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Some Are More Equal: The Politics Of Shareholder Activism, Donald Nordberg

Donald Nordberg

This paper is an early draft of a chapter in the book Corporate Governance: A Synthesis of Theory, Research, and Practice (H. Kent Baker and Ronald Anderson, eds.) published by Wiley in 2010. Shareholder activism is an exercise of power, sometime benign, sometimes threatening to the interests of corporate management, boards and other shareholders. The complexity of these combinations helps to understand how difficult it is for directors to operate in shareholders' interest. What we see, particularly in relation to the growth of hedge-fund activism, is greater dispersion of shareholder interests and growing questions about the legitimacy of how those …