Shaping the shareholder activism agenda: institutional investors and global social issues

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Shaping the shareholder activism

agenda: institutional investors and

global social issues

W.Trexler Proffitt, Jr Franklin & Marshall College, USA

Andrew Spicer University of South Carolina, USA

AbstractWe examine the issues and actors that have shaped the agenda of shareholder activism on

global social issues over the last 35 years. Our analysis of 2158 US shareholders’ proposals

on the topics of international human rights and labor standards reveals that a clear agenda

has developed, dominated by religious organizations that have sponsored or co-sponsored

1312 of these proposals. Public pension funds entered the field of global social issue

activism after religious organizations had already established the legitimacy of the agenda.

We suggest that a social movement perspective on shareholder activism best explains

these findings. Religious groups framed the ideas that constitute the global social issues

shareholder agenda and mobilized support by reaching out to other types of investors.

Public pension funds played a secondary, albeit important, role in agenda creation by cham-

pioning several of the campaigns initiated by religious innovators.

Key words • globalization • human rights • institutional investor • labor standards • shareholder

activism • social movement

A growing literature studies institutional investors mobilizing as a social move-ment, developing increasing power to influence the behavior of business firms(Useem, 1993; Davis and Thompson, 1994; Donaldson, 1994; Monks andMinow, 1995). Yet, in comparison to the growing amount of research into therole of institutional investors in shaping the corporate governance agenda, the academic literature is relatively silent about the role of activist funds inshaping the agenda of corporate social responsibility (for an exception, seeHoffman, 1996). We know little about the trends, players and success trajecto-ries of social issues shareholder campaigns. What types of institutional investorsare actively involved in pursuing social agendas? What concerns do they high-light? Are they successful in steering corporate awareness to social issues? Howcan the findings inform a more generalized theory of investor mobilization?

STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 4(2): 165–190DOI: 10.1177/1476127006064067Copyright ©2006 Sage Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)http://so.sagepub.com

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We address these questions through an analysis of all US shareholder pro-posals introduced on the topic of international human rights and labor standardsbetween 1969 and 2003. This arena, which we call global social issues (GSI), ischaracterized by moral claims on corporations that urge them to pay attentionto their social responsibilities in the multiple communities in which they oper-ate. Our shareholder proposal database provides the empirical record to examinethe actual behavior of institutional investors as social advocates. It identifieswhich categories of institutional investor shaped this agenda and when. Second,it shows which topics reached critical salience and how. Finally, it illustratestrends in success over time.

Given the lack of existing research into the role of shareholder activism insocial issues, we use an inductive method to analyze our data. We build uponevidence in the development of the global social issues agenda to contribute to agrowing research agenda on shareholder activism. One of our most prominentfindings is that, by far, religious organizations were the earliest and most prolificactivists over the 35 years of our sample. Of the 2158 GSI proposals in our data-base, religious groups sponsored or co-sponsored 1312. Public pension fundssponsored or co-sponsored the second largest number at 864, and no other typeof institutional investor introduced more than 90 proposals. Religious organiza-tions were innovators in coming up with the first proposals in most topic areasand in battling the companies and the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) for acceptance of the topic. Public pension funds entered the field ofglobal social issue activism after religious and other activist organizations hadalready established the legitimacy of the agenda. They played a secondary, albeitimportant, championing role.

To explain this finding, as well as the broader dynamics behind the con-struction of the GSI agenda over the last 35 years, we adopt a social movementperspective. The relationship between activism and agenda-framing is wellestablished in this literature. Agenda construction is a path-dependent, collec-tive activity demanding persistence and coalition building (Baumgartner andJones, 1993; Baumgartner and Mahoney, 2005). Interest groups that are notsufficiently powerful on their own bring new issues to the attention of policy-makers and enlist the support of a broad range of other groups to support theircause (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977).

Coalitions in social movements bring new attention to a topic by ‘framing’ itin pre-existing cultural beliefs and attitudes, synchronizing with prior or currentcampaigns, and mobilizing sufficient resources to pressure powerful decision-makers (McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Benford and Snow, 2000). Social movementorganizations ‘devote considerable time to constructing particular versions ofreality, developing and espousing alternative visions of that reality, attempting toaffect various audiences’ interpretations, and managing the impressions peopleform about their movement’ (Benford, 1993: 678). Social movement activistsstrive to shape collective attitudes and beliefs over a long time period as much asto force change immediately through case-by-case struggles.

166 STRATEG IC ORGANIZAT ION 4(2 )




We suggest that a social movement perspective explains the prominent roleof religious organizations in our sample. Previous research on shareholderactivism looks at the role of fund size as an important predictor of investoractivism (Ryan and Schneider, 2002) and at immediate corporate responses toactivism as a measure of proposal success (Karpoff et al., 1996; Wahal, 1996).Neither of these approaches adequately explains why religious organizationsparticipate so actively in shareholder activism. Most religious organizations havenowhere near the asset base or professional staff of public pension systems. Nordo they have much hope of directly influencing corporate behavior by winninga majority of votes. Proposals rarely pass. It is difficult to explain their activismin shaping the GSI agenda unless their activity stems from a moral motivationwith a long-term horizon. For a morally motivated investor with a long-termview, shaping the issues that subsequent activists, perhaps years in the future,can build upon may be more important than immediate success in transformingthe behavior of a particular corporation at a particular time. Prior work emphasizes that corporate social responsibility efforts in general may not haveshort-term financial performance impacts (McWilliams and Siegel, 2000). Weextend that argument here to examine the collective and long-term impacts onagendas and coalitions.

An important contribution of our analysis is that we find evidence for theselong-term effects. The raw count and success rate data indicate that in the share-holder activism arena, the annual cycle of proposal generation and voting buildsslowly. Yet, for campaigns that demonstrate growing mobilization, noticeablepatterns of increasing success are apparent. As issues become legitimized andarticulated through the repeated introduction of proposals on a similar theme,the more likely it is that subsequent proposals will prove successful. Over thelong run, the persistence of religious organizations has helped to shape a newagenda of shareholder activism on global social issues.

The paper is organized as follows. We first examine the political opening ofa new agenda for shareholder activism that emerged in 1970 in the US. We thendescribe the data that we use to look at the emergence of that agenda over thelast 35 years. We look at the issues that defined the agenda as well as the actorsthat shaped it. We conclude by elaborating the key theoretical implications ofour analysis for the broader field of shareholder activism as a social movementmobilization process.

