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This study aims to provide an overview of the development of corporate governance and ownership structure literature and offers a synopsis of the top contributors, influential articles, journals and potential research prospects on this subject.

This study used bibliometric analysis to review the literature. In all, 1,368 articles published between 1992 and 2022 in Scopus-indexed journals were considered.

This review reveals the top leading authors, institutions, countries and sources in the ownership structure research. Using bibliographic coupling, this study fetches four significant clusters. The theme of the first cluster revolved around cash holding. The second and third groups revealed how distinct characteristics of ownership impact the performance of the firm and disclosure decisions, respectively. The last and fourth cluster deals with risk-taking activities in financial institutions. Furthermore, this study suggests a road map in each cluster for future research.

Ownership structure plays a significant role in corporate governance by affecting manager incentives and determining the extent of monitoring. Previous studies have contributed to this field while focusing on the board of directors. However, no study synthesises the literature on ownership structure within corporate governance, which is the core element of the corporate governance system. Hence, this study gives a comprehensive overview and determines the latest and prominent research in ownership structure within corporate governance through bibliometric analysis.

This chapter provides a context for The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology. It offers an overview of the small, yet burgeoning literature dedicated to ‘criminology activism’, which includes engagement with public criminology and various brands of critical criminology, as well as zemiology or the study of social harm beyond narrow state-centric definitions of crime. Among other things, the chapter considers the role academics might play in addressing social and criminal injustice, and the new opportunities afforded to both academics and activists – including citizen journalists and media professionals – by digital technologies and social media when intervening in campaigns for justice and formal criminal legal processes. To answer the question, why now, the chapter argues we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented period of upheaval requiring action from activists and academics alike, including criminologists engaged in social scientific research operating beyond the delusions of objectivity and value-neutrality, that is, politically engaged research aiming to remedy not only the absence of meaningful state intervention in crime and harm but also expose the role of corporations and the state itself in prosecuting and perpetuating crime and harm.

This chapter defines and provides examples of activist criminology methods (ACM). Although many examples of ACM studies are provided, to date, no publications use this identification. The authors begin by questioning not only the feasibility but also the desirability of the ‘neutral scientist’. The authors then summarise the predecessors and contributors to ACM: ‘activist research’, participatory action research, and public criminology. The components of ACM are (1) including the public; (2) using reflexivity; and (3) ensuring the findings are relayed to the public and ideally, used to create change. Including the public has two subsections, the victims/survivors and the activists resisting the injustice studied. The authors discuss some of the challenges in conducting ACM, including academic marginalisation of this scholarship (and thus the difficulty of pursuing it, particularly if untenured), securing collaboration with activists and/or survivors, reflexivity on the power differences when collaborating with marginalised communities, and the near impossibility of achieving all the goals of ACM in one study. Although unnamed until now, ACM, as we describe them, has been conducted for hundreds of years around the world. The growing number of scholars historically kept out of academia due to race, gender, sexuality, class, and criminal history is no doubt related to the vastly increasing frequency of studies employing ACMs, as well as discussions and advancement of these methods.

Since 1980s, institutional child sexual abuse has been ‘discovered’ as an internationally recognisable social problem. Public inquiries have become the most dominant mode of response to this, having been enacted throughout much of the western world. Driven by demands from victims/survivors for collective recognition, these have drawn on features of transitional justice as an important means of truth telling. While the role of survivors in precipitating the enactment of public inquiries has been well documented, less well understood is how social activism has been influenced in the aftermath of such inquiries. In this chapter, the authors explore a local phenomenon known as Loud Fence that arose in the Australian town of Ballarat as a case study to consider the relationship between activism and social change that can occur in the wake of official truth telling.

Criminologists spend many hours debating whether they should intervene in the real world to make it better or whether they should limit themselves to taking a detached stance in their research. Debates about the role of criminologists in society have followed the script of the modern academy, which praises the lone hero researcher. Yet, the challenges criminologists confront with their activism have deep cultural and structural roots that only collective action can transform. The injustices criminologists confront (defined as harm or crime committed by individual or collective actors that is corporate-sponsored or state-sponsored) require that criminologists exchange the ‘I’ for a ‘we’, and ask how we can collectively mobilise to transform society. In this chapter, the author discusses how Colombian Indigenous communities and the author, in partnership, have used a pedagogy of liberation to transform the deep sources of violence fuelling their genocide.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.

Following victimisation of many types, knowing one is not alone in their experience, or the reactions to that experience, has been identified as comforting and supportive of recovery in survivors of violence and abuse. Information is often provided by support groups, professionals, or victim/survivor organisations, which still fill a significant gap in the criminal justice system, which offers insufficient support to victims of crime. However, as many victims do not engage with support services or the criminal justice system, they may be at risk of not receiving such crucial support. The rising popularity of so called ‘hashtag activism’ has however provided victims and survivors with a worldwide platform to share experiences, reactions, information, support, and solidarity. This chapter explores the impact of key hashtags, such as #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter, via a critical evaluation of outcomes, including policy, cultural, and legislative impact, to unpick their successes and failures, with a focus on support and community-building, marginalisation and performative allyship.