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The Ethics of Corporate Governance

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DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.1004038 · Source: OAI

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The Ethics of Corporate Governance

By Donald Nordberg
Senior Lecturer in Strategy
London Metropolitan University, 277-281 Holloway Road, London N7 8HN

and

Editor and Publisher of The BoardAgenda (www.boardagenda.com)

Correspondence address:
PO Box 26231
London W3 9WN
United Kingdom

Email: [email protected]
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The Ethics of Corporate Governance

By Donald Nordberg1

Abstract: How should corporate directors determine what is the "right" decision? For at
least the past 30 years the debate has raged as to whether shareholder value should take
precedence over corporate social responsibility when crucial decisions arise. Directors face
pressure, not least from "ethical" investors, to do the "good" thing when they seek to make
the "right" choice. Corporate governance theory has tended to look to agency theory and the
need of boards to curb excessive executive power to guide directors' decisions. While useful
for those purposes, agency theory provides only limited guidance. Supplementing it with
the alternatives –stakeholder theory and stewardship theory –tends to put directors in
conflict with their legal obligations to work in the interests of shareholders. This paper
seeks to reframe the discussion about corporate governance in terms of the ethical debate
between consequential, teleological approaches to ethics and idealist, deontological ones,
suggesting that directors are –for good reason –more inclined toward utilitarian judgments
like those underpinning shareholder value. But the problems with shareholder value have
become so great that a different framework is needed: strategic value, with an emphasis on
long-term value creation judged from a decidedly utilitarian standpoint.

Keywords: Corporate governance, ethics, utilitarianism, teleology, deontology,

consequentialism, agency theory, stakeholder theory, stewardship theory, shareholder
value, strategic value, boards of directors, non-executive directors, fiduciary trust, corporate
social responsibility

Introduction
Whenever a board of directors needs to take any action, its individual members face a

decision: what is the right thing to do? Most of the time, choosing the right course is a

matter of business judgment on what ethicists call non-moral issues. In a few instances, the

choice is a narrow, legal one, where compliance with specific statute or regulation is at

stake. But in some cases –and in particular for major decisions like mergers, acquisitions,

1Donald Nordberg is Editor and Publisher of The BoardAgenda (www.boardagenda.com), a

newsletter on corporate affairs, and Senior Lecturer in Strategy at London Metropolitan University,
where he also teaches corporate governance. He has been Senior Adviser on corporate governance
and risk to The Conference Board Europe and is a member of the European Corporate Governance
Institute.

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down-sizing or large investments –neither the law nor business judgment may be

sufficiently clear. These decisions often involve conflicting versions of what's right in a

moral sense. Important decision-making in the boardroom is, in short, a matter of ethics.

While directors will choose to act on individual decisions from different theoretical

perspectives, their tough calls are likely to be based on more fundamental and often

unspoken assumptions about the nature of what is right. The lobby for ethical investment

brings with it similarly unspoken assumptions about the ethical basis on which its

recommendations are made. This paper explores how ethical frameworks underpin theories

of corporate governance to give guidance to directors and in particular to those

independent, non-executives who increasingly act as the moral compass for the enterprise.

It suggests, moreover, that the ethical approach that sits most comfortably with the purpose

of most corporations is one that rejects important aspects of both stakeholder theory and

shareholder value.

Concern about corporate governance has developed historically in response to major

crises of confidence, fraud and market failure, and with it development of advances in our

thinking about the role that corporations play in the economy and society. The 1929 stock

market crash formed at least part of the recognition of just how different the economic and

moral imperatives of large listed companies and institutional investors were, compared

with the Victorian concept of the company (Berle and Means 1932/1991). The 1930s also

saw recognition of the way that the corporation could be a vehicle for economizing effort

through the reduction of transaction costs and freeing resources for productive use

elsewhere (Coase 1937; Williamson and Winter 1993). The focus of what we now call the

economics institutions of capitalism (Williamson 1985) lay in showing how capitalism

created of social wealth, and not merely the exploitative power of the capitalist.

Another surge of interest came in the early 1990s from what was perhaps a less

dramatic string of events but ones which reverberate in the news more than 15 years later:

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the near simultaneous collapse of Polly Peck, the Bank of Commerce and Credit

International and, perhaps most importantly, Robert Maxwell's collection of enterprises (see

Wearing 2005 for a detailed discussion). Those events threw into doubt the principles-

based, self-moderating system of accounting, the gentlemanly approach to financial

regulation and the cozy, patrician ways in which directors were selected and boards did

their work. The result was the Cadbury Report (1992) and eventually what became the

Combined Code of corporate governance, which was then emulated in other jurisdictions.

A third wave came from the excesses of the dot-com era of the late 1990s and the

subsequent collapse of Enron in 2001, of WorldCom in 2002. There were other cases, too,

which might have seemed just as dramatic had they not been preceded by such egregious

lapses that had rocked the confidence in US financial markets and led to the implosion of

the global accounting practice of Arthur Andersen. The by-product was a new, stringent

law on corporate responsibility commonly known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Library of

Congress 2002), which led to a new spurt of legislative, regulatory and self-regulatory

actions around the world to clean up the mess and reduce the risk of a systemic infection.

