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As China is transforming from a planned economy a market‐oriented economy, private enterprise plays a prominent role in China's economy today. This paper introduces the status of private enterprise and focuses on its records management. By explaining the changes in China's policy towards the private sector, it deals mainly with practice in both archive administration and the records management of private companies. Government archives administration changed along with national policy from serving only the public sector to serving both public and private sectors evenly. For the private sector, archival consciousness is the key element in its fledging stage of records management. The paper also analyzes the characteristics of private companies that are different from state‐owned ones and the advantages and disadvantages of records management, and predicts some aspects of its development.

The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide insight as to why some privately held small-to-medium sized firms (SMEs) have been able to outperform their peers in terms of their performance defined as revenue growth, profit growth, growth in number of employees and markets. Little is known about privately held firms and what drives their performance. The second purpose is to synthesize and provide clarity to the extant literature on rapid-growth SMEs (gazelles). The third purpose is to bring a unifying theoretical lens to the literature.

The research was conducted using elite interviews with 47 informants drawn from 21 rapid-growth, private companies. Qualitative methods were used to identify themes related to the strategies used by these firms to outperform their peers over a five-year period.

The study organizes and summarizes the extant literature on rapid-growth companies, provides support for some findings, and clarifies equivocal findings. It also suggests that early strategic choices made by the owners of private firms along with their attitudes and capabilities positioned the private firms for rapid growth. The Morgan and Hunt (1994) trust–commitment theory of relationship marketing emerged from the data as the model used most often by rapid-growth private firms and the one that best integrates the factors driving private firm performance. A modified, two-stage model appears to be warranted. The first stage focuses on respect for the value employees bring, and building their trust and commitment is an essential first step that subsequently drives the second stage of the model – building customer trust and commitment. While some of the outcomes are similar to those suggested by Morgan and Hunt, new outcomes (collaborative innovation, citizenship behaviors, sustained growth, and premium prices) also emerged as important outcomes in this study.

This study provides owners of private firms with insight on how to build and grow their firms in a rapid and sustainable fashion.

Little research has been undertaken on private firms. This study addresses this knowledge gap. The modified trust–commitment relationship marketing model that emerged from the data had not been utilized to date in the field of rapid-growth firms and it provides an integrating theory that explains the performance of rapid-growth private firms.

This paper aims to investigate the motivations behind the publication of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, and particularly the effect of information asymmetry between firms and their owners.

A natural experiment contrasting the CSR reporting of private vs public firms is used to test whether the degree of information asymmetry is a significant factor in the decision to publish CSR reports. Using a hand-collected sample of the 239 largest US private companies matched with publicly-traded firms, the effect of these inherently different information environments on CSR reporting is tested through logistic regression. Factors suggested by stakeholder and legitimacy theories are tested for their differential impact on private vs public firms’ decisions to publish a CSR report.

Results indicate that private firms are less likely to publish a CSR report than similar public firms. Public firms also follow Global Reporting Initiative guidelines more frequently, consistent with signaling report quality to dispersed investors. A subsample of private companies facing greater information asymmetry is found to be similar to public firms in their reporting behavior, reinforcing the link between information asymmetry and CSR disclosure. Further analysis suggests that non-owner stakeholders play an important role in private companies’ CSR reporting decisions.

In addition to accounting and governance scholars, the findings should interest private firm managers preparing for an initial public offering (IPO), as the evidence suggests that CSR reporting is used to communicate information to dispersed investors. The insight into reporting motivations should be useful to accountants engaged in CSR consultation and assurance.

With the growing attention paid to the CSR performance of firms, demonstrated by the growth in socially responsible investing, the study provides evidence that effective communication of CSR information to investors may play a key role in CSR-engaged firms’ disclosure strategies.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the CSR reporting decisions of a large sample of publicly-traded and privately-held firms. The results add to our understanding of what motivates firms to publish CSR reports, highlighting the importance of information asymmetry between the firm and its owners.

This paper aims to explore how fund managers (FMs) deal with major problems of ignorance and uncertainty in stock selection and in asset allocation decisions.

Interviews were conducted with 40 fund managers in the period October 1997 to January 2000. A seven stage approach was adopted to sift through and process the large volumes of case data. The interview case data formed the basis for identifying common patterns and themes across the cases.

The case data revealed the nature of this private information agenda concerning intellectual capital or intangibles and the dynamic connections between these variables in the value creation process. The case data provided insight into how the book value and market value gap arose and the special role of information on intangibles and intellectual capital in valuing the company.

The fund management behaviour has important implications for regulatory policy issues on insider information, on corporate disclosure, the corporate governance role of financial institutions, and for the governance of financial institutions.

