Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTA survey of working-class women's activity as savers offers a new insight into their economic activity, opening questions about the sources inside and outside the family of the money saved by single and married women. It is relevant to a number of issues: the economic activity of married women and its relationship to the legal context in which they were operating – in particular before the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; the extent to which women's employment in the nineteenth century may have been mis-stated and/or under-reported; and the distribution of income within the working-class family. A study of investment patterns within two savings banks, one in Huddersfield and one in Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that working-class women may have been more active as savers than has been reported by earlier studies.

It is generally asserted that corporate social reporting (CSR) is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. The present paper contests this view by looking at the ways in which British companies reacted to the challenges they faced during the First World War, when they were exposed to charges of profiteering, as well as to industrial unrest and high taxation. The paper considers the use of the speeches made by chairmen at annual general meetings to refute these charges and defend themselves. It considers the relevance of these findings for contemporary social reporting, and suggests that investigation of the history of CSR is likely to show further examples of its use by companies to put forward "the business case".

There is a continuing debate about the extent to which women in the 19th century were involved in economic life. The paper uses a reading of a number of novels by the English author Anthony Trollope to explore the impact of primogeniture, entail, and the marriage settlement on the relationship between men and women and the extent to which women were involved in the ownership, transmission, and management of property in England in the mid-19th century.

The 'stakeholder economy' forms a central part of the New Labour programme for reforming both the public and private sectors. The present paper considers the potential of stakeholding to address the weaknesses of corporate governance in the UK It concludes that stakeholder governance is a concept which owes its appeal to its imprecision, and is unworkable in practice, and that its deployment, rather than imposing accountability on capitalism, merely represents an attempt to make free market capitalism look more acceptable.

A new conceptualization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is presented as a means of asserting and maintaining corporate control in the face of political, economic, and social challenges. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) applied different strategies to maintain control of its Iranian assets in the face nationalist demands—political and covert mechanisms, market based, resource access controls, and CSR programs. This paper investigates the third, and least explored, strand of their strategy. It identifies managerial strategies for CSR engagement with respect to three corresponding interest groups: politicians and diplomats, shareholders, and local employees, drawing on a variety of previously unused archival sources. From prior studies it is unclear whether the AIOC's CSR programs, for example, in employment and housing, were motivated by social improvement, its business agenda, or responses to legislative pressures from the Iranian government. A detailed examination of CSR policy and private correspondence between AIOC's senior executives about their negotiations with the Iranian government shows that they engaged in and reported voluntary CSR activities to strengthen their reputation and negotiating position but refused to compromise on aspects of CSR that threatened the existing managerial hierarchy of control. This interpretation is supported by a content analysis of the company's annual reports in the years before and after nationalization, revealing a choice of topics and language intended to support its self-presentation as a socially concerned employer. The results of this study have wider implications for understanding CSR reporting as a corporate strategy to enhance negotiating and bargaining positions.

This article explores the widening ownership of stocks and shares in Great Britain between 1870 and 1935. It demonstrates the extent of that growth and the increasing number of small investors. Women became more important in terms of the number of shareholders and value of holdings. Factors that encouraged this trend included the issue of less risky types of investments, and legal changes relating to married women's property. We examine the 'deepening' importance of stocks and shares for wealth holders, arguing that the growing significance of these kinds of financial assets was as important as the growth in the investor population.