The collapse of the German Herstatt Bank in the 1970s, of IBH Holding in the 1980s had

demonstrated that continental European countries were not immune from the problem.

Those cases had been dealt with largely by tapping the hidden reserves of the German

banking system. In Switzerland, Credit Suisse had similarly made its governance fiasco

known as Chiasso disappear by tapping into shareholder funds it had hidden from view.

But in the early years of the 21st Century that was harder to do. In the 2003 lapses and

frauds at the Italian food producer Parmalat and the Dutch supermarket group Ahold came

reminders that corporate governance was an issue for all.

What lay behind all of these episodes was a sense of moral hazard associated with the

accumulation of financial resources and power in the hands of corporations and the sense

that the directors of these corporations, entrusted with society's wealth, were unaccountable

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and open to corruption. While there were issues about the personal morality of individuals,

these episodes raised questions about the ethics of the corporate systems as a whole. These

ethical concerns took on four main questions:

· Were managers in distant corporations draining the resources of shareholders for

their private use, as Berle and Means had described?

· Was the private use of corporate wealth actually contributing to broader social

wealth, as Coase had maintained, or damaging it owing to market failure?

· What assumptions were the directors of corporations using –consciously or

unconsciously –when those excesses occurred under their noses?

· What might they have done differently if they had focused on the examining those

assumptions?

These questions lie at the heart of what have become the four main theoretical

perspectives on the problem of how directors can best control corporate wealth and power:

agency theory, shareholder value, stakeholder theory and stewardship theory and at the

heart of the claims that ethical investors are making on directors. This paper argues,

however, that there is sixth stance available to the individual board member –sometimes

confused with the concept of shareholder value –that lies at the heart of the work of

independent, non-executive directors: decisions based upon perceived strategic value.

Theories of corporate governance

The workings of the boardroom are, as a matter of necessity, largely hidden from view

and therefore from detailed examination. From conversations and public statements of

individual directors we've seen emerge several theories that describe how boards operate

and seek to prescribe the basis on which directors should make decisions.

Stiles and Taylor (2001) outline six theories of corporate governance, though perhaps

only three have a useful normative character. First, the legal view is a narrow one, which

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reflects what some directors might see as their role –fulfilling the obligations of company

law –but which provides little worthwhile guidance for their actions. While directors may

have de jure responsibility for the company, de facto control rests with management. Two

other theories –class hegemony and managerial hegemony –are almost entirely descriptive,

though what they describe provides implicit but salutary advice to boards: all too often

boards either act to perpetuate a ruling elite or exist as a legal fiction disguising the reality

of managerial power. More interesting from an ethical perspective is the organizational

economics approach, which uses agency theory to suggest the board's role is to control

abuses in managerial power, and transaction-cost theory to lead decision-making. A

stewardship approach assumes a psychological stance: managers, and by extension directors,

will be motivated by things other than narrow self-interest, to be good stewards, to do a

good job. The resource-dependence approach sees outside or non-executive directors as

having the role of facilitating access to funds, people and other resources. This can, of

course, be seen as a subset of a transaction-cost approach. Having directors with the right

contacts means cheaper loans, better terms on supply contracts, the first pick of new

business school graduates.

The approach of Stiles and Taylor draws on the analysis of Zahra and Pearce (1989),

who describe four perspectives. They share with Stiles and Taylor legal, resource dependence

and class hegemony, but Zahra and Pearce focus on agency theory while leaving out direct

reference to transaction-cost economics. They do not mention stewardship theory at all.

These surveys of theories of governance, however, leave out perhaps the two most

important and conflicting ones: the competing cults of stakeholder theory and shareholder

value. Owing to their prescriptive nature and their influence on decisions made by

directors, we'll look in greater detail into agency theory, stakeholder theory and

stewardship theory to see what ethical assumptions lie behind each, and then elaborate the

virtues and drawbacks of shareholder value.

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Agency theory

The origins of agency theory in corporate governance are usually traced to the

groundbreaking work of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means (1932/1991). Agency theory, a

term they never used, came to be seen as a way to examine the issue of individual greed. As

Jensen and Meckling (1976) argued, putting managers in charge of wealth that is not theirs

creates, in economic terms, a cost, one they call agency cost. This cost doesn't exist in a

business owned by its manager, which is why the problems of governance in a private

company are different from those in public companies. In what Berle and Means call the

modern corporation, however, the problem cannot be eliminated, but it can be controlled.

Since this realization, public companies around the world have developed incentives that

seek to align the interests of managers with those of shareholders. Controlling agency costs

lay behind the growth of the use of stock options and other equity-based pay systems,

rather than relying solely on salary and bonuses to motivate managers. Rational managers

will see that it is not in their interests to divert the company's resources to their private use

when they have so much more to gain from taking actions that benefit shareholders as well

as themselves. In large public companies, a second layer of potential problems arise.

Shareholders employ directors to watch over the work of managers, creating a second

moral hazard, or put another way a second layer of agency costs.

