Disembedding Corporate Governance: The Crisis of Shareholder Primacy in the UK and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been the subject of much academic discussion, yet there is no consensus on its root cause. This paper traces the origins of the GFC back to the effects of the Anglo-American model of corporate governance on large financial institutions, and in particular to that model’s emphasis on shareholder primacy. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s notion of “embeddedness” and Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, the author notes that the emphasis on shareholder primacy creates perverse corporate incentives that are detached or “disembedded” from their economic, political and social context. He argues that these perverse incentives were the root cause of the GFC and the subsequent economic and political turmoil. The trajectory of the GFC in both Canada and the UK was shaped primarily by the relative disembeddedness of large financial institutions. In particular, excessive risk-taking by those institutions, combined with a weakening of prudential regulation, led to the emergence of a system that was divorced from its economic and social context. As Minsky predicted, the cracks that developed in this disembedded system compelled states to use fiscal and monetary policy to prevent a depression, sowing the seeds of political unrest in the aftermath of the GFC. The author concludes that long-term economic stability requires that shareholder primacy be replaced with a corporate governance model that acknowledges the economic, political and social influence of financial institutions.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".