Against a background of management literature which advocated cultural change to increase corporate competitive performance (such as Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence), John Hendry and Veronica Hope explore four components of the problem of bringing about cultural change to produce...

For most people involved in the strategic management field, teaching competitive strategy involves teaching Porter's model of generic strategies. Critics of the model have however exposed some severe limitations to its application. There are also some serious sources of confusion, both within...

One of the strongest and most sustained trends within business over the last ten years has been the trend towards outsourcing. With increased fervour and conviction, corporations have sought to reduce costs by contracting out services and activities traditionally provided in-house. The rationale...

The idea of process reengineering, or computer-aided process-focused industrial engineering, has taken a firm hold in today's companies, but the benefits of this approach have often been elusive and even when they have been achieved it is by no means clear that they will be sustainable. In this...

We consider the consequences of the regular private meetings between directors of FTSE 100 companies and their major institutional shareholders. Whilst the economic incentives for both the flow of information and the formation of 'strategic informational relationships' between the two have been...

Fund managers are the primary investment decision-makers in the stock market, and corporate executives are their primary sources of information. Meetings between the two are therefore central to stock market investment decisions but are surprisingly under-researched. There is little in the...

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 fund managers and senior company executives to explore how different and often-contradictory conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are...