From an ethical perspective, however, the focus on economics in both instances changes

the moral choice from one of "right" or "wrong" into one of "better" or "worse".

Stakeholder theory

The stakeholder view of corporate governance is often associated with Japanese and

continental European practice, and perhaps most closely with Germany, where law has

required that half the seats on supervisory boards go to representatives of the workforce,

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and where custom has long mandated that a company's bankers and large-block

shareholders have seats as well.

The term "stakeholder" is recorded as early as 1708, when it meant a neutral party

holding the stakes of the contestants in a wager. But that's not at all the meaning it has

developed over the past quarter of a century. "Stakeholder" has deliberate echoes of

"shareholder" and even more of "stockholder", the more common American term. That

rhetorical device boosts employees, suppliers, customers and outside interests to a

linguistic status with something approaching the same claim to rights over a company's

activities.

Its origins in the theory of corporate governance are somewhat difficult to trace. R.

Edward Freeman links it most directly to the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1960s,

though he accepts he couldn't quite pinpoint it (see Freeman 1984, p. 49 n1). Freeman

defines stakeholders as "any group or individual who can affect, or is affected by, the

achievement of a corporation's purpose" (1984, p. vi). SRI and other strategic thinkers used

stakeholder concept mainly as a tool for strategic analysis. It was in part a result of the

growing recognition of the complexity of strategy –that the company wasn't simply a

production system, where strategy was based primarily on products and the means to

produce them, as it had been seen for first half of the 20th Century. Gradually strategists had

come to appreciate that corporations created value through the complex interaction of

various networks of relationships. Examples of that approach range from Igor Ansoff's

thinking in the 1960s through to Michael Porter's conceptions of industry analysis in the

1980s, the balanced scorecards of the 1990s and current work on customer relationships and

their lifetime value (see Porter 1980; Ansoff 1987; Kaplan and Norton 1992; Bell et al. 2002;

Rust et al. 2004). But considering the interests of stakeholders in strategy doesn't imply

stakeholders should be regarded as the or even a purpose of corporate activity. Indeed,

Ansoff argued forcefully against the stakeholder approach, drawing a distinction between a

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corporation's "responsibilities" to a wide range of interested parties and its "objectives",

which guide management to fulfilling the company's purpose (Ansoff 1987, p. 53).

Strong versions of stakeholder theory challenge the assumption that directors and by

extension managers have their sole duty to the company's owners. Indeed, Freeman even

defends exploiting the word "stakeholder" precisely because it sounds like "stockholder".

Words, he writes, "make a difference in how we see the world. By using 'stakeholder'

managers and theorists alike will come to see these groups as having a 'stake'" (1984, p. 45).

Stakeholders have legitimacy because they can affect the direction of the company; it is

legitimate for management to spend time and resources on stakeholders, he argues. That is,

however, still some way from arguing that these people and groups are "ends" of corporate

purpose, to which corporate boards owe a duty, rather than just "means" to the end of

shareholder value.

The usual argument against the strong versions of stakeholder theory is that

shareholders have their entire investment at risk, while suppliers, customers and employees

are in general receive benefits from the corporation contemporaneously, and enjoy the

added protection of prior standing in contract if things go wrong. But Freeman, writing

with William Evan and using examples based on US law, pointed out that shareholders,

managers, customers, suppliers and employees all have their contractual rights protected

by one or another aspect of law. "Another way to look at these safeguards is that they force

management to balance the interests of stockholders and themselves on the one hand with

the interests of customers, suppliers and, other stakeholders on the other" (Freeman and

Evan 1990, p. 347).

Can we find guidance in company law? In many jurisdictions the matter is quite clear:

directors are responsible and accountable to shareholders. But that legal accountability is

only a narrow sense of the ethical issues directors face, and with mounting public pressure

–from corporate governance scandals and environmental concerns –even the legal context

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is subject to change. An example was the eight-year long debate in the UK over revising

company law that finally ended with the law reform of 2006. The business lobby beat off

attempts from the more leftwing elements of the Labour Party to amend the duty-of-care

provisions. Business interests even successfully lobbied to get government to repeal a

requirement for large listed companies to provide a detailed narrative account of the

business in an Operating and Financial Review taking specific heed of employees,

suppliers, customers and the environment. But the final version of the law nonetheless

retained a degree of accountability to stakeholders in the Business Review (UK Parliament

2006) mandated under European Union law. Moreover, at about the same time another

branch of government, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, issued

guidelines concerning annual disclosure for all substantial businesses –public and private –

of key performance indicators for environmental affairs (DEFRA 2006). While not carrying

the force of law, these guidelines carry the threat of affecting a business's ability to contract

with government. A narrow legal definition is, therefore, subject to change.

