In this book we’ve brought together contributions from law, economics, sociology and politics in order to evaluate the effects of the shift to shareholder primacy in both the United States and the United Kingdom, in the context of a parallel shift in both countries to an economy in which finance has an increasingly central role. We have made a decision to include and even emphasize empirical evidence, rather than theory alone, in conscious rejection of the oft-stated view that “it takes a theory to beat a theory.” For in evaluating the empirical effects of these decades-long trends in light of the global financial and economic crises – crises propagated from the United States – we submit that the problems inherent in American-style corporate governance have become manifest. The problem is not only one of corporate governance, since the shareholder wealth maximizing norm in the United States is embedded within economic and political institutions stripped of many social democratic norms and policies. But in conjunction with neoliberal economic and political norms, the result of shareholder primacy has been increasing economic volatility and inequality, systemic fragility, and financial risk that is increasingly being transferred to individuals to manage, particularly given the collapse of many collective bargaining agreements and collective arrangements for pensions.

The congruence of theory and evidence suggesting weaknesses in shareholder driven corporate governance gives rise to questions about what, instead, the goals of corporate governance should be, and how these goals may best be aligned with government policy. It is naïve to think that continental European stakeholder systems could be transplanted into the United States or the United Kingdom by legislative fiat. As the convergence debate has shown, corporate governance systems are sticky, being deeply embedded in complementary institutional frameworks, political constellations and social norms. Certainly aspects of stakeholder arrangements ought to be studied seriously and mined for their inherent values or regulatory approaches that could inform specific policy recommendations. But the embedded nature of firms and corporate governance arrangements does suggest caution, and encourages ever more serious, open-minded study in search of policy ideas. The following paragraphs seek to provide some ideas about what topics seem worthy of that further research.