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A Study in Studying Corporate Boards Over Time: Looking Backwards to Move Forwards[Note 1. The author is very grateful to the Economic and ...]
Author(s) -
Pye Annie
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
british journal of management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.407
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1467-8551
pISSN - 1045-3172
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8551.00184
Subject(s) - shareholder value , corporate governance , value (mathematics) , metaphor , section (typography) , focus (optics) , sociology , positive economics , dimension (graph theory) , shareholder , epistemology , accounting , management , economics , business , philosophy , linguistics , machine learning , computer science , advertising , pure mathematics , optics , physics , mathematics
This paper is based on data collected in the late 1980s and again in the late 1990s from interviews with chairmen, chief executives and board members in 12 large UK organizations such as Hanson, Marks & Spencer, Prudential and Glynwed. Although the primary focus is on theorizing and theory over time, this also leads us to question matters of method and methodology. The first section considers some of the study design issues raised by conducting this sequel study, noting that it was not possible to ‘repeat’ the first study for a number of important reasons. The second section observes that while our earlier analytical metaphor of organizing as explaining endures, the nature of the explanations has changed: ‘strategic focus’, ‘shareholder value’ and ‘corporate governance’ are now the contemporary watchwords although were unheard of in our interviews a decade earlier. The following section develops on this, concluding that in making judgements about future shareholder value, the primary evidence is drawn from events already past and interpreted through current explanations. We conclude on the importance of time to our theorizing, where there appears to be a confluence between time and person, in part, created and in part, supported by particular (judgements of) explanations of organizing prevailing at that time.