Most arguments for a stakeholder approach to governance aren't based on a narrow

legal claim, however, but appeal instead to a larger moral purpose. Freeman declared that

the ordinary view of corporations –with shareholder value at the center –"is or at least

should be intellectually dead" (Freeman 1994, p. 14) That view doesn't go undisputed, either

in its method of argument (see Child and Marcoux 1999 for an example) or its conclusions

about the appropriateness of stakeholder theory. Indeed, John Hendry declared that the

normative stakeholder theory and Freeman in particular had overshot. "To the extent that

they have their sights too high they have also undermined their own position by sacrificing

credibility and introducing major problems," he wrote (Hendry 2001, p. 159). Not only was

the emphasis on stakeholder rights wrong in theory, they were falling out of practice, he

said. Stakeholder concerns had "become increasingly marginal to the corporate governance

debate" not just in the US but also in such "stakeholder oriented societies" as Germany,

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Japan and South Korea (p. 173). Hendry was, of course, writing before the next big crisis in

governance was to occur –the collapse of Enron, which robbed employees of pension rights

and led to the biggest changes in public accountability of executive directors since the

creation of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s.

Stakeholder theorists seem to be representing two different ethical perspectives. The

Freeman and Evan approach was, in some ways, making the argument on the devil's own

terms. They said that seeing the corporation as a contracting mechanism, as Coase (1937)

and Williamson (1985) had done, provided a way of showing the stakeholder theory was

about tangible costs and benefits, a means of reducing the economic burden of the social

contract, the weak version of the theory, where the ethical determination is based on the

consequences of the action. This is far from a typical stakeholder argument, which holds

that businesses are accountable to larger aims than profit maximization (Evan and Freeman

1993; Donaldson and Preston 1995; Crowther and Caliyurt 2004). John Hasnas says: "When

viewed as a normative theory, the stakeholder theory asserts that, regardless of whether

stakeholder management leads to improved financial performance, managers should

manage the business for the benefit of all stakeholders" (Hasnas 1998, p. 26). This is just the

type of conclusion that is sure to raise the hackles of many business people, and led Milton

Friedman to pen his famous retort that the social responsibility of business is to make

money (Friedman 1970).

It's not surprising to see how stakeholder theory became conflated with corporate social

responsibility, though we can argue that there is a difference. Indeed, the devil's argument

(e.g. Freeman and Evan 1990) might well be making an argument that treating suppliers,

customers and employees well reduces transaction costs, thereby contributing to profits.

But the more common view of stakeholder theory is that advanced by these authors and a

host of followers that respect for individuals is a greater good that businesses cannot ignore

(Evan and Freeman 1993). The discussion of an even broader theory of social contract for

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business (Donaldson and Dunfee 1994) lies behind more contemporary notions, including

that od the UK think-tank Tomorrow's Company: businesses require a "license to operate"

from society (Hampson 2007). This approach forms the basis of what we call legitimacy

theory (e.g. Guthrie and Parker 1989; Lindblom 1994; Deephouse and Carter 2005).

Stewardship theory

As a description of board practice, stewardship theory suggests that directive will be

motivated by some larger than personal wealth. Drawing on organizational psychology, it

suggests that self-esteem and fulfillment loom large in their decision-making, as Abraham

Maslow (1943) had suggested in his hierarchy of needs. As a prescription, however, it

contends that individual directors should look after the interests of someone or something

larger than their personal self-interest. Some may be guided by a code of conduct or

statement of corporate purpose, like the charitable aims of the foundation that owns 90

percent of the German manufacturing giant Robert Bosch GmbH, the Credo of Johnson &

Johnson or the trust principles that have protected the editorial integrity of the news

operations of Reuters Group plc. In other cases, a legalistic approach would look at their

fiduciary obligations as described by company law. But on many decisions, the law is silent

and the director needs to look elsewhere to find the guiding principle. Some directors see

their roles as being stewards of a particular interest. When a major shareholder secures a

seat on the board, its director will understandably be tied to that shareholder's aims,

whatever company law might say. That's why we saw new emphasis on the role of

independent, non-executive, outside directors in the governance reforms introduced with, say,

the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, the Higgs Review and subsequent revision of the UK

Combined Code in 2003 or the New York Stock Exchange's listing rule changes that same

year. Independent directors, these reforms hoped, would be stewards of some greater good.

But what?

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An ethical framework for governance

These theories of corporate governance encompass what in ethics are known as

consequential (sometimes called teleological) and idealistic (also called deontological)

approaches. Deciding the "right" course of action can be based on an assessment of the

benefits arising from it (morality based on the consequences of the action) or by obeying

some more general rule or ideal state (some ethical principle) irrespective of the outcomes

of the action. The former is probably best known in its 18th and 19th Century incarnation –

utilitarianism, embracing John Stuart Mill's notion of the greatest good for the greatest

number (Mill 1863/1991) –which underpinned much of the development of the field of

economics. But there is another strand of consequential thinking that also plays a role in

corporate governance, ethical egoism, in which the individual decides on the basis of what

is best for himself2, irrespective of the consequences for others. Among its proponents were

Epicurus, Hobbes and Nietzsche, philosophers who perhaps no longer have the great fans

clubs they once enjoyed, except perhaps among CEOs (for a crystalline exposition of ethical

theory, including the distinctions between act- and rule-utilitarianism, see Frankena 1963).

