Tilting at Windmills or Contested Norms? Dissident Proxy Initiatives in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Question/Issue: Do shareholder activists influence standards of legitimacy with Dissident proxy initiatives? What are the antecedents and consequences of Dissident proxy initiatives? Research Findings/Insights: We use a longitudinal Canadian sample to evaluate the dynamics of Dissident proxy initiatives. Firms with lower legitimacy are more likely to receive governance‐ and performance‐oriented Dissident proxy initiatives. Firms with higher legitimacy were more likely to settle proxy initiatives of all types, and avoid publishing activist shareholders' concerns to all shareholders, but this relationship did not hold for governance‐oriented proposals. Firms that received more governance‐ and performance‐oriented proposals subsequently had lower legitimacy. Theoretical/Academic Implications: Dissident proxy initiatives are legitimation contests, where shareholders contest the legitimacy of corporate management's conduct. The dynamics that produce proposals and management responses are consistent with the predictions of institutional theories of legitimacy, institutional entrepreneurship, and legitimation contests. Because the ownership structure of Canadian corporations makes passage unlikely, they resemble a ritual for influencing legitimacy of a wide variety of practices. Practitioner/Policy Implications: Management's response to Dissident proxy initiatives makes a statement about the legitimacy of their conduct. Settling proxies may enable management to contribute to the acceptance or rejections of emerging practices. Management should consider whether attempts to decouple adoption of some practices from core operations are wise in the long term. Shareholder activists should consider whether management is seeking to ceremonially adopt policies demanded in dissident proxies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".