10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5104
application/pdf
2239-625X
5104
2
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-29856
Joselle Dagnes
Anuac
Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings: An investigation into critical shareholding
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
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Thematic section: Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities
2023-12-31
2022-02-04
2023-12-31
2024-02-03
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1
Joselle Dagnes
2023/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5104
23
Università di Torino, Italy
2239-625X
2
50
urn:nbn:it:unica-29856
Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings: An investigation into critical shareholding
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/5104/5823
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                                        2023 | anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, Dicembre 2023: 23-50




Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings
An investigation into critical shareholding

Joselle Dagnes
University of Torino




ABsTRAcT: This article deals with critical shareholding, that is, the action of non-prof-
it organizations that resorts to involvement in corporate ownership as shareholders to
promote socially responsible corporate behaviours. Based on the combined use of socio-
logical and anthropological tools, I focus on the attendance of annual general meetings
(AGMs) as a gateway to understand the potential and the limits of the transformative
power of marginal actors in investment capitalism. My findings suggest that confronta-
tion through share ownership exerts transformative pressures not only on companies but
also on activist organizations, which over time are called to redefine their skills, actions
and intervention logic to pursue their goals more effectively and report them to their
stakeholders. Thus, the analysis of the phenomenon reveals the dialectical nature of the
processes that take place in and around the AGM, giving them a place in the complex dy-
namics of movements and countermovements of finance and their mutual relationship.

KeYWorDs: critical shareholDing; annual general meeting; social moVements; Finance; meeting
ethnograPhY




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ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5104.
24                                                                  Joselle Dagnes

Introduction
    The 2019 annual general meeting (AGM) of one of the main Italian banking
groups takes place in the auditorium of a large skyscraper in the centre of Mi-
lan, lasting from 10am to 5pm. The first hour of the meeting is taken up by the
initial communications from the chairman and the presentation of the annual
financial statements by the Ceo, while the last hour is occupied by the voting
operations: excluding a short lunch break, all the rest of the meeting time
is dedicated to questions from shareholders. There are around 30 speeches,
all coming from small shareholders owning a very limited number of shares,
from a few units to a few thousand each. Overall, the value of the shares held
by those taking the floor amounted to 0.001% of the value of the shares rep-
resented at the meeting.
    Although some questions are provocative – while others, conversely, are
flattering towards the management – the atmosphere always remains cordial.
Small private shareholders show mutual knowledge, commenting together on
the different speeches, and the responses and reactions of the management
are friendly, even when the tones of the interveners are colourful. In some cas-
es, they put on somewhat of a show: someone jokingly refers to the speeches
given in previous years, someone else is moved by remembering how pleasant
it is to meet in person once a year, there are some requests – kindly refused
by the chairman – to pose for a selfie together. Although this is an official
meeting, the impression is that the economic and financial issues raised by
the shareholders are often more like a pretext to conquer the stage, playing
an assigned role. The small investors who take the floor are likely looking for
visibility, and the management seems to be patiently lending it to them for
a day, while waiting to go back to dealing with more serious issues already
discussed in other meetings with the investors who matter (see Roberts et al.
2006; Birds et al. 2019).
    During the AGM, this friendly atmosphere is abruptly broken off in a single
moment, after three speeches in a row raise the issue of climate change and,
in detail, the bank’s financing of the fossil fuel industry. The first to intervene
is the representative of an association carrying out campaigns against cor-
ruption and environmental destruction, which owns no. 5 shares in the bank,
for a total value of approximately 60 euros. He complains that the company’s
climate change policy is unclear and that, despite the promises of internal
auditing, the bank is financing highly polluting coal plants with a serious im-
pact in Turkey. Then speaks the Czech representative of a European network


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                        25

of non-profit associations whose aim is to stamp out the use of coal. He takes
the floor as a delegate of an Italian shareholder who also owns no. 5 shares
and belongs to the same association as the first speaker. He denounces the
loans granted by the bank to highly polluting plants in the Czech Republic and
other Eastern European countries, and brings the financial and reputational
risks associated with this business to the attention of the other shareholders.
Finally, it is the turn of an English shareholder, who owns only one share –
for a value of about 12 euros – and represents an international organization
focused on the activities that banks finance. In her speech, she stresses the in-
adequacy of the bank’s climate change policy and asks for it to be made public,
as promised by the board of directors following the Paris Agreement in 2015.
   When it is the bank’s turn to respond, the tones are anything but cordial.
After a general reassurance from the president about the company’s environ-
mental awareness, the CEO takes the floor – and this is the only case in which
he intervenes directly in the discussion with the shareholders. Quite vehe-
mently, he argues that it would be appropriate to talk about hard facts, and the
hard facts say that his bank is among those least involved in financing fossil
fuels. He then highlights the corporate commitment to financing renewable
energy and various environmentally sustainable projects in which the bank
is involved, presenting them as “facts that speak for themselves”. Finally, he
mentions some social responsibility initiatives – financial education for chil-
dren and microcredit for small firms – which seem to have little to do with the
critical remarks raised by the shareholders, but which in his opinion “testify
to the bank’s all-round commitment to sustainability” and make clear the ap-
plication of the corporate principle to “do the right thing”.
   Meanwhile, during the questions-and-answers session, some demonstra-
tors have organized a “Fossil Banks, no thanks!” picket in front of the stock
exchange headquarters where the assembly is being held. Being in the hall, I
only hear a confused buzz and a few screams, but the next day the main spe-
cialized media would report the news of the events, describing the meeting
as a “not calm” and “disturbed” situation, and giving great prominence to the
protests.
   The above is an example of shareholder engagement, that is, a form of ac-
tivism that resorts to involvement in corporate ownership as shareholders
to promote socially responsible corporate behaviours (Fleming, Spicer 2007;
Dimson, Karakas, Li 2015). Specifically, the example given can be labelled as
critical shareholding, indicating the action of non-profit organizations that