But this thinking –when other actors invoke governance mechanisms like contract and

the force to law to constraint the actions of the egoists –lies at the heart of the assumptions

we see at work in agency theory. The CEO, indeed any self-interested actor, will seek to

maximize personal gains. The role of corporate governance is, therefore, to constrain his

actions without dampening his drive to succeed. In agency theory, the board uses

negotiation with the CEO and pay policies for the rest of senior management to channel

energy toward common outcomes, albeit with different specific goals: we assume the CEO

will attempt to maximize his wealth. If the way to do that also maximizes shareholder

2 For convenience, the masculine form will embrace both genders. The current custom in polite
English speech of pluralizing to escape gender bias (e.g. "the person themselves") jars especially
badly here. We are speaking of 1) individual actions and, 2) in the context of corporate governance
lapses, overwhelming male perpetrators.

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wealth, then job well done. This ethical stance underpins nearly all the traditional corporate

governance literature, as Hendry's conclusions infer (Hendry 2001). Business culture breeds

people who seek to maximize profits, personal or corporate. If the means to that end differ

depending on whether we are looking at the personal or corporate, greed is widely thought

to take precedence over the sense of corporate purpose. Nor is this approach confined to the

boardroom. Much management literature and the "how-to" approach to organizational

change are about aligning personal goals and incentives with corporate aims.

Stakeholder theory, in its strong form, approaches corporate decision-making from a

deontological perspective. This is especially true among proponents of what we have come

to call corporate social responsibility, around which we see developing an industry of

"socially responsible" or "ethical" investors (though one suspects that many of the managers

of SRI funds take a rather more ethically egoistical approach). There have been many

attempts to demonstrate that what's good for society (in a deontological sense) is also good

for financial performance (in a utilitarian sense). The evidence to date, however, is less than

entirely convincing. This lack of empirical support for the (financial) value of corporate

social responsibility hasn't silenced its proponents, giving greater evidence that their stance

is fundamentally deontological and idealistic in the philosophical sense.

Indeed, much of the academic literature in support of stakeholder theory comes overtly

from this perspective. Donaldson and Preston (1995), for example, see stakeholder theorists

drawing support mainly from the normative aspects of its ethical foundation –a nod, at

least, toward deontology. The philosophical tradition for stakeholder theory draws most

directly from Immanuel Kant (for examples, see Evan and Freeman 1993; Donaldson and

Dunfee 1994; Hasnas 1998), whose notion of the "categorical imperative" –an a priori

obligation –formed the heart of what John Stuart Mill, his utilitarian predecessors and his

followers set out to dislodge. There is some greater good, in Kant's view, that "is not

derived from the goodness of the results which it produces" (Kant 1785/1964, p. 17). When

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extended to embrace an obligation upon business owners to respect some larger and largely

unwritten contract with society for their license to operate, we hear echoes of other

philosophical traditions: Rousseau's social contract and Marx, which contribute to the

skepticism of business people, reared in capitalism and steeped in the thinking of Adam

Smith, whose thinking in part informed Mill's version of utilitarianism.

Stewardship theory arises as well from deontological roots. Though not nearly so well

explored in the academic literature, it has an intuitive appeal to many people in business. In

the corporate governance literature it's more associated with the governance of charities,

where by definition actors –in management or among the trustees –are presumed not to be

seeking to maximize profits but rather working for some greater good. But stewardship is

not confined to the charities, either. Peter Weinberg, a partner at the boutique investment

bank Perella Weinberg Partners and former Goldman Sachs executive, wrote of what a

privilege was to join the board of a public company. "Serving on a board is like taking on a

position in public service," he wrote in the Financial Times. "It is not (and should not be) a

wealth creation opportunity but a chance to play a role in the proper workings of our

marketplace" (Weinberg 2006). Boardroom pay has improved markedly since the scandals

of 2001 and 2002 and the resulting demands for more non-executive directors who must

spend more time on their mandates. Indeed, it is difficult to see how personal profit

maximization would lead many of the current crew of serving independent, non-executive

directors at public companies to take up those roles when there was much better money to

be in private equity.

This is not necessarily true for all outside directors of public companies, however.

Despite the move in recent years away from deep entanglement of German banks with the

equity of German industry, many bankers still sit on supervisory boards of German

companies, taking those roles not for personal gain, nor out of a sense of what Weinberg

(2006) called public service. They are, however, serving at least in part to serve a different

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higher purpose –that of looking after the interests of their bank's loan portfolio. Like the

lawyers, bankers and accountants who so often populated American company boards over

decades, this, too, is stewardship, but of a different kind than that envisaged in the calls for

"independence" of mind and purpose invoked in the Higgs review of the role of non-

executive directors in the UK (Higgs 2003), the NYSE listing rule changes (New York Stock

Exchange 2003) and the German government-backed code ("German Kodex" 2002/2007),

among other governance regulation and principles. But it is still deontological in nature, as

there is a greater good that guides those directors' decisions –just not one that Rousseau or

Marx might have cherished. Nor is stewardship theory limited in use to the boardroom.

Muth and Donaldson (1998) point out that stewardship, unlike agency theory, recognizes

non-financial motives of managers, for example, the need for advancement and recognition,

intrinsic job satisfaction, respect for authority and the work ethic. But these three broad

theories of corporate governance –one rooted in utilitarian ethics, the others in

deontological –miss out the key area most on the minds of corporate directors: shareholder

theory.

