Shareholder Entitlement, Primacy and Empowerment

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to examine three distinct approaches to the notion that companies should be run in the interests of shareholders; shareholder entitlement, shareholder primacy, and shareholder empowerment. I show how these ideologies were a response to a particular set of political and economic developments using material on the United Kingdom, European Union and the United States. I show the negative impact of shareholder primacy and argue that empowering shareholders – particularly where the only shareholders with significant economic power are institutions – is a retrograde and populist step that will merely amplify the damage caused by shareholder primacy governance.