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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Anna Tilba, Professor John Wilson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Prior research on institutional investors’ role in corporate governance draws a distinction between engaged and disengaged pension funds. The aim of this study is to shed more light on how pension fund practitioners talk about engagement and disengagement. Using insights from thirty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews and round-table discussions with pension fund trustees, executives, investment officers and financial intermediaries, we identify different types of vocabularies and temporal perspectives used to account for different stances towards engagement. We highlight a tension between a seemingly causal relationship between accounts and future behaviour and argue that these ‘accounts’, ‘vocabularies’ and ‘uses of the past’ in themselves need to be treated as an object of study because they may represent not simply the individual motivations, but rather the expressions of extant norms in the broader social context of financial markets. An important policy implication is that perceived realities of investment are unlikely to cause a change in pension fund behaviour because participants seem to decouple their view of the world from their impact on the world.
Author(s): Tilba A, Wilson JF
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: British Journal of Management
Year: 2017
Volume: 28
Issue: 3
Pages: 502-518
Print publication date: 01/07/2017
Online publication date: 09/05/2017
Acceptance date: 13/01/2017
Date deposited: 06/02/2017
ISSN (print): 1045-3172
ISSN (electronic): 1467-8551
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd
URL: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12225
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12225
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