Law Commons^™

Taming Or Protecting The Modern Corporation? Shareholder-Stakeholder Debates In A Comparative Light, Martin Gelter

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I provide a comparative historical account on the debate of whether corporations should exclusively be run by the company in the interest of shareholders, or whether managers should be permitted or required to take the interests of others groups (stake-holders) into account. The comparison focuses on the US, Germany and France and traces the debates through the most important formative periods of these countries’ corporate governance systems. It is generally assumed that shareholder primacy has a stronger following in the US and the UK than in Continental Europe, where the stakeholder view is thought to be more …