IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/entsoc/v13y2012i01p120-153_01.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Shareholder Voice: British and American Accents, 1890–1965

Author

Listed:
  • Rutterford, Janette

Abstract

This article discusses the interaction between directors and small shareholders who made up the majority of names on the share ledgers of many companies in both the UK and the USA. It is concerned with the period 1890–1965 and concentrates on the management/shareholder relationship in the context of the annual general meeting and shareholder activism. I argue that there were significant differences between shareholder activism in the UK and the USA, due to the difference in relative numbers of the shareholders themselves, to legal and geographic differences, to corporate culture, and to the earlier diffusion of shareholding in the UK compared to the USA. UK shareholders concentrated their interventions on management issues, as well as some social and labor matters. US shareholders, mostly through so-called ‘corporate gadflies’, concentrated their efforts on corporate governance issues, some of which were already enshrined in UK company law and practice.

Suggested Citation

  • Rutterford, Janette, 2012. "The Shareholder Voice: British and American Accents, 1890–1965," Enterprise & Society, Cambridge University Press, vol. 13(1), pages 120-153, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:13:y:2012:i:01:p:120-153_01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1467222700010958/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Turner, John D., 2024. "Three centuries of corporate governance in the UK," QUCEH Working Paper Series 24-01, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History.
    2. Janette Rutterford & Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos & Carry van Lieshout, 2017. "Individual investors and local bias in the UK, 1870–1935," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 70(4), pages 1291-1320, November.
    3. Siepel, Josh & Nightingale, Paul, 2014. "Anglo-Saxon governance: Similarities, difference and outcomes in a financialised world," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 27-35.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:13:y:2012:i:01:p:120-153_01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eso .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.