The Rights and Wrongs of Shareholder Rights

The company is a legal structure designed to bring together the different parties of a firm—its employees, investors, customers, and suppliers—in the delivery of its corporate purpose. Corporations were established as institutions with autonomous lives—self-standing, legal entities independent of those who worked, financed, and managed them. They were devices to ensure long-term commitment to shared goals and risks, with reciprocal obligations on those engaged in them. A company had to declare its purpose before earning a licence to trade. For example, the East India Company, England’s earliest public company, to issue shares to the public as permanent capital, was given the monopoly for English trade in Asia with reciprocal obligations to protect trade along its routes. There was a mutual relationship between the company and society and a mutual benefit to both. This was carried through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with canal and railway companies operating under charter to deliver on a public purpose. It was with freedom of incorporation in the middle of the nineteenth century that the focus on public purpose gave way to private interest. Nevertheless, public benefit remained at the heart of many private companies, with the families who owned them, such as Cadbury and Rowntree’s, having an interest in wider social purpose beyond pure financial gain. However, to meet the needs for growth in industrial firms in the twentieth century, equity was issued for internal investment and acquisition that diluted these families to the point that they lost control of their companies. Public markets provided capital that promoted economic development and brought transparency to what were previously opaque private firms. However, this came at a price in the separation of ownership from the control of firms. With the separation of ownership and control came a concern, expressed most forcefully by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property, about the need for shareholders to reassert their authority over corporations to ensure that they were run in the interest of their owners, not the self-interest of their managers. The truth, largely forgotten, is that this argument was embedded in a larger vision that wanted economic and political power, in all its guises, to be exercised to benefit the community at large. This pluralist frame of reference subsequently fell out of view, with consequences that reverberate today. So was born what has become a preoccupation ever since with the “agency problem” in the modern corporation of aligning the interests of managers with those of their shareholders to avoid unprofitable growth or undue complacency

Decision-Making by and for Academic Libraries during Covid-19

Academic libraries are fundamental in promoting equitable access to education but are often overlooked and underfunded. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified these inequities. This study investigates how 39 library deans and directors perceived decision-making by university administration during COVID-19’s onset. Open-ended survey questions were sent to deans and directors asking them to describe their experiences working with university administration to adjust library services during the crisis. Some library leaders reported that working closely with other departments strengthened their campus connections. Others commented that disagreement between library personnel and university administration caused discord. Some deans and directors were forced to cut staff funding or felt pressured to reopen, while others were trusted to choose their budget and service priorities. The authors recommend that library leaders be more consistently relied upon for their expertise during university decision-making

In the dedicated pursuit of dedicated capital: restoring an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism

Tony Blair’s landslide electoral victory on May 1 (New Labour Day?) presents the party in power with a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, opportunity to revitalise and modernise Britain’s ailing and antiquated manufacturing economy.* If it is to do so, it must remain true to its long-standing (indeed, historic) commitment to restore an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism. In this paper we argue that this in turn requires that the party reject the very neo-liberal orthodoxies which it offered to the electorate as evidence of its competence, moderation and ‘modernisation’, which is has internalised, and which it apparently now views as circumscribing the parameters of the politically and economically possible

A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect

We conducted a preregistered multilaboratory project (k = 36; N = 3,531) to assess the size and robustness of ego-depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Each laboratory implemented one of two procedures that was intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of self-control. Confirmatory tests found a nonsignificant result (d = 0.06). Confirmatory Bayesian meta-analyses using an informed-prior hypothesis (δ = 0.30, SD = 0.15) found that the data were 4 times more likely under the null than the alternative hypothesis. Hence, preregistered analyses did not find evidence for a depletion effect. Exploratory analyses on the full sample (i.e., ignoring exclusion criteria) found a statistically significant effect (d = 0.08); Bayesian analyses showed that the data were about equally likely under the null and informed-prior hypotheses. Exploratory moderator tests suggested that the depletion effect was larger for participants who reported more fatigue but was not moderated by trait self-control, willpower beliefs, or action orientation.</p

Rethinking capital mobility, re‐regulating financial markets

The globalisation hypothesis has altered many of the common-sense ‘truths’ around which the social world is organised.* In particular, globalisation is thought to restrict the parameters of the politically and economically possible. Indeed, the notion of constrained choice is so pronounced that we are increasingly confronted with the image of globalisation’s ‘logic of no alternative’; an image which is predicated on the assumption of perfect capital mobility. Capital is considered to be sufficiently rational to take advantage of enhanced exit options from the national economy in circumstances in which its interests are served by moving off-shore. Moreover, global markets are also assumed to have exploited contemporary technological developments to such an extent that they now clear instantaneously; consequently, allowing capital to further its interests wherever in the world new profit opportunities arise. Thus, we are presented with the fundamental ‘reality’ of globalisation as currently narrated throughout much of the west: unless the market can be allowed to restore a competitive global equilibrium, capital will exit high-wage, high-cost western economies and re-locate in lower-wage, lower-cost, newly industrialising economies. Under the auspices of ever more hostile wage competition from the newly industrialising economies, globalisation is commonly presumed to act as a trigger for an ‘inevitable’ job displacement effect as capital deserts the advanced industrialised economies

World we're in

xvi, 319 p. ; 24 cm