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26                                                                Joselle Dagnes

acquire a minimum number of shares in listed companies with a bad Environ-
mental, Social and Governance (ESG) assessment in order to attend the AGM
and make requests for change (Meggiolaro 2019).
   The capital market makes it possible to acquire ownership shares and
therefore to influence corporate decisions, at least potentially, hence the phe-
nomenon of critical shareholding arises. This trend can be interpreted as an
emerging and unexpected effect of financialization, meant as the new pattern
of accumulation that started to appear in the 1970s along with the increasing
salience of finance, rather than production, in the economy (Krippner 2005).
For non-financial corporations, the financialization process involves a grow-
ing share of profit deriving from financial activities and, at the same time, the
distribution of productivity gains to the shareholders, rather than their rein-
vestment in the company (van der Zwan 2014). This shift has led over time,
albeit in a non-linear way, to an overall change in corporate behaviour, with
the affirmation of the managerial principle of shareholder value and the align-
ment of investors and executives’ interests, thanks to the growing weight of
managers’ remuneration in stock options (Froud et al. 2000). In this process,
financialization has particularly empowered those types of investors having a
great deal of highly liquid assets and short-term orientation, which are thus
now able to exert significant influence on the management direction in order
to pursue profit extraction. The phenomenon is now referred to as investor
capitalism, indicating the increasingly predominant role of institutional in-
vestors, such as mutual funds, pensions and insurance companies (Useem
1996).
   The centrality of the stock market, however, can also give rise to a dialec-
tical relationship between the financial actors and society, defining arenas
where market and non-market actors bearing different interests come face to
face and possibly clash, contrasting what is priced and what is not. Far from
the concept of finance as a vehicle for the quantitative homogenization of
value (see Zelizer 1994), in critical shareholding the share ownership is exclu-
sively symbolic and the objectives pursued by the activists diverge from the
corporate ones, creating an oppositional relationship. In other words, critical
shareholding places the expansion of finance at the centre of its action, trans-
forming it into a tool to leverage the orientation of shareholders and managers
from within corporations and, thereby, to influence the complex relationship
between society and the market in this era of financialization.




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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                               27

   In this article I will focus on these dynamics, interpreting them as a coun-
termovement of finance. Specifically, I will investigate the conditions under
which critical shareholding can generate a change in the orientation of ac-
tors and organizations, company policies and daily practices. To do so, I will
use AGMs as the gateway to observe, understand and interpret the action of
the subjects involved. The research is based on original empirical material
consisting of: i) analysis of the AGM documentation officially made available
by companies (in particular preparatory materials and minutes of the meet-
ings); ii) 14 semi-structured interviews with company chairs and directors,
investor relations division officers, investment fund representatives, individ-
ual shareholders and activists belonging to non-profit organizations;1 and iii)
ethnography conducted on three AGMs in April, May and October 2019.
   While documentary research and interviews with key informants – both
internal and external to companies – are fairly common methods of investi-
gating corporate structure, attention to attendance of AGMs is relatively rare
in sociology. However, according to the studies that have used participant
observation in corporate meetings, it has undoubted advantages, such as a
greater focus on the formal and informal interaction between actors, as well as
the possibility of retracing the dominant corporate narrative and the alterna-
tive narratives proposed by other subjects (Carrington, Johed 2007). In other
words, through an ethnographic approach borrowed from the anthropological
study of political assemblies (Abélès 2000) and of corporations (Apostolides,
Boden 2005) it is possible to reach a “thick description” of AGMs (see Geertz
1997), tracing material practices and discursive strategies grounded in specif-
ic corporate realities (Dolan, Rajak 2016). Thus, data triangulation is crucial
(see Olsen 2004; Olivier de Sardan 1995): through ethnography the minutes
of the AGMs can be enriched with notes on forms of soft power, as well as
on informal exchanges that take place on the sidelines – for example, during
breaks and downtime – and to capture exchanges of looks, tones of voice and
gestures. Furthermore, the interviews reveal the actors’ point of view on these
exchange dynamics and allow reconstruction of the history and effects of pre-
vious interactions, placing them in the organizations’ “real-life” experience
(Carrington, Johed 2007: 708).

1. In detail, the interviews were carried out with three activists belonging to non-profit
   organizations; two chairmen and a CEO of listed companies; two investor relations man-
   agers of listed companies; a representative of an international investment fund; and five
   small shareholders who regularly participate in shareholders’ meetings. All interviews
   were conducted in person, were recorded and lasted between 40 minutes and two hours.


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28                                                                  Joselle Dagnes

   This contamination between different methods of investigation has not
only a methodological value, but a heuristic one too. The combined use of
sociological and anthropological tools allows to reconstruct the arena of con-
tradictory relationships between corporate actors and activists when dealing
with the (in)compatibility of financial and social values (Dolan, Rajak 2016),
and to analyse how unprecedented domains of corporate power can emerge
from this relational arena (Apostolides, Boden 2005). Specifically, the ethno-
graphic scrutiny of companies – and of the specific device of AGMs – focuses
on how discourses and practices (e.g., management of the discussion and the
attribution of legitimacy to the issues that emerge) can shape new corporate
set-ups, displaying a subtle balance between compliance and concealment,
ritualized and/or enacted by multiple actors (Dolan, Rajak 2016). As we will
see, this dynamic weakens the boundaries between corporations and society,
giving rise to a specific form of countermovement in finance.
   In this article, the issue of blurred boundaries is also relevant from a theo-
retical and analytical perspective. As many authors argue (see Pitluck, Mattioli,
Souleles 2018; Souleles 2020) economic anthropology is by definition interdis-
ciplinary, and its vitality is connected precisely to its ability to bring together
theoretical frames, analytical tools and methodological approaches from dif-
ferent disciplines (i.e. anthropology, sociology, political economy, heterodox
economy). Consistently with this view, my analytical starting point is drawn
from the neo-institutionalist approach in sociology, according to which to un-
derstand organizational change – as well as the attempts to generate it – it is
not sufficient to focus on the single organization, but reference needs to be
made to a composite system of organizations able to influence each other. In
this regard, it is useful to introduce the concept of organizational field, de-
fined as “sets of organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized
area of institutional life” (DiMaggio, Powell 1983: 148), namely the group of
relevant actors in a certain field of activity. Although the AGM is not an orga-
nizational field in itself, it allows us to observe a commonly hidden portion
of the field where interaction between stakeholders with conflicting interests
takes place. Two aspects of the neo-institutionalist approach are particularly
useful here. They are: i) the emphasis on the cognitive, cultural and political
dimension of institutions, that is, the role of prevailing interpretative models
in guiding action within organizations (Zukin, DiMaggio 1990), in this specific
case meaning that the AGM can be seen as one of the sites where stakeholders
struggle either to establish new cultural frames or to maintain existing ones;