The opening of a new agenda

Researchers focusing on the mobilization of institutional investors as share-holder activists have tended to start their analytic clocks at the time whenpublic pension funds began to receive the most attention, around the foundingof the Council of Institutional Investors in 1985 (Useem, 1993; Davis andThompson, 1994). In this view, the US corporate governance movement began

PROFF ITT & SP ICER : SHAP ING THE SHAREHOLDER ACT IV I SM AGENDA 167




in earnest when some of the largest investing institutions became interested init. Our agenda-centered approach provides a more complete picture of howinvestor activism works than a narrow focus on the period of 1985–94.Consistent with a social movement approach, we mark the beginning of socialissues shareholder mobilization as the moment when a political opportunity forsuch activism arose: the legal ruling allowing social policy topics in 1970.

The SEC promulgated the first version of the modern federal shareholderproposal rule in 1942. While the specific elements of the rule have evolved inlight of interpretation and challenge, the principle of permitting a shareholderto use the management-issued proxy statement to communicate a proposal to allshareholders for an advisory vote remains at the core of the rule (Booth, 1987).Any shareholder entitled to vote at the annual meeting, by giving sufficientnotice and confining proposal topics to issues of shareholder interests, is allowedaccess to the management proxy statement and ballot. Once a proposal has beenproperly submitted, corporate officials then choose between three courses ofaction:

1 publishing and distributing the proposal, the proponent’s brief supporting‘words of reason’ and management’s opposing statement, in the proxy mate-rials, and soliciting, tabulating and publishing the vote results;

2 negotiating with the proponents to get them to withdraw the proposal; or 3 omitting the proposal, usually with SEC staff concurrence, on technical

grounds.

At first, the SEC concurred with corporate managers that all social issueswere inadmissible to the formal proxy process. The SEC took pains to prohibitsocial issues from the shareholder proxy process when it formalized the ‘propersubject’ test to exclude proposals designed to advance ‘general economic, politi-cal, racial, religious, social or similar causes’ (federal regulation X-14a-8(c)(2),cited in Emerson and Latcham, 1954:114). This exclusion dates at least from1948, when Greyhound excluded the investor activist James Peck’s proposal todesegregate its buses on ‘proper subject’ grounds. Instead, questioning seniorexecutives from the annual meeting floor was the occasional mode for raisingsocial topics: in 1941, Lewis Gilbert questioned the chairman of Standard Oil ofNew Jersey about oil sales to Germany and Italy. That same year, he debated thechief officer of Curtis Publishing about the isolationist editorial policy expressedin The Saturday Evening Post (Gilbert, 1956). Even a 1964 proposal to GeneralMotors about ties to South Africa, a proposal allowed a decade later, was ruledoff limits by the SEC.

A major shift occurred in 1970. A federal lawsuit (the Medical Committeedecision) led to a revision of the ‘proper subject’ test. At Dow Chemical, theMedical Committee for Human Rights, an anti-war investor group composed ofpublic-interest lawyers and health professionals, submitted a shareholder pro-posal to limit the sale of napalm, which the US military used in Vietnam. Theproposal was submitted too late for inclusion in the 1968 meeting, and when





resubmitted for 1969, the company omitted it as pertaining to an ‘improper’subject for shareholder consideration. The SEC staff concurred with Dow, lead-ing the Medical Committee to sue in federal court. The court supported theMedical Committee’s position that shareholders should consider this and otherimportant social policy issues, leading the SEC to eventually reinterpret 14a-8to allow social issues that raised important policy questions (Talner, 1983).

The revision of the ‘proper subject’ test created a political opportunity forshareholder activists to make formal demands for corporate social responsibility.Central to this new activism was the ideology of corporate and investor account-ability to society (Sethi, 1977; Talner, 1983). These deliberations, part of abroader search for moral social behavior in the ‘organizational society’ (Presthus,1978), resulted in the founding of specialized organizations to confront or reporton the specific issue of investor responsibility for corporate actions. The adventof activist corporate campaigns using the proxy process transformed the corpo-rate agenda by forcing new issues into an old arena, debates in and around theannual meeting (Alinsky, 1971).

Because of the important and complex social policy topics appearing on cor-porate proxy voting cards and being debated at annual meetings, institutionalinvestors founded the non-profit organization, the Investor ResponsibilityResearch Center (IRRC) in 1972. By 1973, IRRC began to track systematicallyall significant social policy shareholder proposals. In contrast to shareholder proposal data from other sources, IRRC tracked all proposals, including thosethat were withdrawn in negotiated settlements and those that were omitted fortechnical reasons.

The emergence of a new agenda

While political opportunities can create room for new actors and claims, socialmovement activists construct new agendas in response to perceptions of success,opportunities, opposition and moral frames (Benford, 1993; Meyer andStaggenborg, 1996). As applied to the field of shareholder activism, this viewsuggests that rather than emerging as a natural outgrowth of fixed investor char-acteristics or interests, the contours of a new agenda only become apparent overmany years as the cumulative result of collective framing, mobilization and collaboration processes. In this section, we track the construction of this new agenda.

Data

IRRC made available all social policy shareholder proposals it tracked routinelybetween 1973 and 2003 for this study. We identified a handful of additionalproposals introduced before 1973 from a secondary historical source (Talner,1983). We examined the data to identify the extent of shareholder activism





across the entire field of social issues. IRRC provided data on proposal year,topic, sponsor and outcome. Table 1 displays a summary of the IRRC dataset infive-year increments, depicting the number of proposals by topic.

While each major topic may illustrate its own agenda dynamics, we usedthis initial sorting of the data to determine whether there was one particularlyvisible and persistent activist agenda, so that we could then examine the role ofinstitutional investors in that campaign. This strategy is analogous to taking the US civil rights movement as the context (and not all social movements), and then examining the role of black churches in the civil rights struggle(McAdam, 1982).1

The preponderance of social issues shareholder proposals, almost one inthree, dealt with the IRRC topic code, ‘International operations’ (see Table 1).We decided to limit our analysis and findings to this issue. At the same time, itis striking how thoroughly this topic dominates the social issues agenda over the35 years of the sample period, accounting for 2158 of 6112 social issues pro-posals. In the following sections, we analyze these proposals to first identify theissues that defined what we refer to as the GSI agenda and then to examine the role of various activists in shaping that agenda.

