An Emerging Third Way?: The Erosion of the Anglo-American Shareholder Value Construct

The market acceptance of corporate social responsibility: a comparison across six countries/regions

“…It particularly reflects the greater emphasis placed on the social responsibilities of companies during the era of Prime Minister Tony Blair (see Williams and Conley, 2005). The fact that the C&S Europe region lags behind the Nordic countries and the UK is reflective of the mixture of attitudes across the 12 countries.…”

Corporate Governance and Director Accountability: an Institutional Comparative Perspective*

“…Second, agency theory undermines the possibility that principals and agents might seek stewardship interests (Davis, Schoorman and Donaldson, 1997) such as firm sustainability or employee well-being (Aguilera, Rupp, Williams and Ganapathi, 2004). The nature of corporate governance systems outside the USA has brought more attention to non-shareholder value issues (Conley and Williams, 2005). Lastly, agency accounts tend to oversee the cognitive side of corporate players in the sense that agents and principals make decisions based on their cognitive map and personal values (Cybert and March, 1963;Forbes and Miliken, 1999), which are influenced by national culture and values.…”

“…Second, British financial regulators such as the Financial Reporting Council, the accountancy profession, institutional investors and the government have been the instigators and trend-setters of corporate governance innovations that spread all over the industrialized world (Aguilera and Cuervo-Cazurra, 2003;Cuervo-Cazurra and Aguilera, 2004). Lastly, given that the LSE houses the largest percentage of foreign-owned firms (24% as opposed to 17% on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and 1.4% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as of June 2004) and also hosts the majority of the world's cross-border securities trades and management (Clark, 2002), the United Kingdom might turn into a global corporate governance regulator since any regulation, code or listing standard endorsed by the LSE becomes by default a 'global gold standard of corporate governance' in the country of origin of an LSE-listed firm (Williams and Conley, 2005).…”

Accounting conservatism and board of director characteristics: An empirical analysis

“…Furthermore, US firms are subject to considerably higher litigation risk than UK firms (Fulbright and Jaworski, 2005;Seetharaman et al, 2002). Finally, UK firms have greater institutional ownership than US firms and UK institutional investors more actively monitor firms as they regularly meet with the board and top management to discuss strategy, governance issues, and financial performance (Black and Coffee, 1994;Williams and Conley, 2005;Aguilera et al, 2006). Greater institutional ownership and more active institutional investor involvement could result in greater board independence as well as the use of more conservative accounting.…”