The paper focuses on issues of importance in an increasingly concentrated and global FM industry.

Our research is about the trade in material goods from Asia to Europe over this period, and its impact on Europe’s consumer and industrial cultures. It entails a comparative study of Europe’s East India Companies and the private trade from Asia over the period. The commodities trade was heavily dependent on private trade. The historiography to date has left a blind spot in this area, concentrating instead on corruption and malfeasance. Taking a global history approach we investigate the trade in specific consumer goods in many qualities and varieties that linked merchant communities and stimulated information flows. We set out how private trade functioned alongside and in connection with the various European East India companies; we investigate how this changed over time, how it drew on the Company infrastructure, and how it took the risks and developed new and niche markets for specific Asian commodities that the Companies could not sustain.

The UK private finance initiative (PFI) public policy is heavily criticised. PFI contracts are highly profitable leading to incentives for PFI private-sector companies to support PFI public policy. This contested nature of PFIs requires legitimation by PFI private-sector companies, by means of impression management, in terms of the attention to and framing of PFI in PFI private-sector company annual reports. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

PFI-related annual report narratives of three UK PFI private-sector companies, over seven years and across two periods of significant change in the development of the PFI public policy, are analysed using manual content analysis.

Results suggest that PFI private-sector companies use impression management to legitimise during periods of uncertainty for PFI public policy, to alleviate concerns, to provide credibility for the policy and to legitimise the private sector’s own involvement in PFI.

While based on a sizeable database, the research is limited to the study of three PFI private-sector companies.

The portrayal of public policy in annual report narratives has not been subject to prior research. The research demonstrates how managers of PFI private-sector companies present PFI narratives in support of public policy direction that, in turn, benefits PFI private-sector companies.

We investigate whether active involvement of private equity firms in their portfolio companies during the holding period of a later-stage private equity investment is related to increased levels in operating performance of these companies. Our analysis of unique survey data on 267 European buyouts and secondary performance data on 29 portfolio companies using partial least squares structural equation modeling indicates that private equity firms, that is, their board representatives, can increase operating performance not only by monitoring the behavior of top managers of portfolio companies, but also by becoming involved in strategic decisions and supporting top managers through the provision of strategic resources. Strategic resources, in particular expertise and networks, provided by private equity firm representatives in the form of financial and strategic involvement are associated with increases in the financial performance and competitive prospects of portfolio companies. Operational involvement, however, is not related to changes in operating performance. In addition to empirical insights into the different types of involvement and their effects, this chapter contributes to the buyout literature by providing support for the suggested broadening of the theoretical discussion beyond the dominant perspective of agency theory through developing and testing a complementary resource-based view of involvement. This allows taking into account not only the monitoring, but also the more entrepreneurial supporting element of involvement by private equity firms.

Explores the central role that private information on corporate intangibles plays in the private corporate governance role of financial institutions (FIs). The institutional fund managers’ (FMs) private understanding of many qualitative or intellectual capital factors driving corporate performance was the basis for wide‐ranging corporate governance influence concerning financial performance and conventional Cadbury‐style corporate governance issues. This was primarily a private, implicit corporate governance process by FIs and their FMs during good corporate performance. Also reveals how the nature of FM corporate governance influence became more interventionist with adverse changes in corporate performance factors, in FI‐side influence factors and in environmental circumstances. The qualitative intangible factors, especially board and top management qualities, were central to this more proactive form of intervention. Finally, discusses the case results within the research literature on the corporate governance role of FIs, identifies new directions for research and discusses policy implications briefly.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which social, ethical and environmental (SEE) disclosure is being integrated into institutional investment. The aim is also to investigate the interplay between private and public SEE disclosure.

The paper uses a grounded theory methodology involving interviews with 21 members of the UK institutional adjustment community.

The paper found that institutional investors did not consider that public SEE disclosure was adequate for their portfolio investment decisions, suggesting that SEE disclosure was decision‐useful. Consequently, this perceived market failure in public SEE disclosure has been supplemented by the development of sophisticated private SEE disclosure channels. Further, the interviews indicated that this private SEE disclosure process was becoming dialogic in nature, since not only were institutional investors initiating the engagement process with companies but also companies were starting to request information on the SEE disclosure required by institutional investors. This finding contrasts with previous work which found that the private disclosure process in financial reporting was essentially user‐oriented and uni‐directional.

This paper highlights the importance of SEE disclosure to a crucial user group, institutional investors. The research contributes to the SEE disclosure literature by revealing details of the evolving private SEE disclosure process for the first time.