Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics

Authors

Marcel Kahan, New York University School of LawFollow
Edward B. Rock, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2014

Abstract

How are we to understand the persistent gap between rhetoric and reality that characterizes so much of corporate governance politics? In this Article, we show that the rhetoric around a variety of high profile corporate governance controversies (including shareholder proposals asking boards to redeem poison pills, proxy access, majority voting in director elections, and shareholder proposals to remove supermajority voting requirements) cannot be justified by the material interests at stake. At the same time, shareholder activists are oddly reluctant to pursue issues that may have a more material impact, such as anti-pill charter provisions or mandatory bylaw amendments. We consider a variety of explanations for this phenomenon including “public interest” analyses, “public choice” analyses, and the possibility that corporate governance politics has a substantial “symbolic” or “folkloristic” element. Elaborating on arguments made in Thurman Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism, we suggest that there is an analogous “Folklore of Corporate Governance” that serves to reconcile the gap between our idealized view of corporations as controlled by real-life shareholders and the inevitable reality that effective control largely resides in managements and in disembodied institutions. We consider some implications of the explanations we put forward.

Keywords

Corporations, politics, corporate governance controversies, public interest or public choice explanations, corporate control, symbols, myths, Thurman Arnold, legal realism, interdisciplinary scholarship, capitalism, gap between rhetoric and reality, folklore

Publication Title

Boston University Law Review

Publication Citation

94 B.U. L. REV. 1997 (2014).

Repository Citation

Kahan, Marcel and Rock, Edward B., "Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics" (2014). All Faculty Scholarship. 876.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/876