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The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 prompted a significant debate on corporate governance and shareholder empowerment. A question arises as to whether shareholders ought to be further empowered to have a greater influence over the companies’ activities. Yet, it is not self-evident that shareholder empowerment ensures better-run companies’ corporate activities. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to critically examine, identify and explain the corporate regulation forms and control collectively to evaluate the effectiveness of shareholder empowerment fully.

To do so, this paper sets out a comparative analysis approach between two jurisdictions, the UK and Delaware in the USA. The paper further addresses by undertaking three case studies; Barclays Plc which illustrated the Comply or Explain role, AVIVA (2012) that concentrated on the impact of the shareholder revolt, and the case of Hills Stores Co. v. Bozic (2000), which involved a claim brought by shareholders on the grounds of a breach of fiduciary duty.

This paper argues that the shareholder empowerment theoretically provides an effective means through which corporate activities can be regulated. However, to do this, account must be taken that a distinction should be made between long-term and short-term investors to encourage shareholder engagement by responsible long-term investors. Furthermore, the shareholders can exercise their powers effectively and influence the Board’s decision to award executive compensation.

This paper offered two distinct contributions: assessing whether in times of crisis shareholder empowerment represents a way to regulate corporate activities and by assessing the distinction between the perception of shareholder empowerment and the reality in practice.

This paper aims to explore the reasons why the USA makes a good comparator for the UK when it comes to corporate governance.

The paper is largely theoretical.

The paper finds that the USA has become a laboratory for ideas in corporate governance and the UK can learn a lot in areas such as takeovers and shareholders’ rights.

The paper explains the reasons why the UK and the USA have dominated research literature in corporate governance. The findings and arguments raised throughout the paper are very original.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the various proposals to regulate executive pay in the UK. Situated within a corporate governance context, it focuses on using shareholder empowerment as a mechanism to formulate a regulatory strategy to quell the continued furore that surrounds the issue.

Using an expansive array of different academic materials, the paper adopts the approach of using critical analysis to provide an original insight into the popular and contentious issue of executive remuneration.

The paper finds that the UK Government’s current proposal to regulate executive remuneration, via the shareholder empowerment device of a binding vote on remuneration, will primarily consist of symbolic rather than practical significance.

The paper provides important social implications, as it provides a new prospective and insight into the well-covered issue of executive remuneration.

The paper draws on a host of traditional and modern academic materials to create a new viewpoint on the issue of remuneration. Moreover, the paper is original insofar that it ties the issue of shareholder empowerment into the conceptual design and formulation of company law and corporate law theory.

The study explores the use of professional investor relations (IR) practices in South African (SA) listed companies to understand which theories may be responsible for IR's adoption and growth in South Africa, an emerging economy. Therefore, this study evaluates shareholder value maximisation, stakeholder and legitimization theory and institutional isomorphism theory as possible theories to explain professional IR behaviour in SA listed companies.

The study design is qualitative and exploratory, based on a questionnaire developed and sent to all companies listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange (JSE).

The results indicate evidence of isomorphic spread to SA environments from practices observed in the UK and the USA, which we find are mostly performed to promote shareholder interests. The data suggest some evidence that the communication needs of black economic empowerment and environmental, social and governance (ESG) investors are given priority, suggesting the utility of professional IR to obtain legitimisation from society. Contrary to expectation is that social media communication channels are not extensively used.

The descriptive nature of this study may be valuable to IR practitioners to improve SA IR practises, while neglected legitimisation opportunities with regard to the needs of ESG and black economic empowerment shareholders may be fruitfully addressed by practitioners.

This study innovates in its use of legitimisation theory and isomorphism theory to develop the study's expectations. Social problems provide contextual elements unique to SA which provides a good opportunity to test the expectation of legitimisation theory's influence on professional IR practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of shareholder rights on the quality of reported earnings using a proxy for strength of shareholder rights. In the analysis, the influence of institutional investors on shareholder rights is incorporated and their joint impact on earnings quality is studied.

