Many services can be self-provided. An individual user or a user firm can, for example, choose to do its own accounting – choose to self-provide that service - instead of hiring an accounting firm to provide it. Since users can ‘serve themselves’ in many cases, it is also possible for...

A detailed survey of 498 high technology small and medium-sized enterprises in the Netherlands shows process innovation by user firms to be common practice. Fifty-four percent of these firms reported developing entirely novel process equipment or software for their own use and/or modifying...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

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...

We draw on a series of in-depth interviews with senior managers from institutional investors and large listed corporations to explore how different conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are...

Purpose - To explore the effects of meetings between company executives and fund managers. Design/methodology/approach - Recognizes the increasing importance of these face-to-face meetings, reviews relevant research and draws on information from interviews with finance directors and investor...

Government has been pressing one group in civil society - financial institutions - to regulate the behavior of another group - the companies in which they invest. We consider the implications of this and assess the prospects for success, drawing on evidence obtained in our recent study of the...

Conventional economic theory, applied to information released by listed companies, equates ‘useful’ with ‘price-sensitive’. Stock exchange rules accordingly prohibit the selective, private communication of price-sensitive information. Yet, even in the absence of such communication, UK...