Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain

Scholars have long debated whether ownership structure matters for firm performance. The standard view with respect to Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on operating profit and shareholder value. Here, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial agency problems. In contrast, we find that directors who were independent of large family owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.

The challenge of MNCs and development: oil extraction, CSR, Nigeria and corruption

Globalisation has led to a shift in world order with the rise of the corporate non-state actor. This rise has led to an assumption that Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) must assume responsibilities beyond profit maximisation for shareholders. With the rise of the MNC as a corporate non-state actor there have been discussions around the role of business with regard to human rights.

This article looks at the case of oil extraction in Nigeria. Focussing on the historical dependency of Nigeria and the evolution of the state into a resource-dependent country, it looks at the limitations of existing human rights obligations as they relate to business. This article proposes that corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies of MNCs can act as a preliminary stage in the quest for wider human rights protections. It is in motivating MNCs to design and implement effective CSR policies in dependent states like Nigeria, that the challenge lies.

The Legitimacy of Subsidiary Issue Selling: Balancing Positive & Negative Attention from Corporate Headquarters

We consider how in issue selling, subsidiaries draw on different forms of legitimacy to attract corporate headquarters’ (CHQ) positive attention and minimise negative CHQ attention. Through case study evidence, we find that directing CHQ attention to subsidiary issues needs to be executed as a balancing act through forms of subsidiary legitimacy, namely; the personal legitimacy of key individuals at the subsidiary; consequential legitimacy vis-à-vis peer subsidiaries; and linkage legitimacy in the local environment. We develop a typology of subsidiary issue-selling roles and illustrate how negative CHQ attention results from a failure to legitimise issue selling.