IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/qucehw/202308.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Aristocratic amateurs to fat cats? British CEOs in the twentieth century

Author

Listed:
  • Adams, Robin J. C.
  • Aldous, Michael
  • Fliers, Philip
  • Turner, John D.

Abstract

This article uses a prosopographical methodology and a new dataset of 1,558 CEOs from Britain's largest public companies between 1900 and 2009 to analyse how the role, social background, and career pathways of corporate leaders changed. We have four main findings: First, the designation of CEO only prevailed in the 1990s. Second, the proportion of socially elite CEOs was highest before 1940, but they were not dominant. Third, most CEOs did not have a degree before the 1980s, or professional qualification until the 1990s. Fourth, liberal market reforms in the 1980s increased the likelihood of dismissal by a factor of three.

Suggested Citation

  • Adams, Robin J. C. & Aldous, Michael & Fliers, Philip & Turner, John D., 2023. "Aristocratic amateurs to fat cats? British CEOs in the twentieth century," QUCEH Working Paper Series 23-08, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:qucehw:202308
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/276258/1/1858484391.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    corporate leaders; corporate careers; Britain; 20th century;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G30 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - General
    • M12 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Personnel Management; Executives; Executive Compensation
    • N83 - Economic History - - Micro-Business History - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • N84 - Economic History - - Micro-Business History - - - Europe: 1913-

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:zbw:qucehw:202308. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/chqubuk.html .

    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.