"A timely report on UK business culture given the recent financial crisis"

In London on 29 February an evening reception, hosted by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, saw the launch of a research report: Shareholder Primacy in UK Corporate Law: An Exploration of the Rationale and Evidence. The report was presented in summary form by David Collison and David Power; other members of the research team were: Lorna Stevenson, also from the A&F Division in the School of Business; Stuart Cross from the School of Law; and John Ferguson from Strathclyde Business School. Copies of the report are available from the authors and online from ACCA. The report included a wide ranging review of the literature on maximising shareholder value - the key traditional corporate objective and a distinguishing feature of the Anglo-American variety of capitalism. Also included were in-depth interviews with senior members of a government-backed review of company law which had formed the basis of the Companies Act 2006. A particular feature of the research was the examination of the potential link between forms of corporate governance and evidence of poor social and health indicators in Anglo-American economies - especially in the UK and the US. A separate study by the same group of authors, which explores that particular phenomenon in more depth and which challenges orthodox assumptions about the success of competing forms of capitalism, is forthcoming in the Journal of Business Ethics under the title Legal Determinants of External Finance Revisited: The Inverse Relationship between Investor Protection and Societal Well-being.