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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                        29

ii) considering the organizational field as a context of mutual constraints and
influences: inside the field, it is not possible to clearly distinguish between the
organizations exerting pressure to change and those that are pressured, since
the interaction within the field is reciprocal and leads to a change for all the
actors involved. What is more, this ongoing overall change favours the process
of mutual legitimation rather than jeopardization of the institutions at stake
(Meyer, Rowan 1977). The emphasis on the interpretative frames is consistent
with the approach of anthropological studies on social movements, according
to which socio-cultural factors influence both protesters and their counter-
parts, sometimes in an unexpected way even for the subjects implementing
collective actions (Salman, Assies 2017). More generally, my work is in dia-
logue with the contributions of economic anthropologists who emphasize the
political dimension of financial processes in relation to complex institutional
settings (see Abélès 2000; Mattioli 2020; Ortiz 2021).
    Consistently with these principles, my hypothesis concerning the critical
shareholding phenomenon is that confrontation through share ownership
exerts transformative pressures not only on companies but also on activist
organizations, intended as a form of collective action, which over time are
called to redefine their skills, actions and intervention logic to pursue their
goals more effectively and report them to their stakeholders. In testing this
hypothesis through empirical material, it will also be important to consider
the imbalance of power between the subjects involved and the risks of manip-
ulation of one towards the other. The analysis will therefore adopt a twofold
perspective, focusing on the changes in both the target companies and the
critical organizations.
    The article proceeds as follows. In the next section, I will introduce the ana-
lytical background for the study of the critical shareholding phenomenon. I will
then briefly describe its origin and development in Italy, focusing on the expe-
rience of the main activist organizations. Afterwards, I will present and discuss
my empirical findings in two sections, dedicated to activist organizations and
target companies respectively. Broader suggestions about the social and analyt-
ical implications of my findings will be provided in the concluding section.

Attending the AGM, taking the floor, protesting
  The AGM, meant as a site of confrontation between shareholders and
management, gives the plastic representation of the relationship between
ownership and control in corporations.



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30                                                                           Joselle Dagnes

   According to the literature, the AGM performs three main functions: i)
it provides shareholders with information about the company’s economic
and financial performance (communication); ii) it ensures that sharehold-
ers express their consent on operations proposed by the management (legal
formality); and iii) it offers a forum for discussion between shareholders and
managers (accountability) (Strätling 2003).2 While in the first two functions
the management prevails, in the third the shareholders can be protagonists,
regardless of the number of shares they hold. In fact, in most corporate legal
systems, even those who own only one share can attend the AGM and ask
questions, demanding the managers’ accountability in running the company.
In other words, thanks to its third function, the AGM could be conceived as a
device to keep under control the principal-agent conflict between sharehold-
ers and management (Carrington, Johed 2007). Namely, it is the situation in
which the shareholders (the principal) delegate functions and power to the
management (the agent) to run the company, while exposed to the risk of
opportunistic behaviours: in fact, management can take advantage of the
asymmetry of information existing between the parties and not to stubbornly
pursue profit maximization, which is the primary interest of company owners
(Jensen, Meckling 1976).
   However, this perspective is partially questioned by those who point out
that for the most part AGMs are deserted by the major and institutional inves-
tors, who usually attend other meetings arranged specifically for them3 (De
Jong, Mertens, Roosenboom 2006; Roberts et al. 2006). Research has shown
that raising a question during the AGM is a last resort for high-level inves-
tors:4 their ability to influence corporate decisions, combined with the desire
not to damage the reputation of the company in which they have invested,
makes them opt for informal consultations with the management (Short,
Keasey 1999; Strätling 2003; Birds et al. 2019). Indeed, institutional investors


2. Some studies highlight the ritual dimension of AGMs which also emerges in the perfor-
   mance of their functions, whose aim is to legitimize the management over the company
   by making the existing power structures visible (Hodges, Macniven, Mellet 2004; Nyqvist
   2015). Even the criticisms – which often take on a ritual dimension too – are functional to
   strengthening the construction of facts and trust (Catasús, Johed 2007).
3. This point is also confirmed by a Chairman I interviewed: “there is no international in-
   stitution that participates, that is, there is no large fund, no one shows up at the AGM,
   everyone says ‘I’ll come to talk to you separately’” (Chairman, int. LC3).
4. An investor relations manager interviewed clearly illustrates this point: “The AGM is the
   place where chickens come home to roost, but only if these chickens haven’t been eaten
   before in one-to one meetings” (Investor relations manager, int. LC5).