Defining the agenda

To look at trends in the types of issues shareholder activists raised in the GSIarena, we first subdivided the IRRC data into its two subcomponents of ‘inter-national labor rights’ and ‘international human rights’. Human rights dealswith ties to repressive regimes. The labor standards subcategory examines cor-porations’ role as employers in other countries, with a concern in maintaininghigher standards of employment practice than those that may be required orcustomary in various host countries. The two issues often coincide, as in situa-tions where a repressive national government tolerates forced labor or childlabor, both of which violate international human rights laws as well as interna-tional labor standards. Table 2 illustrates the trend between these two subcate-gories by five-year periods.

The data show first an increase in the human rights category, which thendecreases, followed by an increase in the labor standards subcategory. We notethat the difference between the two categories is somewhat arbitrary, since manyproposals are motivated by human rights concerns associated with a country,while proposals to companies invariably deal with some aspect of the company’soperations, especially the way it treats workers in that problematic environment.Nonetheless, a shift of this type, whether a difference due to coding or a sub-stantive shift in framing, indicates a changing understanding about the natureof the shareholder concern.

To look further at the dynamics of the particular issues that emerged on theGSI agenda, we reclassified the proposals into subcategories. For example, pro-posals on corporate operations in Haiti, Chile, Guatemala and Mexico were





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Table 1 Shareholder proposals on social policy topics, 1973–2003 (5-year intervals)

International Energy/ Military/Period operations Environment Health Employment Weapons All other Total

1973–8 215 45 20 51 23 243 5971979–83 242 213 86 63 88 121 8131984–8 495 102 29 42 72 82 8221989–93 619 297 136 64 95 154 13651994–8 276 275 236 175 56 259 12771999–2003 311 332 158 160 57 220 1238

Total 2158 1264 665 555 391 1079 6112

Source: Investor Responsibility Research Center.

Notes1. 1973–78 period includes six years, not five.2. International Operations includes proposals IRRC subcategorized as ‘Human rights’ and ‘Labor’.3. Health includes proposals IRRC subcategorized as ‘Abortion/Contraceptives’, ‘Infant Formula’, ‘Animals’, ‘Health’, and ‘Healthcare’ as well as proposals on tobacco and food productionand marketing.4. Employment includes proposals IRRC coded as ‘Labor (non-international)’ and ‘Equal employment opportunity’.5.All other includes all other social issues proposals IRRC coded.These included categories for ‘Political contributions’, ‘Charitable giving’, ‘Banking and insurance’ and ‘Miscellaneous socialissues’, which included proposals on investing in poor and minority neighborhoods, broadcast standards, war toys and many other topics. No single one of these categories exceeded 390proposals each.6.These data omit a handful of resolutions submitted before 1973, including at least four GSI proposals described in Talner (1983) and one in Gilbert and Gilbert (1964).

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combined into an ‘Americas’ category. Similarly, proposals about corporate tiesto China, Burma and South Korea were collapsed into an ‘Asia’ category. In‘Other’ were diverse proposals about ties to Nigeria and Angola, and protectingindigenous people’s rights. Table 3 presents the number of proposals by sevenmajor topic areas.

The data show that a country-specific focus is the norm for global corporatesocial issues proposals through the mid-1990s. The earliest and longest-runningmajor issue was South Africa, from the first prescient proposal on record in 1964to the last proposals in 1995. IRRC coded South Africa proposals as primarilyraising human rights issues: corporate ties to, or support for, a repressive regime.Of course, corporate labor standards for operations there were also hotly debated.The history of the Sullivan principles campaign can be described as a workingout of how corporations could remain responsible to South Africans while stilloperating or doing business under apartheid.

Concerns about fair employment in Northern Ireland (290 proposals)picked up as a proposal topic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and remained


Table 2 Global social issues (GSI) proposals, 1969–2003 (5-year intervals)

Period Human rights Labor standards Total

1969–73 14 2 161974–8 198 6 2041979–83 239 3 2421984–8 448 47 4951989–93 449 170 6191994–8 94 182 2761999–2003 79 232 311Total 1520 642 2162

Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983)

Table 3 Proposals for seven largest global social issues (GSI) campaigns, 1969–2003(5-year intervals)

South Northern Middle Anti- General Period Africa Ireland Americas East Asia Communist Other codes

1969–73 6 6 31974–8 64 4 107 23 61979–83 156 16 1 49 13 71984–8 428 41 7 5 5 91989–93 428 128 39 4 4 7 4 51994–8 27 67 62 1 35 3 15 661999–2003 54 3 1 43 16 194

Overall 1109 290 131 113 83 64 82 290

Note: Data omitted from cells when no proposals introduced during period.Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983).




strong with several dozen proposals a year by the end of the period. Someregional campaigns never gathered the same sort of momentum as South Africaor Northern Ireland. Formal shareholder proposals about the Middle Eastappeared and disappeared suddenly (peaking with 107 proposals in 1976 and1977 from the American Jewish Congress about the Arab boycott of Israel).This absence is noteworthy considering the US occupation of Iraq, the invasionof Afghanistan and near-saturation news coverage of the Middle East regionfrom 2001 to 2003. As is possible with any shareholder campaign, the issuebecame more of a matter for US policy than for corporate policy. The number ofproposals in the ‘Americas’ category tapers off in the last period, with only oneproposal each in 2001 and 2003. Again, here, the development of the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement and US policies may have substituted for firm-by-firm commitments to issues of corporate social responsibility for this region.

One of the most striking results of our analysis is the emergence of a gener-alized solution to the problem of human rights and labor standards. As Table 3illustrates, over the last decade of the sample period country and regional cam-paigns appeared to merge into several global codes of conduct proposals. Insteadof lobbying for change in a designated country or region, these proposals instead call for a general review of a corporation’s activity across all or manycountries in which a company does business. The ‘code solution’ to GSI concernsis robust and increasing over time. Recently, activists have moved towards ask-ing companies to develop, implement and report on general codes of vendor orsupplier conduct, or to address international labor standards. By the last period,1999–2003, it was clearly the most vivid GSI campaign, almost four times thesize of any country-specific campaign.