Shareholder value

The mantra of corporate management at least since the 1980s in what is often called

Anglo-Saxon capitalism has been "shareholder value". It's a measure of the financial

rewards delivered to shareholders through the combination of cash (dividends and share

buy-backs) and the capital gains achieved on public or private equity markets.

Table 1 - theories of governance

Personal Corporate
Consequentialism
Agency theory Shareholder value
(teleology)
Ethical idealism
Stewardship theory (in the main) Stakeholder theory (in the main)
(deontology)

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Overtly utilitarian, shareholder value guides directors to decide what's in the greater

interest of the holders of the greatest number of shares outstanding. Mapping the ethical

approach to the interest served gives us a map of governance theories like those in Table 1.

With the inclusion of shareholder theory, our faith in the economic purpose of the

corporation is restored and the sound economist sitting on a board of directors has an

ethical framework to guide decisions. End of story.

But not quite.

The problems with shareholder value

Discerning what is in the interests of shareholders has never been an easy task.

Founders and their families have different interests from venture capitalists looking for an

early exit; both have different interests from the institutional investor who has just

purchased shares during an initial public offering from either of them. Do you set strategy

for the investor who holds the shares today, or the one who is likely to hold them

tomorrow? Or in three years' time?

In the comparatively relaxed days of the 1980s, when all directors had to worry about

was corporate raiders and vulture capitalists, delivering shareholder value was a pretty safe

ethical bet. In Germany, where the tax system, accounting conventions and company law

requiring Mitbestimmung (worker-co-determination of corporate policy) constrained the

efforts of supervisory boards to deliver profits, yes, even in Germany shareholder value

became the vogue.

Shareholder-value rules-of-thumb grew from the broad patterns of share ownership. In

the US, shareholders of large public companies were mainly domestic. About half were

private individuals, the rest institutional investors of a conventional sort. In the UK,

ownership was also domestic but perhaps less so than in the US. Institutions made up a

large majority of the holdings, though they were, again, largely of a conventional nature:

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domestic insurance and pension funds. In continental Europe, however, even in the early

1980s, a large proportion of shares –a quarter to half, depending on the country –were held

by foreign institutions, many of them in the UK. The globalization of capital markets, the

introduction of new instruments and the development of fast, electronic trading platform

was about to change all that.

By the start of the new century, derivative markets, short-selling, hedge funds and

cross-border trading made the task of understanding the interests of shareholders not just

difficult, but impossible and even perverse. Consider the simplest of these developments:

collective investment tools like mutual funds or what in the European Union are fetchingly

called as UCITS. Their growth has accelerated the concentration of corporate share

ownership in the hands of institutional investors. Some are index-tracking or passively

managed funds, where the interests of the fund lay in overall performance of the market.

The owners' economic interests are, therefore, different from those of the company in its

competitive marketplace. A case in point is the takeover battle between Barclays and a

consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland for control of the Dutch bank ABN-Amro. The

antagonists shared many of the same shareholders, whose greater interests might lie more

in preventing bidding war than in winning or even losing. Deciding what to do in the

interests of shareholders might be deciding to do nothing at all, because doing anything might

damage a competitor that your owners also own.

Even the managers of active funds, however, can see their economic interests diverge

from those of their beneficiaries, introducing another level of agency relationship, and with

it another agency problem. The competition between them for short-term financial

performance led to rapid portfolio turnover. Even in 2002, a dull year for equity markets,

the average duration of an equity investment by a US mutual fund was a mere 11 months

(see Bogle 2003), which raises the question of what interest it would have in the long-term

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performance of the company. Nor was this short-term focus merely a US phenomenon.

Actively managed UK funds turned over their portfolios about every two to three years.

The pressure to deliver short-term fund performance –and with it the focus on

delivering share-price appreciation earnings announcements –lies at the heart of what a lot

of people, including many corporate managers, feel is wrong with the Anglo-Saxon model

of financial markets (Tonello 2006; Aspen Institute 2007; CED 2007).

But their interests were still easier for a corporate director to discern than those of the

other players in the equity market. Hedge funds using high-octane, heavily leveraged

strategies have become a large force, not just in the volume of their trading activities but in

the absolute numbers of shares they hold. Moreover, many used instruments known as

"contracts for difference" to create an economic interest in the company's performance

which don't involve the quaint, old-fashioned notion of owning the shares. The UK Panel

on Takeovers and Mergers modified its disclosure requirements to inclusive derivatives

("The Takeover Code" 2007) and the London-based Investor Relations Society called on the

Financial Services Authority to demand daily disclosures of such positions as well

("Disclose derivatives if you want transparency –IRS" 2007).

