Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

Men and Women of the Corporation

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The Theory of Industrial Organization

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Nordic Corporate Board Diversity

Industrial foundations are self-governing, non-profit institutions that own business companies. This ownership structure is found in a fair number of Northern European companies, some of them successful world-class competitors. Standard agency theory would predict foundation-owned companies to be relatively inefficient since they lack monitoring by residual claimants and access to equity finance from the stock market. Nevertheless, empirical research (Thomsen 1996) has found that Danish foundation-owned companies do no worse in terms of profitability and growth than companies with dispersed ownership or family ownership. The paper considers and tests alternative explanations of this paradox. Explanations based on tax incentives, alternative control mechanisms and product-market advantages are rejected, but some support is found for performance advantages related to family control and long-term business commitment.

Corporate Ownership by Industrial Foundations

Since the mid-1990s, there has been much talk of the convergence of corporate governance systems to Anglo-American standards, and several trends have pointed in this direction. In this paper, however, Steen Thomsen argues that US/UK corporate governance is also converging to European standards through the concentration of ownership, increasing levels of insider ownership, the separation of management and control in more independent boards, the deregulation of the banking system and the increasing importance of stakeholder concerns. Support for the mutual convergence hypothesis is found in a statistical study on the evolution of ownership concentration in 2,238 companies during the 1989–1998 period. Ownership concentration, which is substantially higher in Continental Europe than in the United States and the United Kingdom, has been increasing in the United States and the United Kingdom and decreasing in Europe. However, the process is slow, and even if the observed trends were to persist, differences in corporate governance between Europe and the United States would persist for decades. Moreover, a regime change away from market governance may be under way following the collapse of the recent stock market bubble and the wave of financial scandals in the United States.

The Convergence of Corporate Governance Systems to European and Anglo-American Standards

Manuscript Type: Empirical



Research Question/Issue: This paper analyses the impact of voting power on shareholder activism using unique data on activism at Swedish shareholder meetings. We hypothesize that there is a positive relationship between shareholder activism and a measure of the largest shareholder's sensitivity to increased participation by small shareholders.



Research Findings/Insights: We find that firms' amenability to small shareholder influence leads to more proposals by the nomination committee, but fewer proposals by other shareholders and fewer proposals voted against. We interpret this as evidence that the shareholder elected nomination committees effectively channel shareholder concerns and preempt other kinds of activism. In addition, we find more shareholder activity in large firms and less activity in leveraged firms.



Theoretical/Academic Implications: This paper offers a new voting power approach to the study of shareholder activism. We show the empirical implications of this approach, but also the importance of local institutions such as nomination committees in shaping the nature of shareholder activism.



Practitioner/Policy Implications: Politicians and companies that desire active shareholders could improve the amenability of firms to shareholder influence by ownership transparency, shareholder committees, contacts with shareholder associations and other vehicles for collective action.

Voting Power and Shareholder Activism: A Study of Swedish Shareholder Meetings

Since the publication of the Cadbury Code (1992), there has been a rapid international diffusion of corporate governance codes containing recommendations on boards, executive pay, disclosure and investor relations. But there has been little or no scientific evidence to support the recommendations, so it is questionable whether they can be explained by market failures. Instead, based on public choice theory, I propose the alternative hypothesis that the codes reflect rent seeking by institutional investors in a bargaining game with other stakeholders, including investment banks, auditing firms, incumbent owners, managers and employees. I argue that this hypothesis can explain a number of puzzling features about codes, including their remarkable similarity, the ‘one size fits all’ approach and their pattern of diffusion. A study of fifty-two corporate governance codes and a qualitative review of their core contents provide empirical support for the institutional investor hypothesis. The key focus is on empowering boards and making them accountable to minority investors, i.e., capturing the overall control of listed companies. Since it is not clear that these initiatives contribute to overall value creation, an evaluation of the costs of governance is called for.

Steen Thomsen

Papers

Nordic Corporate Board Diversity

Corporate Ownership by Industrial Foundations

The Convergence of Corporate Governance Systems to European and Anglo-American Standards

Voting Power and Shareholder Activism: A Study of Swedish Shareholder Meetings

The Hidden Meaning of Codes: Corporate Governance and Investor Rent Seeking