The sheer volume of proposals generated about an issue is not the only mea-sure of whether it is important as part of the GSI agenda. Another measure issuccess. It is difficult to measure success from a social movement perspective as the results of collective mobilization may only become discernible over yearsor decades. Shareholder proposal success can indicate the degree to which a cam-paign captures the attention of corporate managers and concerned investors.While all shareholder proposals are advisory to management, even those withlow vote outcomes have the potential to stimulate problem-solving behavior,collaboration, and policy change. They focus managerial attention publicly andofficially on the issue. Management crafts a response to each proposal theyoppose for printing in the proxy statement, and these management statementsof opposition serve as de facto policy positions. Thus, the shareholder proposalprocess stimulates a policy response automatically, and at a high level of publicelaboration.

With this conception of success as focusing attention and creating debate inmind, we identify two proposal-level measures of success: a relatively high vote,and a negotiated withdrawal by its proponents. A proposal must receive 3 per-cent of the shareholder vote in its first year for resubmission. The second year, it must receive 6 percent. The third year and thereafter, a proposal must receive





10 percent of the vote (17 CFR 240.14a-8). We count this 10 percent thresholdas a success, regardless of how long it took for the proposal to attain it. Someexperts, for example, say that ‘any vote above 15 percent is considered high for asocial issues proposal (unlike corporate governance resolutions, which some-times pass)’ (Mathiasen, 1999: 4). While one might debate between whether touse 10 percent or 15 percent, the overall conclusions of our analysis areunchanged regardless of which threshold is used.

A second measure of success is the voluntary withdrawal of a submittedproposal by its sponsors. Usually the result of a negotiated settlement with man-agement, a withdrawal can be viewed as a success in the sense that proponentshave been satisfied enough to take the step of withdrawing a proposal thatotherwise would come to a vote. IRRC reports that ‘the significance of annualactivity on shareholder resolutions invariably goes beyond the outcomes of theproposals that come to votes; often the nature of withdrawal agreements reachedbetween shareholder proponents and their target companies tells at least equallyimportant stories about the year’s campaigns’ (Mathiasen, 1999: 5). Similarly,the SEC writes that a ‘proposal may also influence management even if it is notput to a shareholder vote. We understand that in some instances managementhas made concessions to shareholders in return for the withdrawal of a proposal’(21 May 1998, Amendments to Rules on Shareholder Proposals, File No.S7–25–97). While we do not have details on withdrawal agreements (they areusually kept private by both parties), withdrawal of a proposal is an indicator ofproponent satisfaction. Each measure – more than 10 percent of the votes castand the withdrawal of a proposal – indicates a way in which sponsors success-fully caught the attention of other investors, corporate managers, or both.

Using these two measures, Table 4 depicts the success rate over time for themajor campaigns. Success rate was defined as the number of proposals thatreceived more than 10 percent of the vote or were withdrawn, divided by thetotal number of proposals put forward in that period.

Successful campaigns build momentum over time, but reach a definite peakonce a critical mass has been attained. For instance, in the case of South Africa,proposals and success rates increased from 25 percent from 1974 to 1983,achieving a peak of 68 percent in 1989–93. After apartheid ended, the issue dis-appeared completely. Northern Ireland proposals similarly enjoyed high successrates, which steadily increased from 10 percent in its first five years (1984–8) to84 percent in the latest period (1999–2003). The success rate for NorthernIreland proposals increased, even as the campaign produced fewer and fewer pro-posals, suggesting greater consensus on that issue.

While some campaigns end because they are successful, others end becausethey fail or move into alternative venues. For example, early on, proposals aboutcorporate ties to the Middle East garnered 36.6 percent success, and proposalsabout communist regimes attained 16.5 percent success, but the number of pro-posals declined relatively quickly. Success is by no means automatic, and may bedependent on the duration of a campaign and the political force of its sponsors,





as well as its relevance to and popularity in the broader society. Proposals thatconsistently get high votes, or that occasion negotiated withdrawals, provide asignal that activists have garnered the attention of managers. Over time, thedata show that a powerful factor in predicting the success of any individual proposal is the degree of success that similar proposals on that topic have already received.

Not all issues remained on the agenda for the same amount of time orreceived the same amount of success. South Africa proposals remained on theagenda for more than 25 years, with an overall average of 59 percent success.Proposals about the Americas and Asia have had high success rates during someperiods. Least successful were the anti-Communism proposals about forced laborin the Soviet Union and China. Indeed, except for the period 1979–83, no pro-posals in this category were successful. And while the Middle East proposalshave had a high average success rate, the short-lived Arab boycott pro-posals account for all of this success.

Another way success varies is through expansion in the number of com-panies receiving proposals on a particular issue. This can dramatically affect the success rates. For example, Asia proposals earned 75 percent success in theperiod 1989–93, but there were only four of them. In the subsequent decade,the campaign expanded dramatically with more successful proposals in absoluteterms, but with lower rates of success. Similarly, the general codes of conductproposals experienced generally increased success over their lifetime, peaking atabout 50 percent for five proposals in the period 1989–93. But a dramaticexpansion in the number of such proposals lowered the success rate slightly, eventhough the absolute success total goes up substantially. During the period1994–8, 66 general code proposals earned 49.2 percent success, increasing to194 with 42 percent successful in the 1999–2003 period. So, while the success


Table 4 Success rates for seven largest global social issues (GSI) campaigns, 1969–2003(5-year intervals)

South Northern Middle Anti- General Period Africa Ireland Americas East Asia Communist Other codes

1969–73 0.0 0.0 0.01974–8 21.0 16.7 36.6 19.0 20.01979–83 25.4 17.0 0.0 16.5 21.7 25.01984–8 60.7 9.7 25.0 0.0 0.0 0.01989–93 68.7 57.6 68.6 0.0 75.0 0.0 66.7 50.01994–8 56.4 80.1 36.5 0.0 25.1 0.0 12.5 49.21999–2003 83.6 33.3 0.0 25.1 35.0 41.7

Overall 59.3 60.3 52.7 36.3 28.9 12.5 23.2 38.3

Note: Data omitted from cells when no proposals introduced during period. Numbers represent percentof proposals during 5-year period that either received more than 10% votes at annual meetings or werewithdrawn through negotiation between corporations and investors.Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983).




rates decreased, the number of companies and absolute number of successesincreased. Used together, number of proposals and success rates over time canindicate relative overall campaign success.