If that weren't enough, hedge-fund activity supercharged the practice of stock-lending,

in which a traditional institutional investor –even a passively managed index-tracker –

might lend shares from their portfolios for a fixed period of time in exchange for a payment

of interest from the hedge fund. Stock-lending gives the hedge fund temporary ownership,

creating two types of trading strategies. One involved short-selling –selling shares today in

the expectation of buying them back later at a lower price. This means the economic interest

of the (temporary) owner of the shares is in seeing the company perform badly. In the cases

of some small companies, we've even seen the short interest –the number of share sold in

this fashion –represent a majority of the voting stock. For a brief period, therefore, it was, in

a utilitarian sense of greater value to shareholders for the company to go bust.

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The second trading strategy of hedge funds has been to join the ranks of shareholder-

activist fund managers. This approach involves taking control of the shares for the sake to

effecting a change of direction on the company, to pursue a particular acquisition or to

change the chief executive. The high profile case in 2006 of the actions of The Children's

Investment Fund and its investment in the German stock exchange operator Deutsche Börse

AG provoked a political storm that included the German Social Democratic Party chairman

Franz Müntefering, then a member of the German government, referring to hedge funds as

"locusts". Just how profitable of this approach can be was demonstrated in a large

quantitative study of the shareholder activism of the Focus Funds of the UK asset

management firm Hermes (Becht et al. 2006).

Whatever the success of these trading strategies, they complicate massively the

problems directors have in pursuing an ethical stance based on achieving shareholder

value. Even more harshly than before, shareholder camps divide along the lines of what is

in their personal self-interest. The voices from the traditional, long-only asset managers,

especially those managing pension-fund assets with a long investment horizon, argue that

directors should act in the interest of long-term investors, not short-term speculators, a

phrase often spat out with the same disgust as Müntefering used with "locusts". Some push

for governance solutions giving greater voting power to long-term holders. Seemingly

unaware of the irony, some of these same investors –wearing a different hat –argue against

the disproportionate voting power afforded to a) founding-family shareholders, say, in

Belgium, b) the beneficiaries of pyramids share structures in Italy, or c) super-voting rights

of A-shares in Sweden. It's easy to see how these shareholders themselves face conflicts of

interest with their narrowly personal and utilitarian stance. [It's worth noting, however,

that an Oxford Union-style debate at the European Corporate Governance Institute in 2007

soundly defeated the motion that long-term investors should have double the voting rights.

The vote was 13 in favor to 55 against with three abstentions (ECGI 2007)].

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Toward a new ethical stance in governance

This discussion suggests, from the vantage point of the independent, non-executive director,

that an ethical system based on shareholder value is unworkable on a practical basis as well

as having deep theoretical flaws. Stakeholder theory is flawed as well, but for different

reasons. It fails in theoretical terms because it struggles with determining the difference

between means and ends. It fails on a practical level because when everything is a goal then

nothing is. Agency theory helps the director in finding solutions to the narrow problems of

corporate governance: how to keep managers from diverting corporate funds for private

purposes. Qualified by reference to transaction-cost economics, as in the organizational

economics theory as outlined by Stiles and Taylor (2001), it can even help directors decide

when its no longer worth trying to prevent managers from stealing shareholder funds,

indeed why it might help shareholders to encourage what the British media like to call fat-

cat pay. It was, after all, all those very fat-American-cat CEOs who delivered the

disproportionately large gains in profits, share price appreciation and productivity while

taking home large sums of cash pay and huge, unrealized gains on stock options.

Stewardship theory helps explain why people might still want to serve on boards of

directors of US public companies, despite the risk of federal prosecution under Sarbanes-

Oxley or shareholder lawsuits so common in litigious America. Stewardship will help guide

a director's decision when the board faces authorizing a questionable transaction or

deciding when and how to report bad news. For a summary, see Table 2.

What is missing, though, is the big picture, a theory to guide the large, strategic

decisions, the ones that involve a substantial commitment of shareholder funds or the

opportunity costs of abandoning one line of business for the sake of entering another.

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Table 2 - Perspectives of boards of directors

Directors' Theoretical Ethical

Dimension Board's role Limitations
accountability origins assumptions
Capitalist
Boards culture
Class Marxist Descriptive, not
perpetuate power n/a
hegemony Themselves as a sociology normative
of ruling elite
class
Managerial Board is a legal Descriptive, not
CEO Sociology n/a
hegemony fiction normative
To the state Not useful for
Fulfilling legal As mere decision-making
Legalistic Corporate law Law = right
requirements fiduciary of beyond narrow
shareholders compliance
Narrow definition
Monitor agents Assumes
of board's role
(executives) to ethical egoism
ensure efficient on part of In public
Economics and executives companies,
Agency use of principal's Shareholders
finance directors are
(i.e. Act-utilitarian
shareholders') themselves agents,
for outside
funds monitoring another
directors
agent's actions
Cooperative
mechanism to Transaction- Sees board in
secure vital cost economics passive role,
Resource resources Each other and Rule-
Organizational facilitating rather
dependence shareholders utilitarian
Boundary- theory than setting
spanning Sociology direction
Create legitimacy
Trustee Beneficiary of Without clear basis
Idealism
Representative of the "trust" for trust, lacks a
Stewardship Sociology Rule-
external Self, one's shared basis of
deontological decision-making
principle(s) conscience
Useful only for easy
Customers, decisions
suppliers, Sociology
Special case of Idealism Confuses means
employees, Trade unionism
stewardship with and ends
Stakeholder competitors, Religious belief, Rule-
stated Temptation for
society at large esp. Christian deontological
beneficiaries director to act as
and altruism
shareholders trustee of one
interest group
Susceptible to
short-termism
Derivatives markets
Shareholder Special case of Economics and Act- and rule- compound
Shareholders difficulty of
value stewardship finance utilitarian
knowing who
shareholders or
what their interests
are
Strategic
Ensuring value management
Strategic Act- and rule- Unpredictability of
maximization The enterprise
value Transaction- utilitarian future
over long-term
cost economics

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Strategic value
This framework for the ethics of corporate governance wasn't, perhaps, quite complete.

