Battles in boardrooms : the diffusion of shareholder value rhetoric and practices in Finland, 1990-2005
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the consequences of economic globalization for organizations and the corporate elites through an investigation of recent transformations in the Finnish corporate governance system since the early 1990s. The core thesis of this dissertation is that globalization encourages diversity in organizational forms rather than convergence. Globalization is not a sweeping trend that affects all states and organizations in the same way or to the same extent. In drafting public policies, governments try to strike a balance between global pressures and political and ideological preferences, and competing demands of different stakeholders. Similarly, organizations respond to global pressures in unique ways by recombining foreign elements with already available templates and scripts to create new, blended forms and unique configurations of the old. To capture transformations in the systems of governance, I focus on changes in three distinct layers of economic life: organizational practices and structures, managerial rhetoric, and political discourse around issues of ownership and control. I show how the rhetoric of shareholder value permeated the managerial and political discourse in Finland, and document how Anglo-American governance practices diffused among Finnish corporations. Although many governance practices associated with the American model have spread widely among Finnish firms, none of them have diffused throughout the entire corporate population. Similarly, although shareholder value rhetoric has become increasingly common, it has not entirely replaced the old rhetoric emphasizing the importance of all stakeholders. Thus, globalization has not entailed a clean transition from one homogeneous environment to another, as suggested by convergence theorists. Instead, globalization has lead to the emergence of a heterogeneous order, in which some firms stayed true to the stakeholder model, some aligned both their rhetoric and practices with the shareholder value concept, and some mixed and matched elements from both.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Snellman, Kaisa Elina |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
| Primary advisor | Powell, Walter W |
| Thesis advisor | Powell, Walter W |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, John-Paul |
| Thesis advisor | McAdam, Doug |
| Advisor | Ferguson, John-Paul |
| Advisor | McAdam, Doug |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kaisa Snellman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Kaisa Elina Snellman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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