Alternative regression models with the level of discretionary accrual (DA) as the dependent variables are estimated. To measure DA, a model developed by DeChow et al. is used. Higher levels of DA imply lower quality of earnings. The independent variables of interest are shareholder rights (measured by a modified Gomper's index) and institutional ownership (measured in three different ways discussed in the paper). A number of control variables, which prior research indicates, that can influence earnings quality is also included.

It is found that stronger shareholder rights are associated with higher earnings quality. However, when firms' stocks are held predominantly by institutions with short investment horizons (transient institutions), the role of shareholder rights in constraining aggressive and opportunistic management of earnings is significantly diminished or rendered essentially ineffective.

This research adds to the understanding of how levels of institutional ownership moderate the association between shareholder rights and earnings quality.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the Board Neutrality Rule and the primacy afforded to shareholders during takeovers is justified under common law and policy.

The paper provides a detailed assessment of the role play by the board neutrality rule and whether this is supported by takeover law and Company law. A review of case law and statutes is provided. The paper is largely analytical.

The paper finds little justification for the continued imposition of the Board Neutrality Rule.

The paper adds to the growing body of research literature which has analysed the role played by the Board Neutrality Rule during takeovers.

This paper aims to elaborate on the extent to which the Indonesian legal framework has provided room for shareholder activism and the extent to which shareholder activism has been implemented in Indonesia.

This study combines normative and empirical legal research methods. Indonesian laws and regulations are analyzed aside from the analysis of empirical data and court decisions on shareholder activism implementation.

Indonesian laws and regulations have accommodated shareholders’ activism and shareholders have started to rectify mismanagement and abuse of power that causes loss to the company through derivative lawsuits. Despite this, Indonesian shareholders are still passive, shown by the number of questions asked in the general meetings of shareholders despite the high attendance percentage. Shareholders have also formed associations to gather more influence on the company’s decision-making process.

The empirical observation in this study was limited to LQ45 companies of the February to July 2021 period. This study can be useful to improve corporate governance and corporate communication in a company to encourage higher participation of individual/minority shareholders. This study also serves as an extension to numerous studies on shareholder protection, corporate governance and corporate law in Indonesia.

Study on shareholder activism in Indonesia is still rare, despite the rising urgency of company supervision and monitoring to prevent mismanagement. To fill in that gap, this research hopes to initiate discussion on shareholder activism in relation to shareholder protection, corporate governance and corporate law implementation.

This paper aims to demonstrate that state shareholders are confronted with contradictory logics leading to institutional contradictions that activist shareholders can exploit. The competing logics of the state as shareholder and their impact on corporate governance and shareholder activism offer fertile grounds for research advances in Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs).

Through an extensive literature review of state ownership, institutional contradictions and shareholder activism, this paper analyzes two case studies involving the French State as shareholder.

In the French context, these two cases illustrate how institutional contradictions result in opportunities for shareholder activism. By focusing on the institutional contradictions of the state shareholder, this investigation suggests a need for experimental research to observe how shareholder activists adapt to each institutional change in CMEs. This experimentation can help policymakers to avoid creating additional conditions that shareholder activists can exploit.

This focuses only on France and its state shareholdings. To generalize results, studies of other CMEs and state shareholders are needed.

Policymakers should consider all legislative proposals for their potential to deviate from corporate governance practice by experimenting with them in a laboratory setting. Shareholder activists can compare state shareholders’ actions against the state’s legislation to emphasize institutional contradictions that counter minority shareholders’ rights.

This research is the first to analyze how the state as shareholder can exploit its competing logics to resist against shareholder activism and support management or to become itself a shareholder activist.

In this study, I explore the link between workforce downsizing and the predominance of a corporate governance model that espouses a shareholder value maximization principle. Specifically, I examine how top managers’ shareholder value orientation affects the adoption of a downsizing strategy among large, publicly traded corporations in the United States. An analysis of CEOs’ letters to shareholders indicates that firms with CEOs who use language that espouses the shareholder value principle tend to have a higher rate of layoffs, after controlling for various indicators of the firm’s adherence to the shareholder value principle. The finding suggests that corporate governance models, particularly those advocated by powerful organizational elites, have a significant impact on workers by shaping corporate strategies toward the workforce. The key actors in this process were top managers who embraced the new management ideology and implemented corporate strategy to pursue shareholder value maximization.