Charlotte Villiers

The Role of Investor Networks in Transnational Corporate Governance

Charlotte Villiers, writing on The Role of Investor Networks in Transnational Corporate Governance, focuses on the role of shareholders in transnational governance, particularly through institutional mechanisms such as the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. Shareholders enjoy particular salience in corporate governance but their role is limited by problems such as confusion over their fiduciary position, resource and information deficits, regulatory uncertainty, and a persistently short-term, profit oriented perspective. Networking has the potential to overcome some of these problems and the UN PRI has had a positive influence, but a fully transformative contribution requires engagement with and active participation of citizens and non-shareholder experts. Such involvement is necessary for a genuinely democratic and legitimate international governance system.

Post‐Crisis Corporate Governance and Labour Relations in the EU (and Beyond)

This article attempts to explain how corporate governance and macroeconomic policies have impacted on the role of workers and their representatives in the corporate environment and to consider how this has affected their capacity to protect themselves in the context of the financial crisis. It also considers the strategies they might adopt to strengthen their position in the future. It argues for the need to reposition labour law in the legal hierarchy as a first condition but also, and more importantly, that for democratic reasons, trade unions need to work collectively with other civil society and protest movements to hold corporations, national governments, and European institutions to account and, internally, to develop the class consciousness of old and new members.