Time frames and agenda construction

A unique feature of our database is that it encompasses the full life cycle of theGSI agenda in this arena. We start at the political opening of a new agenda andthen look at its subsequent development over the next three decades. Ouragenda-focused strategy differs from existing research into shareholder activism.Corporate governance researchers have tried to pick up effects of shareholdergovernance in the immediate responses of markets and firms (see Wahal, 1996,for a summary and empirical test). Others have expanded this analysis by focus-ing on the unique decade starting in 1985 when some institutional investorsgrew more involved in shareholder activism on corporate governance issues(Useem, 1993; Davis and Thompson, 1994).

In contrast to this early work, we suggest the time in which campaignsdevelop is probably on the scale of decades, not single years. Our finding of therecent dominance of global codes provides an important illustration of the slowconstruction of shareholder activist agendas. Table 5 lists representative pro-posals falling into the ‘General code of conduct’ category for both human rightsand labor standards issues, along with a cursory assessment of their prevalenceby decade.

These representative proposals exemplify the types of general codesrequested, and the typical sponsor and outcome. General codes of conduct forinternational operations have been proposed since the early 1970s. However, itis only in the last decade that general codes have become the most prevalenttype of GSI proposal put forward by shareholder activists.

Clearly this historical development built on decades of code developmentprograms for individual countries. Numerous country-specific and regionalhuman rights campaigns laid the groundwork for generalizing to all globalworkplaces through codes of conduct beginning in the 1990s. For example, theSullivan principles for companies operating in South Africa provided a templatefor the MacBride principles for ensuring fair employment practices in NorthernIreland, and now for the global Sullivan principles that companies can signgoverning all their international operations. Increasingly, general code proposalsreference labor standards put forth by international organizations, such as theUnited Nations International Labor Organization (see also Kolk and van Tulder,2002, for a description of this evolution.)

One implication of this finding is that sponsors who seek to influenceagendas realistically must commit for the long term. The impact of a singleinvestor introducing a single proposal to change a single company to get a boostin stock price or operating performance, as researchers often model shareholderactivism’s effects, does not pick up the longer term patterns identified in our





sample. Change may take place, but, as a social movement perspective suggests,discernable effects may only become apparent over the long run.

Shaping the agenda

We now turn from the issues that defined the GSI agenda to the types ofactivists that shaped it. To orient our analysis, we coded each sponsor into one of nine mutually exclusive categories. The sponsor categories were:

1 religious groups and churches; 2 public pension funds;3 individuals;4 TIAA-CREF (the largest private pension fund);5 labor unions;6 socially responsible investment companies;7 activist groups and foundations;8 socially responsible mutual funds;9 universities or student groups.


Table 5 Representative general codes of conduct for global social issues (GSI), (bydecade)

Period Topic Representative proposal Prevalence

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Humanrights

Laborrights

Humanrights

Laborstandards

HumanrightsLaborstandards

Humanrights

Laborstandards

Rare

Rare

Occasional

Rare

Frequent

More frequent

Occasional

Very frequent

1971 proposal from Presbyterian church to Gulf Oil,asking to amend the corporate charter to avoid investment in colonial countries, won about 3% of vote1978 church group proposal at Castle & Cooke, aboutlabor practices overseas, won 3% of vote

1985 church sponsored proposal at Control Data, askingfor a review of review human rights policy and computeruse, won 4.75% of vote1984 individual proposal at American Motors requesting apolicy against the use of slave labor, won 2% of vote

1995 church-sponsored proposal at Unocal requestingadoption of global human rights code, won 6.4% of vote1997 proposal to Disney to review and report on supplier labor standards, sponsored by socially responsibleinvestment firms and churches, won 8.5% of vote

2003 church-sponsored proposal at Boeing requestingadoption of a comprehensive human rights policy, won26% of vote2002 proposal at American Eagle Outfitters requestingimplementation of the International Labor Organization(ILO) standards and third-party monitoring, sponsored bythe New York City pension funds, won 9% of vote




Only a handful of sponsors could not be grouped into one of these cate-gories: the sponsors of six proposals were either missing or not identifiable, andwere coded as ‘unknown’. Because co-sponsorship is commonplace, more spon-sorships exist in the database than actual proposals. Table 6 subdivides overallproposals by type of sponsor in five-year increments.

Focusing on who sponsors international operations proposals, the vastmajority of the 2158 GSI proposals include a religious sponsor or co-sponsor(1312). Public pension funds accounted for the second largest number of spon-sorships (864). Finishing much lower in total sponsorships were individuals(107), TIAA-CREF (88), labor unions (81), socially responsible investmentfirms (61), and activist groups or foundations (50), among others. From this dis-tribution, it is clear that the movement depends significantly on religiousgroups and public pension funds, with other categories providing a supportingrole.

To further examine the relationship between religious groups and pensionfunds, we examine in Table 7 the proposals they introduced across seven majortopics. The sequencing of activism in-campaign demonstrates a division of laborbetween these two types of actors. Religious activists are almost always theinnovators for a topic category, generating proposals before public pensionfunds. Then, pension funds enter as sponsors or co-sponsors, and add volumeand success to the campaign. A close examination of the data by year reveals thatreligious organizations were the innovators on every topic on which public pen-sion funds later presented proposals. Even on the issue of Northern Ireland,where entry appears to be simultaneous, religious organizations introduced thefour first proposals on this issue in 1985, a year before public pension fundsjoined in.

To extend the analysis of the division of labor between religious organiza-tions and pensions funds in the development of a GSI agenda, we examine therelationship between success rates and sponsor types. Table 8 breaks out thesuccess of GSI proposals by sponsor type. Between 1974 and 1978, religiousorganizations sponsored 186 proposals on international human rights issues.According to Table 8, only one received greater than 10 percent of the voteand 53 were withdrawn. This gives religious sponsors an overall success rate of29 percent in the early period. In contrast, during the period 1984–8, reli-gious organizations introduced 298 proposals on the same topic. Of these pro-posals, 93 received more than 10 percent of the vote and 63 were withdrawn,giving them an overall success rate of 54 percent in those years. From1989–93, this category of sponsors had a success rate of 71 percent. Theincreasing success rate correlates with persistence of the South Africa cam-paign over many years and the entry of public pension funds into the processbeginning in the mid-1980s.

