Changing the Tune: Conceptualising the Effects of the Global Financial Crisis on Stakeholder Perceptions of Corporate Value

Could shareholder primacy, with its assumed short-termist practices, have had its day when it comes to managerial activity centered on creating corporate value? Many business and opinion leaders appear to take this position, not least Jack Welch who famously declared ‘shareholder primacy is the dumbest idea in the world!’ Indeed, in a post-Crash economy has a wider stakeholder focus with a longer-term outlook superseded any business notions of shareholder primacy and wealth maximization? This research examines these possibilities through a consideration of the narrative companies produce, such as annual reports. From this corpus material, an assessment is made of whether UK managers’ perceptions about corporate value generation changed over the period covering the worldwide financial crisis, with respect to their relative favouring of shareholders and stakeholders. The corpus of narrative material used is visualized as a conceptual space in which a conversation reflecting perceptual bias to the generation of corporate value occurs. To explore such corpuses, in order to compare narratives at points either side of the 2008 Crash, a new methodology was devised called narrative staining. Hence, a detection and visual mapping over the period was made possible of managers’ changing perceptions concerning primacy (shareholder or stakeholder orientation) with its mediation by termism (a short or long-term bias). Termism is also originally conceived as part of a larger temporal category, which includes a sense of urgency to act (urgent versus non-urgent) that is similarly examined. The investigation reveals that over time perceptual change about value creation happened, though in unanticipated ways. Companies pre-Crash were often short-term stakeholder oriented then moved post-Crash to a long-term shareholder orientation. A focus for this study was the corporate domain, consisting of a selection of FT250 companies. However, managerial perceptions about corporate value creation are influenced not simply by the conversation of the corporate domain but rather by a multi-actor conversation taking place throughout the business environment. To comprehend this effect, the research mines further corpuses that comprise the UK’s regulatory domain (hard and soft law), the press (Financial Times and other newspapers), and relevant peripheral stakeholder organizations (including the Confederation of British Industry, the Institute of Directors, and the Trades Union Congress). These organizations demonstrated more complex, unforeseen, perceptual effects as the financial crisis proceeded with many aligning according to their political or business agenda, which also impacted any sense of urgency to act they had. There appears to be no previous attempt at an extensive and multivariate analysis of this nature. And the findings challenge prevalent characterizations of shareholder and stakeholder behaviour. Moreover, the research shows that utilizing a wide set of stakeholder corpuses acts a viable proxy for broader financial perspectives amongst UK organizations. The technique of narrative staining therefore provides insights, hitherto inaccessible, for assessing and consolidating large-scale perceptual bias regarding value creation across the economy. The technique also has significant potential for other applications

Ecological assembly of high-diversity plant communities: dispersal, competition, and environmental filtering in longleaf pine savannas

Ecological mechanisms proposed to explain community assembly and the maintenance of biodiversity are hypothesized to fall along a theoretical continuum bounded at one extreme by deterministic processes (“niche assembly”) and at the other extreme by stochastic processes (“dispersal assembly”). In this dissertation, I explore the idea that the position of ecological communities along the niche-dispersal assembly continuum is dynamic in space and time. Using field experiments in a high-diversity longleaf pine savanna, I test the general hypothesis that “ecological filters” (competition, disturbance, and resource availability) contribute to niche assembly through their effects on established plant species and recruitment from the species pool. Consistent with dispersal-assembly theory, I found that dispersal from the species pool strongly limited local species diversity regardless of the presence of these three niche-based ecological filters. Importantly, however, some ecological filters (e.g., space limitation in communities with low-intensity fire disturbance and establishment limitation imposed by drought and high-rainfall conditions) limited the extent to which community assembly was influenced by dispersal, suggesting ecological conditions that reduce stochastic community assembly in high-diversity communities. I examined the generality of these patterns by conducting a meta-analysis of \u3e60 published experiments. I found that dispersal strongly limited species richness in a wide range of plant communities, but that dispersal had a stronger positive effect on species richness in more disturbed communities and when the species pool contained high species diversity and functional-trait diversity, supporting the hypothesis that community assembly reflects a dynamic interplay between species-pool diversity and local environmental heterogeneity. My results suggest a conceptual model for community assembly in high-diversity pine savannas, with implications for other species-rich plant communities. I propose that characteristics of high-diversity communities (large species pools and pervasive recruitment limitation in populations of many rare species) generally contribute to stochastic community assembly, but that niche-based ecological filtering of resident species and immigrating species can shift high-diversity communities towards more deterministic community assembly. This conceptual framework has broader implications for understanding the maintenance of biodiversity and species coexistence in communities of contrasting diversity and for conserving biodiversity in longleaf pine communities threatened by habitat loss, fragmentation, and environmental change

When to Tender, When To Negotiate? Why Are We Ignoring The Elephants In The Room?

Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne