Shareholder engagement is pivotal in corporate governance, evolving beyond formal resolutions to impact business decisions. This chapter unveils the typically undisclosed dynamics of board-shareholder engagement through a survey of 171 SEC-registered corporations, targeting corporate secretaries, general counsel, and investor relations officers. The survey was complemented by a review of the disclosure on shareholder voting and engagement included in proxy statements filed by Russell 3000 companies during the 2018–2022 meeting seasons. Larger and mid-sized companies more frequently engage than smaller organizations. Engagement, often with major asset managers, can take a confrontational turn, particularly with hedge funds at smaller firms. Topics include executive incentive plans, ESG metrics, GHG emission reduction, workforce diversity, pay equity, and political spending. The study reveals that engagement significantly influences corporate practices, leading to changes, withdrawal of proposals, alterations in proxy votes, and the inclusion of engaged shareholder-nominated directors in management slates.

Corporate governance debates have undergone a fundamental shift, with environmental,social and governance (“ESG”) issues coming to the forefront of decision-making by boards, executives and shareholders. Across a spectrum ofstakeholders, companies and their boards face pressure to incorporate ESG considerations into their business strategies, including strategies around merger and acquisition (“M&A”) transactions. This chapter addresses how the growth of ESG is poised to affect board and shareholder engagement in M&A. For boards evaluating M&A deals, ESG factors are emerging as critical to all aspects of dealmaking, including selection of targets and buyers, due diligence, governance and integration, and financing. The ESG pressures on M&A deals also influence corporate governance in M&A – implicating board strategy and oversight in M&A, as well as shareholder engagement in M&A. In an ideal world, ESG information can help enhance board and shareholder decision-making around M&A. Yet, whether ESG considerations are likely to do so remains uncertain.

Chapter 1 sets the historical and theoretical background of the book. It starts by describing the regulatory battles that took place from the 1970s to adopt more stringent tobacco control measures. Then, it illustrates how the negotiations of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the subsequent WTO and international investment disputes can be considered the internationalisation of the tobacco wars. In this context, the concept of ‘lawfare’ is introduced as a descriptive device and analytical tool for the analysis of the book. The second part of the introduction introduces the second fil rouge of the book: evidence. It begins by defining the notion of evidence and by showing how, in the context of tobacco control, it can refer to different bodies of evidence that pertain both to the risk assessment and risk management dimension of tobacco control measures. This second part, moreover, shows how evidence has always been one of the key points of contention in the tobacco wars and has continued to be so in the international tobacco control lawfare. The introduction concludes with an explanation of the methodology employed, a reflection on its limits, and an outline of the content of the book.

Focusing on the relationship between the ICRC and the business world, the chapter notes that the ICRC was sustained in its first decades by Swiss corporate donations. There is also passing note that two of the early basic beliefs of ICRC leaders were the value of religion and private property. The ICRC governing board has always been well stocked with business leaders but not labor leaders. That board, aka the Assembly, has not been well constructed in recent decades, but there is little firm evidence that business leaders on the board have affected ICRC field operations or active diplomacy in significant ways. In recent years the organization has created a Corporate Support Group to recognize major business donors, who remain mostly Swiss, some of whom are controversial. Overall the financial contributions to the ICRC from the business sector constitute a small percentage of the total today, although the organization contracts with a number of for-profit entities to sustain its activities.

In addition to summarising the main findings of the book, this final chapter offers some reflections on the lessons that emerge from the history of the international tobacco control lawfare. The reflections are organised around the two main themes of the book: lawfare (Section 5.1) and evidence (Section 5.2). The first part offers some thoughts on the value of using ‘lawfare’ as an analytical tool, zooming in on the role of business actors in international regulation (Section 5.1.1) and on a reflexive account on one’s research (Section 5.1.2). The second part summarises the main topics related to evidence that have emerged in the book: the different types of evidence in risk assessment and risk management (Section 5.2.1), international law’s overreliance on evidence (Section 5.2.2), evidence as a weapon (Section 5.2.3), and evidence as an ideological battleground (Section 5.2.4).

Chapter 3 analyses how evidence has become a central element of the FCTC regime (2005–present). Section 3.1 captures the most important developments since the conclusion of the FCTC in 2003. Section 3.2 provides the theoretical framework of the chapter, focusing on the concept of path dependence in international organisations. Section 3.3 proceeds by showing that the development of the guidelines by the FCTC Conference of the Parties (COP) has been in effect a continuation of the strategy on evidence. Section 3.4 in turn highlights the second facet of the FCTC as an evidence-based regime, that is how the FCTC has mobilised new evidence at the national level. Sections 3.5 and 3.6 reflect on the consequences that the evidence-based approach has had on the outlook of the FCTC regime. Section 3.5 uses in-depth qualitative analysis to demonstrate that the evidence-based approach has reinforced the importance of the expertise of civil society organisations. Finally, Section 3.6 illustrates how the evidence-based approach has started to show its shortcomings in the work of the FCTC COP – particularly in the approach to new products like e-cigarettes (or ENDS) and in the (lack of) development of strategies to foster the implementation of tobacco control measures.

Unlike late nineteenth-century nostalgists, modern readers are unlikely to conclude that the Company was an enlightened promoter of knowledge. Still, those concerned with the present relations among companies, states, and knowledge might learn much from the earlier debates in which it was involved.