Although they enter later, pension funds play an important champion role.In the literature on organizational entrepreneurship (Day, 1994; Venkataramanet al., 1992), innovators are the individuals that come up with and package new





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Table 6 Global social issues (GSI) proposals by Sponsor Type, 1969–2003 (5-year intervals)

Public Activist SR UniversitiesSponsor Religious pension Labor groups and mutual or student type groups funds Individuals TIAA-CREF unions SRI firms foundations funds groups Unknown

Period HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS HR LS❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚

1969–73 13 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 01974–8 186 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 13 0 0 01979–83 187 3 5 0 19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 26 0 0 0 12 0 1 01984–8 259 31 282 34 8 0 52 0 2 0 0 0 8 0 0 0 7 0 4 01989–93 298 56 219 122 15 0 36 0 2 3 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 01994-–8 70 100 0 70 13 6 0 0 7 27 13 7 2 1 2 7 4 0 0 01999–2003 18 83 1 131 18 25 0 0 6 24 36 3 5 6 8 29 2 0 0 0

Total 1031 281 507 357 73 31 88 0 17 54 50 11 43 7 10 36 38 0 6 0

Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983).


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Table 7 Degree of involvement in global social issues (GSI) campaigns by public pension funds (P) and religious investors (R), 1969–2003 (5-year intervals)

Campaign Anti-Topic South Africa Northern Ireland Americas Middle East Asia communist Other General Codes

Period P R T P R T P R T P R T R T R T R T P R T❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚

1969–73 6 6 6 6 3 31974–8 52 64 4 4 107 107 23 23 6 61979–83 3 140 156 16 16 1 22 49 8 13 4 71984–8 282 249 428 34 25 41 7 7 2 5 3 5 4 91989–93 218 293 428 122 15 128 38 39 1 1 4 2 4 7 1 4 4 51994–8 27 27 65 21 67 2 46 62 1 1 29 35 3 9 15 2 37 661999–2003 54 14 54 1 3 1 2 43 9 16 77 75 194

Overall 503 767 1109 275 75 290 2 112 131 1 109 113 33 83 24 64 59 82 79 133 290

Note: Zeros omitted for readability. P=public pension fund, R=religious group,T=total proposals by all sponsors.Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983).


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Table 8 Successful global social issues proposals by pponsor type, 1974–2003 (5-year intervals)

Public Activist Universities/Sponsor Religious pension Labor groups/ SR mutual studenttype groups funds Individuals TIAA-CREF unions SRI firms foundations funds groups

Period >10% W >10% W >10% W >10% W >10% W >10% W >10% W >10% W >10% W❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚

1974–8 1 53 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 101979–83 15 53 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 41984–8 139 61 174 91 1 0 30 18 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 11989–93 128 97 128 52 5 0 16 1 1 8 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 01994–8 16 46 20 27 2 0 0 0 1 13 1 1 0 1 0 3 0 11999–2003 15 35 35 38 7 3 0 0 8 8 2 11 0 3 3 13 0 0

Total successes 311 339 352 202 13 4 46 19 10 28 3 15 0 5 3 16 4 16Success rate (%) 23.7 25.8 40.7 23.0 12.5 3.8 52.3 22.0 16.4 45.9 4.2 21.0 0 10.0 7.9 42.0 8.7 35.0

Notes: >10% = Proposal received more than 10% of the votes cast.W = Proposal withdrawn by sponsors as part of a negotiated agreement.No GSI proposals were successful by our measure before 1974.Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983).


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ideas. Champions are the individuals that help innovators navigate the socio-political environment of the corporation to attract attention and resources.Public pension funds play a similar champion role in assisting innovating reli-gious groups to gain clout with other investors and management. Their entrycorresponds with higher levels of success, particularly vote success. On the topicof South Africa, for example, public pension funds are major sponsors or co-sponsors from 1984 to 1993, the period of greatest vote success. Similarly, thesuccess rates for Northern Ireland began to increase with the involvement ofpublic pension funds from 1986 onwards. On some issues with lower averagesuccess, pension funds have not been involved much or at all. This is true in pro-posals about the Americas, the Middle East and Asia, and the anti-Communismproposals.

While our analysis cannot differentiate between public pension funds caus-ing the success, or merely entering the arena because they forecast that the issuehas or would shortly become successful, prior research demonstrates that compa-nies do pay more attention to public pension funds (Davis and Thompson,1994). Accordingly, those issues that attract public pension funds as co-sponsorstend to do better and garner more corporate attention. Public pensions havebeen active generating large numbers of proposals on only three of the sevenmajor campaigns: South Africa (10 years), Northern Ireland (20 years) andGeneral Codes (5 years). In addition, they tend to support no more than twomajor campaigns at a time with large numbers of proposals.

The general code campaign illustrates a new heterogeneity in sponsor typesnot seen in prior issues. Table 9 depicts the major sponsors of general code proposals.

In Table 9, it is clear that religious groups have escalated their involvementin this campaign over the last decade, from 37 proposals in 1994–8 to 75 in1999–2003. A further examination of the general codes sponsorship pattern,however, reveals another interesting shift. While public pension funds are amajor sponsor in the last period, other types of sponsors have also entered thearena, some relatively new players in shareholder activism. Sponsor type diver-sity is highest on this issue than on any other in the study. For instance, sociallyresponsible mutual funds were late-movers in proposal activity on global socialissues, introducing only 46 proposals across all topics. Table 9 demonstrates thatthe vast majority (38) of those proposals were on the topic of general labor stan-dards. In addition, individuals, labor unions, socially responsible investmentfirms, and activist groups all enter as major players on this issue in the last decade.

To summarize our findings, the data suggest that religious organizationshave played a critical role in fulfilling an innovator function in the developmentof a new agenda. Social movement organizations generate new campaign ideas,frame them in relation to dominant themes in society and build coalitions, andreligious groups took up this work for the long term on GSI. It is interesting tonote that in contrast to predictions by business around 1970, shareholder





activism did not degenerate into a free-for-all of random claims (Emerson andLatcham, 1954; Talner, 1983). Instead, it evolved into a fairly narrow set of reg-ular claims revolving around ever more generalized campaigns. Religiousgroups proceeded in an orderly and disciplined manner over many decades.