Instead of looking "corporate" aims, we might better have formulated the notion as serving

shareholder interests. The teleological, utilitarian stance remains shareholder value, with all

the problems that entails, but the deontological focus becomes not that of stakeholder

theory but of a narrower view: the one of socially responsible investors. A third and

broader category of aims –collective ones –can be added to the framework to

accommodate the deontological approaches of stakeholder theory and corporate social

responsibility, involving the interests of those who aren't shareholders. That leaves a gap, in

ethical terms utilitarian and in scope collective, which we shall call strategic value (See

Table 3).

Table 3 - Ethics of governance, expanded

Personal Shareholder Enterprise
Consequentialism
Agency theory Shareholder value Strategic value
(teleology)
Stakeholder theory;
Ethical idealism Stewardship
Ethical investing social
(deontology) theory
responsibility

The shareholder perspectives are both problematic. Shareholder value still suffers from

every director's inability to assess it in a meaningful way. Ethical investing operates on the

hope that social responsibility will be profitable but on the conviction that even if it isn't, it

is still the right thing to do. Stakeholder theory –especially in its guise as corporate social

responsibility –carries over the confusion of means and ends.

Strategic value, while not easy to determine, asks the director to take actions on the

basis of what's best in a utilitarian sense for the viability and persistence of the enterprise.

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An example: Faced with the decision between a takeover bid at a price than gives

certainty of a 30 percent gain over a six-month period compared with an uncertain gain of

100 percent over a three-year period, how does the director choose? The incumbent CEO,

conflicted as we know under agency theory, will vote for or against, depending on the size

his severance package and what his next job outside the company might be versus what

position and power he'll enjoy in the merged entity. The chairman, when it's not the same

person, might act in his personal interest (a comfortable retirement, perhaps) or out of a

sense of stewardship for the narrow interests of his close friends in senior management. A

non-executive but bound director may feel obliged to vote in stewardship of the owners he

represents, the founding family, the venture capital fund, the activist shareholder.

Under the governance model that the reforms this decade have promoted, the decision

rests in the hands of the independent, non-executive, outside directors. They are now,

supposedly, in a majority. They control all the key board committees. They are able to

monitor performance through their control of the audit process, and to command the

necessary data through their independent staffs. They already possess the requisite strategic

knowledge through their formal induction to the board and the company and their

deepening knowledge of the business through the greater frequency and length of board

meetings. On what basis do they decide?

They assess what constitutes strategic value. That means judging sources of value –

particularly the intangible ones –that might be lost in a takeover. If the company itself,

using its own resources –its people, its customer relationships, its supply chain, its research

and development –has a pretty good chance of matching the money on offer from a bidder,

then it's better to stay independent –better, that is, in the sense that doing it oneself

generates the psychological benefits we valued in aspects of stewardship theory as well as

creating the options for further value creation through having succeeded ourselves. It

recognizes that it's better for wealth creation, for society, to earn a capital gain rather than

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just make one. If, on the other hand, the offer is clearly much better than what we can

manage ourselves, it's better to let someone else manage the business.

Basing decisions on strategic value involved considering the interests of stakeholders,

yes, but in their strategic sense, for the options they generate in the creation of future

wealth. The orientation of the independent, non-executive director should, therefore, be on

the long term, regardless of what shareholders say. Its utility is limited by the

unpredictability of the future, a shortcoming it shares with all other theories. And

shareholders may, after all, be merely here today, gone tomorrow. The enterprise remains.

Conclusions
Boards of directors face a wide variety of decisions that will involve invoking –

consciously or otherwise –decision framework and ethical perspectives. The dangers of

executive excess call out for non-executives to look to agenda theory to guard against

excesses and transaction-cost economics to know when it becomes counterproductive to

stop here. In most cases they will see shareholder value as the governing framework for

decisions, and in some instances, especially when the companies themselves have adopted

sweeping statements of purpose, stewardship theory comes into play. Given the economic

purpose of most corporations, however, it is not terribly surprising that directors might

draw more on utilitarian ethics, using the expected consequences of their decisions as the

basis for determined their "rightness", than on deontological calls for a higher authority of

an imperative beyond what is prescribed in law. As such, when crucial decisions arise,

directors can be guided by their determination of what is likely to create strategic value,

where the goods of stakeholder like employees, customers and suppliers may well be taken

into consideration, but as means to purpose of wealth creation over the long term.

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