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                        31

“clearly preferred not to ‘waste’ time by attending annual general meetings
(AGMs) and considered that they could perform their active voting function
perfectly well without such attendance” (Solomon et al. 2000: 220).
   The result is that it is very rare to meet major investors at AGMs. Meetings
are usually only attended by a few small private shareholders, who partici-
pate for various reasons, including the sense of belonging to the company, the
quest for a speakers’ corner and the political will to promote their own causes
(Strätling 2003; Apostolides, Boden 2005). This is also true in the Italian case:
in the three AGMs in which I took part, the number of shareholders in the hall
ranged from approximately 30 to 80 and was made up almost exclusively of
individual investors.
   In the last two decades, AGMs have increasingly become physical sites for
protest, as well as for demanding accountability, precisely because of their
characteristics: they are easily accessible (in most countries even one share
is enough to have the right to attend and to speak); they allow direct inter-
action with the top management, which is required to answer the questions
posed; they guarantee high visibility and publicity, due to the media coverage.
In other words, critical shareholding transforms AGMs into a place where a
particular voice is exercised: while not leading to an immediate change in busi-
ness approach, it can nevertheless have a strong impact on the proceedings of
the AGM itself, as well as possible repercussions on the direction of expansion
of financial capital in non-financial corporations (Goodman et al. 2014). Wide-
spread sensitivity to possible scandals related to corporate responsibility in the
environmental and social fields and the awareness of their media resonance
lead companies to devote a lot of energy on the one hand to preparing the ap-
propriate responses to the critical issues raised (Apostolides, Boden 2005) and
on the other hand to trying to weaken the impact of critical shareholding on
the AGM and the other investors (Hadani, Doh, Schneider 2018).
   The dynamics triggered by critical shareholding have so far been given lit-
tle attention in the literature, with the partial exception of social movement
scholars (see Waeger, Mena 2019). The focus is in particular on the potential
that social campaigns have in “moralizing” companies and the entire eco-
nomic system (Arjaliès 2010), through the analysis of what has been defined
as “private politics” (Soule 2012). Following Waeger and Mena (2019), we
can distinguish two main types of studies in this area: the first concentrates
on activists and the conditions under which they can mobilize tangible and
intangible resources – such as money, specialist knowledge and relational net-



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32                                                                             Joselle Dagnes

works – to advance their cause; the second focuses on the target companies,
investigating their characteristics and reactions to the campaigns promoted
by social activists. Although these contributions offer a promising analytical
background, they show a twofold limit: i) they tend to treat activists and target
companies separately, thus failing to see the interplay of reciprocal influences
between them; ii) they lack a situated perspective, dealing with different forms
of activism within the same analytical framework, such as social campaigns,
boycott campaigns and various forms of shareholder engagement. This article
aims to fill this gap by focusing specifically on the phenomenon of critical
shareholding in Italy.
   The roots of critical shareholding can be traced back to some broader
forms of shareholder engagement that emerged in the USA at the beginning
of the 1970s, when a coalition of religious groups – the Interfaith Center on
Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) – began to participate in the AGMs of large
American companies to protest against their investments in apartheid South
Africa. The path chosen was the presentation of shareholder resolutions,
which in the event of approval would bind the company to divest. Although no
resolution was approved until 2018,5 this engagement influenced the compa-
nies’ investment policies; meanwhile, the ICCR evolved into a partnership of
active shareholder funds that currently manage approximately $ 400 billion in
assets (Meggiolaro 2019).
   Following the ICCR experience, but having to deal with the different Eu-
ropean legislation on shareholder resolutions,6 starting from the end of the
1980s some organizations of European activists such as the German Dachver-
band der Kritischen Aktionärinnen und Aktionäre (DKA) began to promote real
critical shareholding by taking the floor in the AGMs of numerous companies
and raising environmental and social issues. In the following years, other or-
ganizations adopted the same form of shareholder engagement, giving life
to a plurality of initiatives which differ from each other for the tones used
(extremely aggressive, as in the case of the DKA, or based on constructive di-
alogue, as in the case of the Dutch Vereniging van Beleggers voor Duurzame

5. In 2018, with 69% of votes in favour the AGM of one of the main US arms companies
   approved a resolution proposed by a group of Dominican nuns, members of the ICCR,
   which obliges the company to monitor the episodes of violence in which its weapons are
   involved (Meggiolaro 2019).
6. Unlike simple participation in the AGMs, adding shareholder resolutions to the AGM
   agenda is only possible with certain capital requirements, in Europe usually correspond-
   ing to 5% of the share capital represented, even collectively. In Italy, the required share is
   2.5%. In the USA, on the other hand, a 2,000 $ capital is sufficient.


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                        33

Ontwikkeling (VBDO)) and for the diversity of those involved (for example,
the British ShareAction, created in 2005, includes trade unions, environmen-
tal associations such as WWF and Greenpeace, and social organizations such
as Amnesty International and Oxfam). The first European network of criti-
cal shareholders, the European Responsible Investment Network (ERIN), was
created in 2016 by 36 organizations from 12 different countries (Meggiolaro
2019).
   In Italy, the first pioneering critical shareholding initiative was born in
1989 with the Legambiente group Azionisti ecologisti, which began to take part
in the AGMs of listed companies to ask for their ecological conversion.
   The initiative lasted until 2000: in 2003 the baton was picked up by Banca
Etica and its newly created Fondazione Finanza Etica (FFE, which, unlike tradi-
tional banking establishments, is a cultural foundation), which would become
the most active player in the following years, setting up a working group on
shareholder engagement involving numerous representatives of civil society.
In 2007, upon the proposal of some participants in the working group, for the
first time FFE purchased a small – although not entirely symbolic – share quo-
ta in two companies: the energy company Enel and the oil and gas company
Eni (respectively 250 shares, for a value of approximately 1,750 euros, and 80
shares, equal to approximately 2,000 euros), and began to participate in their
AGMs, soliciting them particularly on environmental issues and their energy
policies.
   Recently, the number of companies subject to critical shareholding in Italy
thanks to FFE has expanded. Since 2016, upon the proposal of Rete Italiana
per il Disarmo (RID, Italian Network for Disarmament), FFE has participat-
ed in the AGMs of the defence and security company Leonardo (formerly
Finmeccanica), thanks to the possession of 3 shares, for a value of approx-
imately 30 euros. In 2017, together with Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per
l’Acqua, it bought 5 shares in the multi-utility group Acea (an investment of
approximately 50 euros) and, in the same year, it also made its debut abroad,
participating together with RID in the AGM of the German weapons-manu-
facturing firm Rheinmetall. Rheinmetall, among other things, has production
plants in Sardinia, from where the weapons are exported to Saudi Arabia to be
used in the Yemen war. Since 2018, together with the organization Re:Com-
mon (RE), FFE has participated in the AGM of the insurance company Generali,
thanks to 10 stock shares (around 150 euros), while in 2019 it was the turn of a
new international initiative, with the participation in the AGM of the clothing



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34                                                                           Joselle Dagnes

retail company H&M in Sweden, together with the Clean Clothes Campaign
(Meggiolaro 2019). Thanks also to the partnerships created over time, social
(e.g., violations of human rights) and governance issues (in particular remu-
neration policies) have been added to the initial activities which concentrated
above all on environmental issues.
   At the same time, critical shareholding initiatives in Italy are now no longer
limited to those promoted by FFE. Some organizations that had started their
shareholder engagement with FFE have become autonomous over time: they
now participate in AGMs – both those where FFE is present, maintaining orga-
nizational coordination, and other new ones – as independent shareholders,
intervening on their own behalf. Moreover, alongside these major initiatives,
in the last decade several listed companies have also been subject to critical
shareholding by individual activists or local groups, both independently and
invited by the more organized subjects mentioned above. In one of AGMs I
attended, for instance, a very young shareholder who was not part of any or-
ganization took the floor to raise the issue of carbon compensation.

