Center for the Study of Social Organization

Date:           March 25, 2013
Time:          12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Location:    165 Wallace Hall
Please feel free to bring a lunch.

We investigate why countries around the world have adopted minority shareholder protections as part of their legal framework. Based on the neo-institutional and world-society perspectives, we argue that isomorphic pressures of a normative, coercive, and mimetic nature have over time prompted countries to better protect minority shareholders against the actions of large shareholders and management. We argue that democratic freedoms generate normative effects, dependence on conditional IMF loans produces coercive pressures, and the actions of peer countries as well as the leading influence of the U.S. create the conditions for mimicry. Using a unique dataset on 56 countries between 1970 and 2010, we find support for each of the hypotheses. We discuss the implications of the results for the evolution of the modern corporation and the financialization of the economy.

Mauro F. Guillén is the Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute at Penn, a research-and-teaching program on management and international relations. He holds the Dr. Felix Zandman Endowed Professorship in International Management at the Wharton School and a secondary appointment as Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology of the University of Pennsylvania. He previously taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received a PhD in sociology from Yale University and a Doctorate in political economy from the University of Oviedo in his native Spain. He holds dual U.S./Spain citizenship.