Influence strategies in shareholder engagement: a case study of all Swedish national pension funds

Ian Hamilton and Jessica Eriksson

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2011, vol. 1, issue 1, 44-61

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 article, 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. In addition to the traditional power and legitimacy dependencies that have been reported as influential in deciding stakeholder salience, our findings reveal five additional factors useful for 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 using a stakeholder—firm perspective.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.3763/jsfi.2010.0006 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:jsustf:v:1:y:2011:i:1:p:44-61

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TSFI20

DOI: 10.3763/jsfi.2010.0006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment is currently edited by Dr Matthew Haigh

More articles in Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().