Changing to make others change
   As already mentioned, my hypothesis – consistent with the organizational
analysis promoted by Sociological new institutionalism – is that the sharehold-
er engagement implemented through AGMs does not only – or mainly – act
on the target companies, but also requires a significant change in the activist
groups. The coordinates of this change, deriving from the analysis of the em-
pirical material I collected, are illustrated in this section, which focuses on the
political practice of collective social actors, as suggested by the anthropologi-
cal literature on social movements (Escobar 1992).7
   We can identify three main types of changes that activist organizations
make when critically confronting their target companies. First, a change can
be observed in the slant of the interventions in the AGM compared to previ-
ous (or alternative) forms of pressure on the same companies. As noted in the
previous section, critical organizations do not start attending AGMs out of the


7. The empirical material presented in this and the next section is primarily based on the
   interviews conducted with the three representatives of the critical organizations active in
   Italy (FFE, RID, RE), because these interlocutors, more than others, have focused on the
   concrete practices of critical shareholding and its effects. Nevertheless, some references
   are also made to the content of the other interviews; more generally, the interviews with
   non-activists, together with the fieldwork and the analysis of the AGMs official documen-
   tation, have been used to trace the analytical and interpretative framework adopted.


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                              35

blue, but usually have intense experiences of campaigning on ESG issues be-
hind them. These campaigns are oppositional and, since they are public, they
also aim to reveal to consumers the contradictions between the value system
professed by companies and their actual operation. Thus, the slant is often po-
lemical, if not downright aggressive. This approach, however, has turned out
to be inadequate during participation in AGMs, where one of the objectives is
to initiate a dialogue with the management and with other investors:
        If you only go there as the super-protester, who basically says ‘you’re all
        accomplices in the deaths and destruction in the world’, it’s unlikely that
        other people in there will be on your side.8

        We started with critical shareholding in 2007 in a very aggressive way […].
        Now our approach has changed, we’ve understood that great results aren’t
        obtained by attacking the company, the results are obtained while, yes, being
        very critical but with facts, numbers and alternative proposals.9

   This last interview excerpt evokes a second change that critical organiza-
tions undergo by engaging in AGMs, closely connected to the first one. Just
as the slant must change, so must the proposed contents, at least partially. In
fact, the traditional campaigning activity refers to a moral dimension, regard-
less of economic considerations. In attempting to initiate a dialogue with the
target companies, the critical organizations must, however, set aside exclu-
sively ethical positions, and instead focus on tangible arguments to support
their claims: “Ten years ago, we attended assemblies in a naïve way, asking
questions as idealistic activists. Now we participate with questions prepared
by financial analysts and lawyers”.10 In other words, a shift in content is re-
quired from what is right for society to what is useful for the company, according
to a logic of economic rationality. The meeting minutes of the Italian com-
panies that, in the last five years, have been subject to critical shareholding
testify this transformation, despite their concise form. To be effective, activ-
ists must somehow temporarily change their role. It is not simply a question
of “pretending to be an investor for a day”,11 but of adopting a new perspective
and logic of action in order to be credible interlocutors in the AGM:
        It’s not about saying ‘stop making weapons’, which is our idea, but ‘what can
        you do to guarantee shareholders business sustainability for the future?’. If
        you do critical shareholding, you must take the view that you’re no longer


8.    Activist, int. RID2.
9.    Activist, int. FFE1.
10.   Activist, int. FFE1.
11.   Activist, int. RE3.


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36                                                                              Joselle Dagnes

      just an activist, but a shareholder […] You go there as a shareholder, so you
      have to put yourself in the shareholder’s shoes.12

   Finally, the third type of change concerns the redefinition of the objectives
of critical action, which reflects the multiplication of interlocutors whom the
activists have to address and, consequently, the greater complexity of their
work and communication. In detail, it is possible to identify four main inter-
connected objectives that are pursued through participation in the AGM.
   A first basic objective, usually the initial one when an organization debuts
in an AGM, is to give visibility to ongoing campaigns. AGMs are therefore per-
ceived in the first instance as a showcase for protest and awareness initiatives
already underway. Hence, participation follows an activist more than a share-
holder logic, by aiming to exploit the media coverage of AGMs to expand the
number of people receiving the campaign communication as much as possible:
      The critical shareholding activities we do have also had a good response from
      the media and this is important to us. […] If we go there, we protest, we say
      things, this is news and the media is there covering the news. In this way,
      we’re also able to relaunch related campaigns.13

   Even at a later stage, when the objectives of participation in AGMs become
differentiated, communication remains a cornerstone of the critical organiza-
tions’ action. At this point, it can be more sophisticated, providing different
channels for different audiences: the hope of media coverage for the general
public – as occurred in two out of three AGMs that I attended, on the side-lines
of which activists were interviewed by the media – is thus added to internally
managed communication, which aims to reach those who are already support-
ers of the organization and those belonging to other activist groups sensitive
to the cause, to inform and motivate them:
      Over the past five or six years we’ve tried to make the AGMs a social event too,
      so, to go live on Twitter, with the hashtags, clearly for a small group of interested
      parties. […] And then on Facebook: this year we also had a social media manager
      who attended all the AGMs with us and made videos for us and then posted them
      on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.14

