Impact of Shareholders’ Activism on Governance Practices and Firm Performance in Pakistan: A Response for Family Controlled Firms

By taking a sample of 150 non-financial firms listed on PSX, this study has empirically examined the impact of ownership structure on firm performance while considering multiple dimensions. This study employed the system GMM econometric technique to examine the association between ownership structure and firm performance. According to the computed results of the study, family ownership puts a positive and highly significant impact on the market performance of the firm. It has also found a strong and significant relationship between family control and the market value of a firm. Similarly, group affiliation and market performance of the firm have a strong and significant association but in a negative direction. Institutional ownership is significantly related to the accounting and market performance of the firm. Moreover, the joint impact of institutional and family ownership is positively and significantly related to the accounting performance of the firm. Finally, institutional activism is positively and significantly related to the accounting performance of the firm.

Institutional Activism and Ethnic Intermediation in Post-Communist Romania

Existing studies on legal approaches to ethnic minority representation often highlight different systems’ strengths and weaknesses. While this scholarship provides important insights into the growing body of literature on minority representation, the topic remains largely under-theorized. Because systems of ethnic minority representation clarify the organizations and philosophies of diverse states, more theoretical analyses can enrich the descriptive literature. Building on the existing scholarship, this article assesses Romania’s particular version of proportional representation regarding designated national minorities. It applies two theoretical models: (1) institutional activism and (2) ethnic intermediation. The former clarifies the establishment of Romania’s post-communist constitutional provisions regarding minority organizations, and the latter explains how small yet influential minority populations make claims to and reallocate resources from the Romanian state. Through a unique, understudied case study – the Armenian community of Romania – this article attempts to broaden ethnic minority representation scholarship by refining the theoretical frameworks of institutional activism and ethnic intermediation.

The Philippines as a Case Study—Populism and Institutional Activism in Transformation Processes Towards Sustainability

The current resurgence and reinforcement of populists in many countries has profited not only from various real or imagined crises (e.g., 2015-present refugee crisis in Europe or the caravan of migrants in Latin America heading to the United States), but also from how established political parties and polities have addressed these crises, which have disenfranchised, in a de facto manner, a significant portion of the population. Former Greek finance minister and Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Yanis Varoufakis, notes that President Trump’s election, Brexit, and the resurgence of right-wing political parties in Germany, Austria & other countries are not new in history, but merely “a post-modern variant of the 1930s, complete with deflation, xenophobia, and divide-and-rule politics” (Varoufakis 2016). Populist movements have found and instrumentalized compelling issues, such as emission reduction, to gain political importance.

Feminism and Conservatism in México

Mexico is usually described as a secular country with a Catholic following that remains above the regional average. In this context, a strong presence of feminist institutional activism and a relatively weak performance of Evangelical religious conservative activism have developed (Pérez Guadalupe 2017). This essay reviews these usual descriptions in order to adjust this image, undertaking the task of avoiding both overestimating and underestimating the scope of these activisms. The essay also identifies emerging challenges for research on politics and gender in Mexico and Latin America more generally.

Unpacking non-institutional engagement: Collective, communicative and individualised activism

This paper disaggregates non-institutional political engagement into three distinct repertoires of activism: collective, communicative and individualised forms. I evaluate the claim that non-institutional activism is more inclusive than traditional forms of political engagement by measuring the relative effects of typical predictors of participation, including resources, values and contextual measures, on different repertoires of non-institutional engagement. The findings suggest that individualised engagement is more accessible to women but stratified by resources and national wealth. Collective engagement is more accessible to people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds but is stratified by gender, with women less likely to engage.

The Value-Extracting Enablers

This chapter explains historical and systemic sources of institutional activism. Starting from re-examining underlying principles of New Deal financial regulations established in the 1930s that discouraged institutional activism, it argues that they were overturned in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of promoting “shareholder democracy.” It analyzes these misguided regulatory “reforms” including the introduction of compulsory voting by institutional investors, a proxy-voting rule change that greatly facilitated aggregation of proxy votes by predatory value extractors. The chapter argues that those reforms created a large vacuum in corporate voting because, contrary to the ideal of shareholder democracy and particularly with the increasing dominance of index funds, institutional investors had little ability and incentive to vote the shares in their portfolios. The main beneficiaries of these reforms have been the leading proxy advisory firms and a small group of hedge-fund activists intent on looting the business corporation.

La Lucha Sigue: Making the Case for Institutional Support of Undocumented and DACAmented Students in Higher Education

This project used a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach to explore the experiences of undocumented and DACAmented college students in Southern Nevada. CBPR is a collaborative approach to research that involves members of the community being studied to be a part of the entire research process and builds on the strengths of the community. Relying heavily on the knowledge and voices of our community partners, the UndocuNetwork, we conducted interviews with undocumented and DACAmented student activists about their experiences in higher education. We discuss the findings from in-depth interviews with twelve undocumented and DACAmented student activists who are leading the movement at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to make higher education more accessible and supportive of undocumented and DACAmented students. The questions were written broadly to foster discussion on three main topics: institutional activism, access and barriers to student resources, and campus climate. Participants shared a sense of responsibility to engage in institutional change work, and embraced their agency and exhibited resiliency for navigating higher education through their peer support network. We argue that undocumented and DACAmented students in the UndocuNetwork fill a gap within the institution in sharing resources and helping each other navigate higher education.