Book launchThursday 5 July 2012
6:00pm – 7:00pm
Hedge Fund Activism in Japan: The Limits of Shareholder Primacy
Drinks reception from 8:00pm
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
By John Buchanan, Dominic Heesang Chai and Simon Deakin
Published by Cambridge University Press
Hedge fund activism is an expression of shareholder primacy, an idea that has come to dominate discussion of corporate governance theory and practice worldwide over the past two decades. This book provides a thorough examination of public and often confrontational hedge fund activism in Japan in the period between 2001 and the full onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. In Japan this shareholder-centric conception of the company espoused by activist hedge funds clashed with the alternative Japanese conception of the company as an enduring organisation or a ‘community’. By analysing this clash, the book derives a fresh view of the practices underpinning corporate governance in Japan and offers suggestions regarding the validity of the shareholder primacy ideas currently at the heart of US and UK beliefs about the purpose of the firm.
Related Internet Links
FT: When US investors took on Japan’s executives – Review by Geoffrey Owen
About the contributors
Dr John Buchanan
Dr John Buchanan is a research associate at the Centre for Business Research, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. His first degree was in oriental studies and subsequently he worked as a commercial banker in Brazil, Japan and Spain, and then as an investment banker in the UK and Japan, at both British and Japanese banks. He has been studying Japanese corporate governance since 2002.
Professor Simon Deakin
Professor Simon Deakin is Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law and Fellow of Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge. He has directed an interdisciplinary programme of research on corporate governance at the Centre for Business Research in Cambridge since the early 1990s. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.