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one. As Joshua Ehrlich reveals in this original account, a commitment to the cause of knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. Ehrlich shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company—just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Since their creation, corporations have proven to be vehicles for incredible aggregate wealth creation. It was, however, recognised at the outset that in creating a unique set of legal features that would make the company attractive for private investment, the state was not only creating a co-investor in public wealth but there was also the possibility that the company would pose a threat to the state itself. As such, since its inception, the corporation has been involved in a delicate dance with the state both to route its productive capacity towards socially desirable ends and to control the corporation’s power. Today, as technological development and the mobilisation of international financial capital allow the power of the corporation to transcend that of the state, the tools of the past that were used to constrain the corporation are increasingly relevant. Corporate law and antitrust were once used to maintain the balance between the power of the corporation and the power of the state. The now-separate conversations about corporate responsibility in the corporate governance sphere and about corporate power within competition policy circles have always, in fact, been fundamentally connected and targeted at the same set of risks.

Corporations can come to possess significant political capital. Consequently, they can come to exert influence not just on their own sustainability and responsible business policies and practices, but on those of society in general. To begin making sense of such influence, and of the fact that such influence is complex, multi-faceted and sometimes profound, this chapter focuses on four considerations. First, corporate involvement in multi-stakeholder initiatives is discussed. Second, the corporate capacity to influence (inter)national political processes is noted. Third, the current trend towards (potential) CEO activism, and the ways in which such activism appears shaped by ongoing transformations in social media, is outlined. Fourth, and most controversially, it is noted that, given the technologies they control, big tech corporations can play an increasingly directive role in how people comprehend, understand and decide upon decisions relating to (personal) responsibility and sustainability matters. In short, and as is re-emphasised in the chapter’s concluding remarks, the overall purpose of the chapter is to show that corporations can have a profound impact on matters relating to politics, sustainability and responsibility.

The company form of business structure is one of the most common in the world today. As discussed in the previous chapter, there are a variety of benefits that make the corporate form the most appealing for many business operators, and also for investors and other stakeholders. This chapter examines this dominant business structure in detail, and explains the regulations in place around it. It identifies the legislation and other regulatory tools that enable the formation of companies in Australia, the process of incorporation and its legal consequences, what it means to be a member of a company, how companies are managed and the duties that are owed by the persons in control, companies financial reporting obligations, and the processes involved when a company becomes insolvent or otherwise needs to be wound up. You will follow a practical example across the course of this chapter, identifying how the company business structure would affect this startup business, and the impact that the legal regulation in this area will have on the individuals within and associated with this business.

This chapter focuses on sugar as a commodity underlining and overdetermining social, political, and aesthetic changes in the Caribbean from the 1870s to the 1930s. These global and regional changes included the consolidation of the gold-standard regime and its sudden dismissal, the apparition of corporate-based capitalism, the rearticulation of economics as a discipline through the marginalist “revolution,” the incorporation of former slaves and indentured service into a wage-labor force, and the beginning of the conversion of former plantations into hospitality sites. The resurgence of sugar as a dominant raw commodity gave a particular character to the region's absorption into global corporate capitalism. By focusing on both the material and the social dimension of sugar, the argument is made that this commodity helped negotiate the differences between literary and artistic innovations coming from European-influenced lettered elites and those coming from popular groups with strong Afro-Caribbean roots.

It’s easy to assume that all businesses (of any scale at least) are corporations, and that all corporations are run the same. They have executive leadership, boards of directors, and their overriding aim is to make profit for their investors. This is how most large corporations are organized and operate; and you could be forgiven for assuming that this is just the way things work. That said, close readers of this volume have likely intuited that this way of running a business is in fact historically specific, and owes a lot to neoliberal ideas about how a business and how society should work (hierarchically, with a minimum of democracy, and all organized to generate profits and reward shareholder owners). Here, Wood and Palladino take these assumptions apart by illustrating all the different way that other people (even workers!) can in fact own and control companies. One simple thing this chapter shows is that in designing a business or organizing a company, it doesn’t need to be top-down and oriented toward maximizing shareholder value; but can be oriented toward other values, and these values can be reflected in its organization.

Chapter 8 examines and partially defends Durkheim's functionalism as practiced in The Division of Labor in Society. His position is reconstructed with an eye to determining which aspects are worth retaining for a contemporary theory of social pathology, including the functionally organized nature of society. Focusing on claims regarding the moral function of the division of labor, it examines epistemological issues bound up with ascribing functions to features of society, including the relation between functional explanation and functional analysis and the role played by historical narratives. Durkheim's method is a complex holism whose claims depend less on single facts and individual arguments than on the plausibility of the whole picture that emerges from mutually reinforcing arguments, empirical facts, interpretive suggestions, and analogies. Thus, Durkheim's method for ascribing functions to social phenomena bears similarities to other interpretive enterprises, from the reading of texts to the construction of theories in the natural sciences.

Chapter 2 examines the extent to which theories of social pathology are committed to thinking of human societies on the model of animal organisms. It rejects the thought that societies exhibit a complete teleological harmony, where all parts work together perfectly to maintain the organism's stability and cohesiveness. Societies are totalities in the more modest sense that their parts – institutions or practices – cannot be adequately grasped or evaluated in isolation. Like organisms, societies are functional beings in that how they are constituted and how their parts interact cannot be understood without ascribing ends to both parts and the whole they make up. Societies are, moreover, functionally organized in that they carry out their characteristic functions – including both material and spiritual reproduction – via specialized and coordinated functional subsystems (or social spheres). Finally, even though social functions extend beyond material reproduction, the latter remains an essential part of healthy social functioning.