Aristocratic amateurs to fat cats? British CEOs in the twentieth century

Robin J. C. Adams, Michael Aldous, Philip Fliers and John Turner (j.turner@qub.ac.uk)

No 23-08, QUCEH Working Paper Series from Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History

Abstract: This article uses a prosopographical methodology and a new dataset of 1,558 CEOs from Britain's largest public companies between 1900 and 2009 to analyse how the role, social background, and career pathways of corporate leaders changed. We have four main findings: First, the designation of CEO only prevailed in the 1990s. Second, the proportion of socially elite CEOs was highest before 1940, but they were not dominant. Third, most CEOs did not have a degree before the 1980s, or professional qualification until the 1990s. Fourth, liberal market reforms in the 1980s increased the likelihood of dismissal by a factor of three.

Keywords: corporate leaders; corporate careers; Britain; 20th century (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 M12 N83 N84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/276258/1/1858484391.pdf (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:zbw:qucehw:202308

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in QUCEH Working Paper Series from Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).