Influence Strategies in Shareholder Engagement: A Case Study of Five Swedish National Pension Funds

Ian Hamilton () and Jessica Eriksson
Additional contact information
Ian Hamilton : Umeå School of Business at Umeå University
Jessica Eriksson: Umeaå School of Business at Umeå University

No 2010/8, Sustainable Investment and Corporate Governance Working Papers from Sustainable Investment Research Platform

Abstract: Investors spend money and resources trying to reduce the environmental, social, and governance risks in companies they own. If unattended, these risks may cause reputational damage not only to the portfolio firm, but also to its owner. In this paper, we study five Swedish national pension funds and the influence strategies used in shareholder engagement. Knowledge about influence strategies is important because successful shareholder engagements can lead to more sustainable corporate behaviour and a lower risk to the investor. Our findings show that, besides traditional power and legitimacy dependencies which have been reported as influential in deciding stakeholder salience, we present five additional factors in determining influence strategies in shareholder engagement. We provide a conceptual model showing how these factors interlink with choices of influence strategies, offering a practical use of this study. Stakeholder theory has been used as our theoretical frame of reference, based on existing influence strategy literature taken from the stakeholder–firm perspective.

Keywords: case study; ESG directive; influence strategy; pension funds; reputation risk; responsible investment; shareholder engagement; shareholder salience; stakeholder theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2010-06-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://sites.google.com/site/climatedeclaration/Ho ... f?attredirects=0&d=1 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhb:sicgwp:2010_008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Sustainable Investment and Corporate Governance Working Papers from Sustainable Investment Research Platform Economics of Corporate Sustainability Management, Department of Industrial Economics and Management, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, SWEDEN. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pontus Cerin ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).