Download or read book Responsible Ownership, Shareholder Value and the New Shareholder Activism written by John Hendry and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper we use interview data to explore the 'new shareholder activism' of mainstream UK institutional investors. We describe contemporary practices of corporate governance monitoring and engagement and how they vary across institutions, and explore the motivations behind them. Existing studies of shareholder activism mainly assume that it is motivated by a desire to maximize shareholder value, and we find some evidence both of this and of alternative political/moral motivations related to ideas of responsible ownership. We conclude, however, that in the current situation both these act primarily as rationalizations rather than as genuine motivators. The main driving force behind the new shareholder activism is the institutions' own profit maximization and the need to position themselves against competitor institutions in the context of political and regulatory changes that have significantly changed the non-financial expectations of their clients.