   A second objective related to participation in AGMs concerns the acqui-
sition of corporate information that is not publicly available. Campaigning
organizations often have difficulty interacting with target companies and


12. Activist, int. RID2.
13. Activist, int. RID2.
14. Activist, int. FFE1.


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                                37

accessing detailed information about their behaviour in sensitive areas. Be-
coming a shareholder expands these possibilities, since the management is
obliged to be accountable towards the owners of the company, even those who
own only an infinitesimal share of it:
      We participated with (name of an NGO) in the AGM of (name of a listed
      company). They (the NGO) had been trying to ask specific questions about
      some aspects of management for years, and the company ignored them. But
      if you go there as a shareholder in the meeting, the company must answer
      you. The information aspect is very important because you, as a shareholder,
      acquire a right that you don’t have as a campaigner.15

  Therefore, participation in the AGM becomes not only a tool to give reso-
nance to campaigns but also a way to strengthen them, allowing activists to
acquire corporate information that is otherwise precluded:
      Having first-hand, secure, accurate information from companies is a tool
      that is perhaps less visible, less shiny than the moment of protest, but it’s
      fundamental for our campaigns.16

   Legislation comes to the aid of critical organizations in the delicate balance
between public communication and the possibility of acquiring information.
Article no. 127 ter of the Testo Unico dell’intermediazione finanziaria (Consol-
idated Financial Intermediation Act), introduced by Legislative Decree no.
27/2010, sets out that shareholders can ask questions even before the AGM
and that the company must give a written reply at the latest during the AGM
itself. This opportunity has turned out to be a central tool in the hands of ac-
tivists, precisely because it allows them to pursue multiple objectives at the
same time:
      This gives us a great advantage because very often our questions are very
      technical, boring even, they’re of no interest to either the press or the public.
      So we select a couple of impactful questions for the AGM, to launch them to
      the press and the campaign supporters, and then all the technical questions,
      which, however, we need in order to understand how to continue the
      campaign, are sent before the meeting, as required by article no. 127 ter.17

   The selection of questions is a crucial point underlined by all the activists.
An examination of the AGM official documents shows the extreme precision
of the questions submitted before the meeting by these activists, concerning
for example the effective tax rates, the interest income, and the revenue of the


15. Activist, int. FFE1.
16. Activist, int. RID2.
17. Activist, int. RE3.


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38                                                                      Joselle Dagnes

subsidiaries, with data break-down by country. Part of the critical sharehold-
ing process consists of learning how to operate effectively, on the one hand to
obtain impactful communication and displace the target company by putting
it in difficulty during the AGM, on the other hand to get valuable information
that is usually hidden:
      Also based on possible media coverage, the decision we make is above all the
      choice between ‘Do we send these questions before the meeting?’ and ‘Do
      we ask these questions orally during the AGM?’. Because if you send them
      before, you lose the ‘I raise my hand and ask’ impact, […] but you have the
      advantage that you have written answers, so you can then use them.18

   The third objective, which directly refers to the change of role from activist
to shareholder mentioned above, consists of exerting influence and pressure
on other shareholders. As we have seen in the previous sections, this objective
is often difficult to pursue due to the lack of interlocutors in the AGM: since
the large shareholders tend to desert it, the AGM can rarely become a place for
discussion with them. In the three AGMs that I attended there were no large in-
vestors and the funds were represented by young practitioners from law firms
who acted as proxy advisors. However, also thanks to the media coverage, it is
always possible that the issues raised during the AGM will subsequently come
to their attention:
      When we participate in the AGM […], we have to translate our themes, and
      say for example: ‘beware that pollution can cost you a lot in fines that can
      then decrease the profit of shareholders’ […]. What we always try to do
      is ensure that a theme that arises within a campaign ends up becoming a
      relevant theme for other shareholders as well.19

   The ultimate goal, in this case, is to build alliances with other relevant own-
ers beyond the AGM, so that they develop attention to the issues raised by
activists and, possibly, urge the company to change its behaviour. However,
this is a difficult objective to pursue, which would require a type of action by
large shareholders that at the moment is hardly observed in the Italian con-
text:
      If they were many more shareholders for profit saying: ‘This business
      direction […] creates problems for us because it doesn’t create profit’, […]
      this would be very important, it’d give us more strength. Because we’d act
      with more quantity, but also with a different quality.20


18. Activist, int. RID2.
19. Activist, int. FFE1.
20. Activist, int. RE3.


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                              39

   The fourth and final objective concerns the actual impact on the target
company’s policies. This objective, which at first glance might seem to be the
main reason why critical organizations participate in AGMs, in actual fact ap-
pears much more nuanced and often subject to redefinition compared to the
initial plans. In trying to change corporate policies, activist groups need to
put aside the radicalism that usually characterizes their actions and focus on
gradual interventions. In other words, they must accept the inertia of large
companies and proceed according to an incremental logic, and make do with
affecting limited aspects with their solicitations:
      On several occasions, they (the target companies) accepted our proposals and
      made them their own […]. We’re hardly talking about revolutions, however…
      often the critical shareholder is frustrated by the fact that yes, we have said
      this and that, they tell us yes and then do nothing. In reality, companies
      are very complex organisms, they need a lot of time to change, […] we must
      always be there to tease and make proposals.21

   This shift from a radical to an incremental logic of action introduces a sig-
nificant change in the assessment of critical shareholders’ success and, at the
same time, can also make the concomitant pursuit of other objectives, in par-
ticular communication, more complex:
      One of our successes was the modification of the remuneration policy
      regarding sustainability criteria: the company had included 15% ESG criteria
      among the long-term variable remuneration criteria. We said: we’re happy
      that you’ve added ESG criteria, but they don’t seem very objective criteria,
      and we explained why. We’d like you to change these criteria. They modified
      them and raised their weight from 15% to 25%. However, this is a success
      that is difficult to communicate to the general public, because we’re not
      talking about moving mountains.22

  This example shows how critical shareholding profoundly affects the
balance and objectives of both the activist organizations and the target com-
panies. In the next section, I will go into this last aspect.

