Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

Vocabularies of Motive and Temporal Perspectives: Examples of Pension Fund Engagement and Disengagement

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Anna Tilba, Professor John Wilson

Downloads


Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).


Abstract

Prior research on institutional investors’ role in corporate governance draws a distinction between engaged and disengaged pension funds. The aim of this study is to shed more light on how pension fund practitioners talk about engagement and disengagement. Using insights from thirty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews and round-table discussions with pension fund trustees, executives, investment officers and financial intermediaries, we identify different types of vocabularies and temporal perspectives used to account for different stances towards engagement. We highlight a tension between a seemingly causal relationship between accounts and future behaviour and argue that these ‘accounts’, ‘vocabularies’ and ‘uses of the past’ in themselves need to be treated as an object of study because they may represent not simply the individual motivations, but rather the expressions of extant norms in the broader social context of financial markets. An important policy implication is that perceived realities of investment are unlikely to cause a change in pension fund behaviour because participants seem to decouple their view of the world from their impact on the world.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Tilba A, Wilson JF

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: British Journal of Management

Year: 2017

Volume: 28

Issue: 3

Pages: 502-518

Print publication date: 01/07/2017

Online publication date: 09/05/2017

Acceptance date: 13/01/2017

Date deposited: 06/02/2017

ISSN (print): 1045-3172

ISSN (electronic): 1467-8551

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd

URL: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12225

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12225


Altmetrics

Altmetrics provided by Altmetric


Share