considering law as a field. To make all of this more concrete, I use field theory to offer a stylized account of the rise of the “shareholder value” movement of the 1980s and the use of agency theory as the dominant theory of corporate governance to justify the shareholder value revolt. I end by considering whether or not field theory has normative implications useful for the law

How the upper and middle classes embraced a culture of household debt and aggressive financial risk taking

The last three decades have seen a growing role for financial markets and institutions in the economy, with households included in this trend. But how have households changed their attitudes and behaviors in relation to financial markets? In new research which looks at survey data on consumer finance, Adam Goldstein and Neil Fligstein find evidence of a new household ‘finance culture’. While financial firms sought out customers of all incomes, the upper and middle classes have embraced household borrowing and have become much more likely to take financial risks

Power Law Distribution of the Frequency of Demises of U.S Firms

Both theoretical and applied economics have a great deal to say about many aspects of the firm, but the literature on the extinctions, or demises, of firms is very sparse. We use a publicly available data base covering some 6 million firms in the US and show that the underlying statistical distribution which characterises the frequency of firm demises - the disappearances of firms as autonomous entities - is closely approximated by a power law. The exponent of the power law is, intriguingly, close to that reported in the literature on the extinction of biological species.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Multinationals and Skills Policy Networks: HRM as a Player in Economic and Social Concerns

This paper uses an embeddedness framework to reconceptualise HRM agency over the external labour market, and in so doing bring into focus the societal implications of HRM. Drawing on qualitative data from 53 key informants in two English regions, we identify the ways in which the subsidiaries of foreign multinationals (MNCs) engage with labour market skills actors. Our findings reveal how power structures are mobilised by local economic actors to align labour market skills with MNCs’ demand priorities. We show that multinationals may seek to partially endogenize, i.e. take ownership of, the resources of local labour markets when their competitive value is redefined in social as well as economic terms, and demonstrate that the social structure of subnational institutional governance arrangements and firm strategic action on skills creates the conduit through which resource endogenization may occur. Theoretically, this paper identifies the social structure of networks as a casual mechanism to bridge divergent skill interests, which is mobilised when network actors have the capacity to frame fields within the social structure of the network around ideas on economic sustainability and moral interest

"The institutional terrain of the European Union"

Policy domains form where there exists a constitutional agreement to create legislation, a collective definition of what issues are and who gets to be an actor, and procedures to mobilize the production of new rules in the domain. Policy domains may be entirely constituted by government organizations or may also include nongovernmental groups. We explore the EU as a set of policy domains. We demonstrate that the Treaty of Rome and its subsequent revisions defined the issue arenas. We also show how the organizational structure of the European Council of Ministers and the Commission mirror these domains. Finally we plot the expansion of pressure groups and legislative output to domains over time. We show that the Treaty changes, which changed the decisionmaking rules in the domains, tended to be in domains where there were a large number of nongovernmental organizations and where legislative output was high. For example, the largest number of pressure groups in the EU circa 1980 were attached to the Single Market domain. We view this as a kind of spillover. By our calculations, at least 13 of the 17 policy domains in the EU exhibit a supranational character

The Impact of the Great Recession on Perceived Immigrant Threat: A Cross-National Study of 22 Countries

In an increasingly globalized world, anti-immigrant sentiment has become more prevalent. Competitive threat theory suggests that anti-immigrant attitudes increase when adverse economic circumstances intensify competition with immigrants for scarce resources, but past studies using this approach are inconclusive. In this study, we investigate the impact of the Great Recession on perceived immigrant threat—an index of seven items measuring attitudes toward immigrants—using the 2013 International Social Survey Program survey. Using multilevel models, we analyze responses from 18,433 respondents nested within 22 countries. We create a country-level measure of the Great Recession Index comprised of four dimensions—the housing crash, the financial crisis, economic decline, and employment loss—and assess its impact on perceived immigrant threat. After controlling for a variety of individual-level and country-level covariates, we find that the Great Recession is positively associated with perceived immigrant threat. We also identify important interaction effects between the Great Recession Index and change in government expenditures, age, educational levels, citizenship, and urbanization. The study contributes to competitive threat theory by showing the effect of the Great Recession in exacerbating anti-immigrant sentiment

Networks of corporate power revisited

This paper examines developments through the quarter century since the publication of Stokman, Ziegler and Scott's (1985) iconic ten-nation study of the structure of interlocking directorships. The surprising decline of research in the area following the publication of Networks of Corporate Power is in part testimony to the rigour of the comparative methods used, raising the standard of evidence required for subsequent director interlock studies. But it also reflected a critical weakness in director interlock research to that point, the limited ability to answer what Mark Mizruchi has called the “So what?” question. While replicated studies found clear structures in director interlocks, varying from country to country, and there was some speculative fit with the distinctive political economies of these countries, there was little evidence of any effect of these structures on firm performance or activity. The more recent resurgence in director interlock research is in some ways rooted in a second generation of the original drivers; the ready availability of now large masses of data on firm governance and firm level performance and further advances in social network analytical techniques. Where Stokman and his colleagues manually compiled lists of directors scoured from company reports, these data are now routinely collected and compiled in accessible databases by government agencies and business information services in many countries. And there has been a gradual accumulation of advances in addressing the “so what” question

Networks of corporate power revisited

This paper examines developments through the quarter century since the publication of Stokman, Ziegler and Scott's (1985) iconic ten-nation study of the structure of interlocking directorships. The surprising decline of research in the area following the publication of Networks of Corporate Power is in part testimony to the rigour of the comparative methods used, raising the standard of evidence required for subsequent director interlock studies. But it also reflected a critical weakness in director interlock research to that point, the limited ability to answer what Mark Mizruchi has called the “So what?” question. While replicated studies found clear structures in director interlocks, varying from country to country, and there was some speculative fit with the distinctive political economies of these countries, there was little evidence of any effect of these structures on firm performance or activity. The more recent resurgence in director interlock research is in some ways rooted in a second generation of the original drivers; the ready availability of now large masses of data on firm governance and firm level performance and further advances in social network analytical techniques. Where Stokman and his colleagues manually compiled lists of directors scoured from company reports, these data are now routinely collected and compiled in accessible databases by government agencies and business information services in many countries. And there has been a gradual accumulation of advances in addressing the “so what” question