Target companies amidst resistance, pressure and openness
  Faced with the action of critical organizations, the reaction of target com-
panies can essentially be of two types: defensive or willing to dialogue and
make changes. Obviously, this is an analytical distinction, which in reality is
usually not so rigid: on the one hand, there are many intermediate positions
that companies can take, also depending on the topic raised; on the other

21. Activist, int. FFE1.
22. Activist, int. FFE1.


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40                                                                         Joselle Dagnes

hand, over time the orientation of a single company can shift towards an atti-
tude of greater openness or closure to external solicitations.
   In the defensive sphere, we can first of all identify some strategies concern-
ing the management methods of the AGM. These are dynamics to neutralize
the opposition, which aim to dampen their criticism in the eyes of both other
shareholders and the media. A first banal technique concerns the time man-
agement during the AGM, which can limit the expression of dissent:
      It also depends on the AGM, there is management and management, at the
      beginning the chairman can say: the interventions can be of a maximum
      of 10 minutes and a 5 minutes reply, or a maximum of 5 minutes and a 2
      minutes reply. Once these rules did not exist and the troublemakers talked
      for an hour of interventions.23

   In the AGMs that I attended, a sound signal warned the speakers that their
time was running out. In one of them, moreover, if the intervention lasted
more than 30 seconds after the end signal, the microphone was deactivated.
In another AGM, in giving the floor to some participants – evidently already
known for the interventions made in the past years – the chairman was rec-
ommended to respect the 10 minutes assigned and not to digress, eliciting
giggles from other attendees and, in at least two cases, a heated argument
with the speakers.
   The participation of compliant subjects in the AGM and the scheduling
of a well-determined sequence of speeches are also part of the management
methods:
      (An NGO) brought some people from Africa or Latin America to criticize
      the company. (The company) has studied a counter-strategy by inviting
      people close to it to speak in the AGM […], such as friendly NGOs, university
      professors with similar positions to theirs. […] They organize the AGM,
      so they leave nothing to chance: our first speech is followed by a speech
      in support of the company, then there is me, then another speech in their
      favour, then there’s our ‘bad’ Nigerian and then there’s their ‘good’ Nigerian.
      It’s like a big sandwich where there are layers that soften everything.24

   But the management of dissent does not only involve the actual moment of
the AGM. Often companies try to start a dialogue with critical organizations
outside the meeting. While in some cases, as we will see, this is aimed at in-
troducing some real changes to their policies, in many other cases it is simply
a way to try to keep the activists quiet:


23. Chairman, int. LC1.
24. Activist, int. FFE1.


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                                  41

        Especially in the case of large companies that have invested a lot of money
        in the corporate social responsibility departments in recent years, they try to
        send us their CSR manager who comes to recite all the criteria they follow but
        doesn’t answer our questions. […] The company always tries to neutralize us
        with this CSR function, which in most cases is an offshoot of marketing.25

      An investor relations manager partially admitted this practice, stating that:
        Except in rare cases, there is no one-to-one dialogue with small shareholders.
        The only exception is when there is an organized team that raises sensitive
        issues for the company, in this case targeted meetings can be organized.26

   Another outside-the-meeting strategy, compatible with this one, consists
of trying to break any alliances that may be created – or which may exist from
the outset – between different critical groups, according to the divide and rule
policy:
        What (the company) tries to do most of the time is to isolate the various
        groups. If they see four organizations participating in the AGM, they try to
        contact only one of them and say: please come (to a private meeting), but
        don’t tell others anything.27

   In addition to defensive behaviour, there may be openness, which however
in some cases is just a façade:
        When I was in (name of a listed company) an environmental activist, a nice
        guy, took part in the AGM. Every year he made the same intervention but we
        always let him talk, it was important for the company, also to be sensitive on
        certain issues.28

  Sometimes real change happens due to a displacement effect: not all com-
panies are used to being in the spotlight due to public criticism and, when this
happens, the desire to protect their reputation can be the driving force behind
seeking dialogue with activists and intervening on company policies:
        (This company) is an exception, because its AGM is very crowded, there are
        small investors from the local area. The first year, people applauded at the
        end of our speeches. It was so unusual […]. This forced the company to make
        some commitments immediately. The CEO and the chairman came to talk
        to us on the sidelines of the AGM… no one had ever campaigned against
        them, their brand is considered reassuring, so they recognized the huge risk
        to their reputation. Although in an awkward way, they immediately made
        commitments and within two to three years launched policies on coal. This



25.   Activist, int. FFE1.
26.   Investor relations manager, int. LC4.
27.   Activist, int. FFE1.
28.   Ceo, int. LC2.


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42                                                                        Joselle Dagnes

      AGM was very strategic for us, even more than we thought, because they felt
      a lot of pressure and acted accordingly.29

   Even when the change is not so sudden, the repeated confrontation with
critical shareholders in the AGM – and the associated reputational risk – can
produce a transformation over time. This transformation stems primarily
from a change in the views towards the activists. In other words, they stop
being seen exclusively as a problem and instead begin to be conceived of as
subjects with knowledge and skills, from whose action the company can derive
concrete benefits:
      The company listens to us and recognizes that we’re prepared interlocutors,
      and that it can also learn something from us. For free. A manager told us:
      ‘basically, you’ve given us free advice on this issue’. […] They’ve understood
      that it’s worth listening to us, and not ignoring us.30

  This shift in perspective on critical shareholding can ultimately lead to real
change, and cause the company to modify some aspects of its business:
      In the 2017 AGM, we raised the issue of coal imports from Colombia
      associated with human rights violations, and the CEO made a commitment
      and said: ‘I’m tired of this Colombian story that you’re always bringing up,
      I promise I’ll go there and check it out’. And the following year he broke the
      contracts with these suppliers… A decision that the company then also used
      to appear virtuous in the eyes of its stakeholders.31


