Sustainable Investment and Corporate Governance Working Papers, Sustainable Investment Research Platform
No 2010/8:
Influence Strategies in Shareholder Engagement: A Case Study of Five Swedish National Pension Funds
Ian Hamilton ()
and Jessica Eriksson
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
stakeholderfirm perspective.
Keywords: case study; ESG directive; influence strategy; pension funds; reputation risk; responsible investment; shareholder engagement; shareholder salience; stakeholder theory; (follow links to similar papers)
30 pages, June 12, 2010
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