Explaining religious organizations’ activism

What explains the persistence of religious organizations in our sample? Existingtheories most often propose financial motives for investor activists. Research infinance based on agency theory supposes a value creating benefit from increasedinvestor monitoring, exemplified by shareholder activism. But many studies ofpension fund activism and corporate governance proxy proposals find no mean-ingful financial return to investor activism as monitoring behavior (see Karpoff,et al., 1996; Wahal, 1996). A second argument suggests a symbolic effect ofshareholder proposals – investors signal to managers that they are paying atten-tion (Black, 1992). In this view, it is still the funds with larger, more diversifiedequity portfolios who are predicted to become activists. The largest pensionfunds with the widest scope of activity and the longest investment horizons aremost likely to invest resources in activism with the expectation of a financialreturn (Ryan and Schneider, 2002). Yet if only the richest and most profession-ally run engage in shareholder proposals, why then have religious organizationsbeen the most prolific activists in our database? Most religious organizationshave nowhere near the financial asset base or professional staff of public pension systems.

We suggest that a social movement approach to shareholder activism bestexplains these findings. In essence, social movement outcomes are mainly col-


Table 9 Major sponsors of general codes of conduct for global social issues (GSI),1969–2003 (5-year intervals)

Public Activist SR Religious pension Labor SRI groups and mutual

Period groups funds Individuals unions firms foundations funds

1969–73 31974–8 61979–83 4 11984–8 4 2 51989–93 4 11994–8 37 2 12 15 8 1 51999–2003 75 77 28 24 9 9 33

Overall 133 79 43 39 18 15 38

Note: Major sponsor categories include those producing more than 10 proposal sponsorships overall.University and student groups submitted two proposals, and one sponsor was not identifiable.Sources: Investor Responsibility Research Center;Talner (1983).




lective. This view, first articulated in the field of shareholder activism by Davisand Thompson (1994), has yet to sufficiently inform research on this area. Butthis perspective is the one that best fits the empirics: as a social movement, reli-gious organizations, and perhaps all activist investors, are trying to mobilizeideas, sentiments and collective resources to advance moral claims and agendas.Despite their lack of a discernible financial stake in the outcome and the factthat their proposals rarely gain majority votes, religious organizations havetaken a patient and collaborative approach to shareholder activism in order toshape public discourse on global social issues over the long run.

The organizing strategies of religious organizations illustrate a social move-ment approach to shareholder activism. Their entry into the field once theproper subject test was eliminated was marked by moral dialogue and deliberateorganization to generate large numbers of proposals routinely and over the longrun. Mainstream Christian church groups came to see shareholder proposals as anatural outgrowth of their mission to work for social good (Talner, 1983). In1971, six Protestant denominations formed the Interfaith Committee on SocialResponsibility, which would eventually become the Interfaith Center onCorporate Responsibility (ICCR) (Talner, 1983). ICCR coordinated activism byreligious organizations with stock investments – convents, monasteries, reli-gious health care institutions, religious schools, etc. – all of which had retire-ment money for their members in the stock market. While some large religiousgroups sponsored proposals on their own (e.g. the Evangelical Lutheran Churchof America), they simultaneously worked in consultation with ICCR. ICCR, inturn, helped dozens and later hundreds of smaller religious organizations (e.g.the Sisters of Loretto of Kentucky, a Catholic social justice mission) to produceand co-sponsor proposals on social topics.

As a contrasting case, universities and foundations also responded to theopening of a new agenda for social issues, but not as proposal sponsors. In1971 and 1972, Harvard, Yale and the Ford Foundation conducted officialuniversity inquiries into the moral obligations of institutional equity owner-ship (Talner, 1983). In 1971 two Princeton economists weighed in on thequestion of whether investors should use the proxy to pursue socially desirablegoals (Malkiel and Quandt, 1971). Pressing views for corporate changethrough available channels might be more effective, the authors argued, thansimply selling the stock of an objectionable company. Between 1970 and1975, high-profile organizations such as churches, universities, and founda-tions revised their institutional missions to include the substantive scrutinyand use of the proxy process for their stock holdings (Simon et al., 1972).However, in contrast to the religious community’s quick routinization andexpansion of shareholder proposal sponsorship activity, most institutionalinvestors let churches and activist groups introduce the proposals while theydebated their votes internally.

Our findings do not contradict theory that identifies an important role forpublic pension funds in pushing for new corporate agendas since the mid-





1980s. Instead, our argument extends and situates it. Other organizations, espe-cially religious ones, were the innovators that developed and framed the moralprinciples at stake that preceded the entry of public pension funds. Publicpension funds have played a complementary role in agenda-creation by cham-pioning the issues brought forth by religious innovators.

Discussion

In the social movements of society, activist campaigns are oriented not onlytowards the state, but also towards other major institutions, like large corpora-tions (Meyer and Tarrow, 1998). When it comes to organized investor activism,most theoretical statements emphasize the importance of regulatory changes,resource shifts and large investors with long-term investment horizons makingaccountability claims on corporate managers (Useem, 1993; Davis andThompson, 1994; Ryan and Schneider, 2002). Our analysis emphasizes a dif-ferent set of dynamics: unexpected innovators, coalitions, framing and re-framing, and varieties of collective success over long periods of time. We foundthat over a series of campaigns in the social issues domain, an innovator-champion dynamic led to a series of apparent successes. Second, the agenda cameto be less about specific outrages and more about ensuring generalized account-ability. Third, the success metric moved from an emphasis on the vote to a com-bination of vote and negotiation outcomes.

Analyzing in greater detail the who and why in investor activism is impor-tant given the presumptions of prior theory and research, as well as ongoingdebates in society about how to create corporate accountability. Prevailing the-ories emphasize the strictly financial calculus that an investor activist might useto decide whether to engage in a shareholder campaign. Only those with largestakes and a long-term horizon will engage the proxy process, otherwise it is tooexpensive to use (Ryan and Schneider, 2002). This has been translated into theimagery that large public pension funds will spearhead the important share-holder campaigns, and that in turn, the important campaigns will be those thatfeature public pension funds as prominent sponsors. Lost from this account isthe concept that moral claims also enter into activist motivation.