Conclusions
   The analysis of critical shareholding reveals some concrete dynamics relat-
ed to the expansion of financial capital in corporations and its consequences
on the rest of society. Far from being a homogeneous and homogenizing field,
in which a single type of value, supported by quantitative metrics, it is stated,
finance instead shows multiple facets, as do the actors who populate it and
are engaged in a continuous redefinition of the meaning of their econom-
ic actions (Zelizer 1994). In this concluding section I focus on these aspects,
highlighting how they contribute to advancing our knowledge on movements
and countermovements of finance and their mutual relationship.
   The empirical material allowed close observation of the shareholder value
approach – which drives the expansion of finance in the non-financial sec-
tor – revealing its complex nature. If, in general terms, the shareholder value

29. Activist, int. RE3.
30. Activist, int. RID2.
31. Activist, int. RE3.


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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                         43

approach indicates that the main objective of companies is to promote the
interests of shareholders, here the attention is on the plurality of these inter-
ests, which can partially go beyond economic rationality. In fact, shareholders
are not all the same and, consequently, the way they conceive of the meaning
of value is not the same either.
   Alongside actors oriented towards immediate enrichment – making up the
great majority – there are some critical shareholders, who, as we have seen,
exploit the opportunities provided by financialization to promote ESG causes;
but there are also, for example, institutional shareholders aiming for long-
term sustainable investments that may eventually take a stand in favour of
some changes and thus promote the activists’ work (Goranova, Ryan 2014).
So, even in a context in which the maximization of financial value largely
prevails, shareholders remain heterogeneous and their actions can introduce
fractures within the seemingly monolithic movement of finance. These frac-
tures can then be amplified by actors external to the corporations, such as the
media and individual citizens, that work as a sounding board for particularly
sensitive issues and can foster unprecedented alliances. A recent example of
a stance taken by an institutional investor concerns BlackRock, the largest
investment fund in the world, which – under the pressure of public opinion –
sent a letter to the companies in which it has invested announcing possible
dissenting votes in the AGMs in the absence of a concrete commitment to
fight climate change.32
   The study of critical shareholding therefore reveals the dialectical nature
of the processes that take place in and around the AGM, showing its poten-
tial but also its limits, due, for example, to the scarcity of real interlocutors
– such as large shareholders – who take part in it. The ethnographic approach
is particularly suitable for this analysis, since it can highlight the relevance (or
irrelevance) of the AGM as a physical place of confrontation between share-
holders. Observing the functioning of a place formally appointed to make
official corporate decisions reveals, among other things, the existence of fur-
ther informal meetings – hidden and inaccessible to most – where the salient
issues are actually discussed and deliberated.
   The emergence of a dialectical relationship between actors, played out both
inside and outside the AGM, also invites proper consideration of the dimen-
sion of time. In detail, analysing the long-term relationships between critical

32. www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter (accessed on
    3/02/2022).


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44                                                                    Joselle Dagnes

shareholders and target companies, rather than focusing on individual epi-
sodes of confrontation, shows the incremental nature of change and its two
directions, thereby confirming my initial hypothesis. A diachronic perspective
allows to understand, on the one hand, that the absence of radical changes
in corporate behaviour does not usually mean that everything remains in-
variable, but that small progressive changes occur whose extent can only be
appreciated in the long term. On the other hand, we can thus see that the
transformations concern all the actors involved, not just the target companies,
and that indeed part of the change derives precisely from the mutual orienta-
tion of those exercising and those subject to the pressure.
   This brings me to the last point that I would like to emphasize, concerning
the dynamics of mutual legitimation that arise when a target company accepts
critical solicitations and introduces a real change in its policies. If it is true
that this constitutes the greatest desirable success for activists, who see their
efforts valued and can report it to their supporters, it is also true that this im-
plies an attribution of recognition to the target company, which in turn can
exploit this external acknowledgement to promote itself with its stakeholders
and consumers.
   This process recalls Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis of the spirit of
capitalism, according to which criticism catalyses change and neutralising ad-
aptation, reinforcing capitalism instead of undermining it (1999). As pointed
out by the authors, “capitalism needs its enemies, people who have a strong
dislike for it and who want to wage war against it. These are the people who
provide it with the moral foundations that it lacks, and who enable it to incor-
porate justice-enhancing mechanisms whose relevancy it would not otherwise
have to acknowledge” (Boltanski, Chiapello 2005: 163). The anthropological
studies on CSR highlight this “chameleon-like capacity” of corporations to
absorb oppositional ideas and mainstream them, turning them into business
opportunities (Dolan, Rajak 2016: 5). Thus, the results pursued by activists
immediately become subjects of corporate capture and, with their implemen-
tation, help redefine the target company “as an ethical actor, claiming to elide
the frictions between principles and profit” (ivi). If it is true that critical share-
holding gives rise to a push-pull dialectic between companies and activists, it
is even more true that the strong imbalance of power of the parties involved
emphasizes the risk of exploitation or manipulation of the requests carried
out by activists. Through shareholdering, therefore, critical organizations
become protagonists of the inherent contradictions of corporate capitalism,



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Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings                                        45

actively participating – at their own risk – in specific financial movements and
countermovements.
   From a relational point of view, a delicate dynamic arises between corpo-
rations and activists, which must be managed by both parties in a balanced
way, in order to reap the maximum benefit from their actions without however
putting themselves in a disadvantageous position for subsequent exchanges.
This fine balance is not achieved once and for all, but is subject to continuous
redefinitions by critical groups and target companies that are both parts of the
same changing organizational field.




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46                                                                      Joselle Dagnes

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bringing Dissent to shareholDers’ meetings                                               49

  Joselle Dagnes, PhD, is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University
  of Torino, where she teaches Sociology of Markets. Her research interests focus on
  the transformation of the economy and the financialization of society, with a par-
  ticular interest in corporate governance and the role of the economic and financial
  elites. On this topic, she has published books and scientific articles, including Ai
  posti di comando. Individui, organizzazioni e reti nel capitalismo finanziario italiano
  (Il Mulino, 2018); “The Super-rich: Origin, Reproduction, and Social Acceptance”,
  in Sociologica. International Journal for Sociological Debate, n. 2/2021 (with L. Storti).
  joselle.dagnes@unito.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Joselle Dagnes
Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings.
An investigation into critical shareholding.
2023 | anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, Dicembre 2023: 23-50.
