Monday, November 24, 2008

Cheffins on the British Corporation

Brian R. Cheffins, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, has posted the abstract for his new book Corporate Ownership and Control: British Business Transformed, which is forthcoming next month from Oxford University Press. Here is the lengthy abstract's opening paragraph:
The typical British publicly traded company has widely dispersed share ownership and is run by professionally trained managers who collectively own an insufficiently large percentage of shares to dictate the outcome when shareholders vote. This separation of ownership and control has not only dictated the tenor of corporate governance debate in Britain but serves to distinguish the UK from most other countries. Existing theories fail to account adequately for arrangements in the UK. Corporate Ownership and Control: British Business Transformed accordingly seeks to explain why ownership became divorced from control in major British companies, examining how matters evolved from the 17th century through to today.