In contrast, our findings suggest that activism can be as much influencedby moral concerns as by financial interests. Financial returns and assets undermanagement may have little to do with the degree of activism exhibited by vari-ous activist investor groups. Instead, moral beliefs about what is right andwrong are strongly reflected in the large numbers of proposals introduced onsocial policy issues, and co-sponsored by public pension funds. One implicationis that financial motivations may be subsidiary to moral motivations. In otherwords, rather than corporate governance activism being different in kind fromsocial issues activism, perhaps both result from core beliefs in society about whatis morally desirable in corporate management (Proffitt, 2001; Marens, 2002).





The financial stakes could, for example, serve as a recruiting ploy made bylonger-term activists (individuals and religious groups) to provide ideologicalcover for their more recent allies (state pension funds, TIAA-CREF, laborunions). Whatever the mechanism, the restoration of meaning and moralauthority to studies of investor activism is one important avenue for future research.

Our findings also suggest that researchers should consider expanding sam-pling frames. In the social issues domain, it took 35 years of persistence to pro-duce the discernible coalition-building and framing process documented here. Ifa similarly ambitious time frame is adopted for research on corporate gover-nance, a new picture may emerge in that area as well. The ‘pension fund revolu-tion’, as it was described by Drucker (1976), can be situated in a 60-yearstruggle initiated and sustained for many years by determined, wealthy indivi-duals and expanding since to include labor and religious groups (Proffitt, 2001;Marens, 2002). Recent observable successes came on the heels of and capitalizedon a pre-existing movement.

It is noteworthy that so much attention is paid to the motives of publicpension funds in managerial research when fewer than a dozen such funds everuse the shareholder proposal process. In contrast, the roles of hundreds of indi-viduals and churches that built and shaped the activist agenda are relativelyundertheorized. So at a minimum, an expanded sampling frame that emphasizesthe content of the mobilization process, rather than the appearance of the mostvivid participants, is an important avenue for future research.

One corollary to this expanded frame is the rediscovery of a tight linkageamong actors in an evolving coalition, and between coalitions and possible fram-ings of the movement over time. Prior research emphasizing corporate gover-nance tends to treat all proposals as cut from the same cloth, the oft-used term‘anti-management proposals’ embodies this combat imagery. But the socialissues evidence here shows that proposals and proponents are linked over time indynamic configurations. Coalitions of two, three or more types of investoractivists work together first on country campaigns, regional campaigns and,eventually, a growing general code campaign. The reapplication of this approachto corporate governance may result in a different version of that activism story,one that includes nuances of how pension funds were recruited and enticed tointroduce proposals that had been introduced by other types of investors beforethem, but with a different framing and a different effect.

This study did not systematically examine the consequences of shareholderpressure on subsequent firm-level activity. Instead, it focused on the way inwhich shareholder activism produces and shapes an agenda for strategic discus-sion. In other words, we examined the creation of the stimuli that attract firmattention to social issues, instead of looking at individual firm responses to thesetopics (Margolis and Walsh, 2003). One implication of our findings is that weexpect that corporate reactions to individual proposals will change dependingon the degree of maturity of the broader campaign. Historical context, as well as





firm characteristics, should matter in understanding corporate responses toshareholder activism.

More fundamentally, the results of this study raise questions of what level ofanalysis success should be measured. Success does not have to be defined interms of particular proposals. Success can also be defined from the perspective ofactivist organizations working together to shape collective agendas. Forinstance, the sheer organizational capability to introduce proposals over longperiods of time could be conceived as one form of success. The ability to gener-alize and include multiple campaigns under a new, more resonant frame couldbe another. In other words, conceptualizing the goals of social movement orga-nizing processes goes beyond whether an individual proposal wins a vote at agiven company in a given year. Examining the collective outcomes of actors andissues over time using a variety of metrics for influence is another important areafor future research.

Shareholder mobilization around global social issues represents an importantand wide-ranging case to analyze the dynamics of interconnected shareholdercampaigns over an extended period of time. Global social issues have been a per-sistent concern of investors in multinational companies because these topics oftenremain outside the jurisdiction of national legal systems. Given the limitations oflaw in regulating corporate behavior across national boundaries, extra-regulatorymechanisms like the shareholder proposal process are particularly important inbringing GSI concerns to the attention of corporate managers.

There is some evidence that the major shareholder campaigns during the1970s and 1980s, especially those dealing with businesses in South Africa andNorthern Ireland, eventually influenced the behavior of multinational firmswith ties to those countries. Many corporations ended various locally toleratedforms of discrimination, relocated facilities, ended business ties, or substantiallychanged business operations in response to the collective pressure of shareholderand other activist campaigns (Cooper, 1989; Auditor General of California,1990; Donfried, 1996). In contrast, the consequences for firm behavior from therelatively newer social issues topic of global corporate social issues are stillemerging (Varley et al., 1998; Jenkins et al., 2002). The general code campaignsare in full force and our data demonstrate that a wide array of institutionalinvestors has pushed strongly for a corporate engagement about this issue. Itremains to be seen, however, what success this relatively young movement willultimately achieve in influencing substantive firm behavior.

Note

1 This approach differs from most research on corporate governance, which begins with theselection of actors first (public pension funds), and then studies their influence on firms. Weare interested in the development of the GSI agenda itself, so we start there regardless ofwhether public pension funds are present.





Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Diana Zahn for her work.

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W.Trexler Proffitt, Jr is an assistant professor of Organization Studies in the Departmentof Business, Organizations and Society at Franklin & Marshall College. He teaches classes





focusing on organizational strategy, corporate social responsibility and conflict resolution.Hisresearch emphasizes the institutional and social environment of business. In particular, hespecializes in the role of ideology and ideas in the study of social conflict at the intersectionof business and society. Address: Franklin & Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, PA17604, USA. [email: [email protected]]

Andrew Spicer is an assistant professor in the Sonoco International Business Departmentat the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. His research and teachingfocuses on the impact of globalization on nations, organizations and individuals. He has stud-ied privatization, financial market development, corporate restructuring and ethical decision-making in the context of economic reform in post-communist societies. Address: MooreSchool of Business, 1705 College St, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA.[email: [email protected]]





Documents

Shaping the shareholder activism agenda: institutional investors and global social issues