The marketisation of European corporate control: A critical political economy perspective

New Political Economy

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 211-235

  Van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan ^a   Horn, Laura ^a  

^a VU UNIVERSITY AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CORPORATE STRATEGY; MARKET CONDITIONS; MARKETING; POLITICAL ECONOMY;

EURASIA; EUROPE;

EID: 34347329320     PISSN: 13563467     EISSN: 14699923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13563460701302984     Document Type: Article

References (173)

1. Charlie McCreevy, 'The European Corporate Governance Action Plan: Setting Priorities', Speech at the Second European Corporate Governance Conference, Luxembourg, 28 June 2005 (emphasis added).
2. See, for example, David Wells & Lina Saigol, 'Hostile bids are back: companies have targets in their sights and bankers foresee lucrative transactions', Financial Times, 18 February 2004, p. 11
3. James Politi & Lina Saigol, 'Europe outpaces US in volume of deals', Financial Times, 26 September 2005, p. 25
4. James Politi & Lina Saigol, 'M&A fever surpasses dotcom era - global deal-making for first half of year poised to hit dollars 1,930bn', Financial Times, 30 June 2006, p. 17
5. and James Politi & Lina Saigol, 'Rise in hostile bids pushes M&A to record - unsolicited approaches double last year's figure: Switch to shorter-term views fuelling the boom', Financial Times, 29 September 2006, p. 21.
6. As maintained by, for example, Henry Hansmann & Reinier Kraakman, 'The End of History for Corporate Law', Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 89, No. 2 (2001), p. 56.
7. What is 'institutionalist' in Polanyi's work is his emphasis on the institutional preconditions (including the enabling role of the state) for a capitalist market economy to emerge and be sustained. In contrast to some more functionalist interpretations of his work though, and in contrast to some 'new institutionalisms', we emphasise from a Marxian political economy perspective that institutions themselves are empty if not for the content given to them by social forces and their struggles. In other words, institutions are the outcome as well as the medium of underlying social relations (cf. Peter A. Hall & Rosemary C. R. Taylor, 'Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms', Political Studies, Vol. 44, No. 5 (1996), pp. 936-57).
8. Beyond Polanyi our 'institutionalism' is also indebted to work in economic sociology. See, especially, Neil Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First Century Capitalist Societies (Princeton University Press, 2001), and William G. Roy, Socializing Capital. The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton University Press, 1997).
9. See, for example, Michael Useem, 'Corporate Leadership in a Globalizing Equity Market', Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1998), pp. 43-59
10. Mary O'Sullivan, 'Corporate Governance and Globalisation', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, No. 570 (July 2000), pp. 153-72.
11. See, for example, Michel Aglietta & Antoine Rebérioux, Corporate Governance Adrift: A Critique of Shareholder Value (Edward Elgar, 2005).
12. Due to the limits of a single journal article, we here limit ourselves to the more modest task of describing and interpreting, informed by a preceding theorisation of the marketisation of this political and ideological project as articulated at the EU-level corporate control.
13. This applies, for example, to much of the so-called agency theory. See Michael Jensen & William H. Meckling, 'Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure', Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1976), pp. 305-60
14. Eugene Fama & Michael Jensen, 'Separation of Ownership and Control', Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1983), p. 16.
15. In this respect, we may also argue that much of this literature is implicitly or explicity rather normative and prescriptive in its orientation. On this, see also Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Henk Overbeek & Andreas Nölke, 'The Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation: Introducing Key Concepts, Questions and Approaches', in Henk Overbeek, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn & Andreas Nölke (eds), The Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation (Routledge, 2007).
16. See Peter A. Hall & David Soskice, 'An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism', in Peter A. Hall & David Soskice (eds), Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1-68.
17. Whereas we share with the varieties of capitalism approach the notion of the indispensability of public regulation in the constitution of markets, we take public regulation here not just as an independent variable but as part of our explanandum - with politics (such as the construction of a particular political project) as the explanans On this, see also van Apeldoorn et al., 'The Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation'. For a notable exception to the ahistoricity of the varieties of capitalism literature, see Wolfgang Streeck & Kozo Yamamura (eds), The Origins of Non-Liberal Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2002).
18. For a recent attempt to make sense of contemporary changes in historical varieties of capitalism, and to underline the politics of those changes, see Colin Crouch, Capitalist Diversity and Change. Recombinant Governance and Institutional Entrepreneurs (Oxford University Press, 2005). Finally, we may also note that although we share the emphasis the approach puts on the role of institutions in the organisation of capitalist political economies,we go beyond the institutional analysis ofmost of this literature by starting with the institutional preconditions of the capitalistmarket in general (starting with fundamental categories like 'the commodity), rather than focusing on the institutional dimension of its variation across space. We thus enquire about what much of the varieties of corporatism literature (especially Hall & Sockice, 'An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism') takes as a given.
19. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, 'Theorising the Transnational: A Historical Materialist Approach', Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2004), p. 144.
20. John Scott, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 37.
21. Adolf A. Berle & Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Transaction Publishers, 1991 [1932]).
22. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Greenwood Press, 1975 [1941]), p. 223.
23. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1957 [1944]), p. 71.
24. Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2002), p. 7.
25. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Penguin: 1990 [1867]), p. 166.
26. cf. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
27. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 125.
28. Ibid., p. 131.
29. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 72.
30. Helen Raduntz, 'The Economy of Uncertainty, Marketisation and the Direction of Educational Change', paper presented at the Conference of the Australian Association for Education Research, Brisbane, 1-5 December 2002, p. 3.
31. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 178.
32. See, for example, Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Polity, 2002), p. 39
33. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 271.
34. David Harvey, Limits to Capital (Verso, 1999 [1982]), pp. 19-20.
35. Ibid., p. 245.
36. Daniel Ankarloo & Giulio Palermo, 'Anti-Williamson: A Marxian Critique of New Institutional Economics', Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 28 (2004), p. 424
37. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Penguin, 1991 [1894]), p. 612.
38. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 168-9.
39. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 69.
40. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 280.
41. Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets, p. 35.
42. Ibid.
43. see also Polanyi, The Great Transformation; Wood, The Origin of Capitalism.
44. See Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, p. 45.
45. Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets, p. 34.
46. Roy, Socializing Capital, pp. 16-18
47. cf. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Greenwood, 1977).
48. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 567.
49. Roy, Socializing Capital, p. 12.
50. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 567-8.
51. Roy, Socializing Capital, pp. 15-20; 37-8.
52. Berle & Means, The Modern Corporation, p. 8.
53. Scott, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes, p. 38
54. see also Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 599.
55. Harvey, Limits to Capital, p. 299
56. see also Douglas Henwood, Wall Street (Verso, 1998), p. 57.
57. Harvey, Limits to Capital, p. 276.
58. Aglietta & Rebérioux, Corporate Governance Adrift, p. 2.
59. Mark Roe, Strong Managers, Weak Owners: The Political Roots of American Corporate Finance (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 230.
60. Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (Verso, 1984).
61. The managerialist thesis has in fact never been fully correct, not even in the USA during its so called heyday in the 1960s. See Ronald Dore, William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, 'Varieties of Capitalism in the Twentieth Century', Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1999), p. 109.
62. As many empirical studies have shown, the dispersal of share ownership has only rarely been so advanced as to eliminate any controlling interest. In fact, many corporations, also in the USA, continued to be controlled or at least influenced by large shareowners through a variety of ways, sometimes - in a popular neo-Marxist theory derived from Hilferding - through networks of so called 'finance capitalists' On this see, for example, Maurice Zeitlin, 'Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class', American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 81, No 4 (1974), pp. 1073-119. We argue, however, that if we want to understand the current marketisation of corporate control we have to move beyond these familiar critiques of managerialism, which miss the fundamental point that even in the absence of the ownership of a large block of shares of a single firm, or control by finance capital, capitalist owners may, under certain institutional conditions, still exercise control collectively through the market mechanism.
63. Wolfgang Streeck, The Transformation of Corporate Governance in Europe: An Overview, MPIfG Working Papers 01/08, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, 2001
64. Martin Höpner & Gregory Jackson, An Emerging Market for Corporate Control? The Mannesmann Takeover and German Corporate Governance, MPIfG Discussion Papers 01/04, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, 2001.
65. Ronald J. Gilson, 'The Political Ecology of Takeovers: Thoughts on Harmonizing the European Corporate Governance Environment', Fordham Law Review, Vol. 61, No. 161 (1992), p. 181.
66. Gregory Jackson 'Comparative Corporate Governance: Sociological Perspectives', in John Parkinson, Andrew Gamble & Gavin Kelly (eds), The Political Economy of the Company (Hart, 2000), pp. 271-3.
67. Scott, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes, p. 50.
68. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 59
69. see also Bart Nooteboom, 'Voice- and Exit-Based Forms of Corporate Control: Anglo-American, European, and Japanese', Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1999), pp. 845-60.
70. This notion of market- or exit-based control can in fact also be found in neo-classical agency theory. Fama and Jensen, for instance, argue that '[t]he unrestricted alienability of the residual claims [that is, shares] of open corporations', gives these corporations a unique 'external monitoring device' ('Separation of Ownership and Control', p. 16).
71. Agency theory views this in terms of a natural and rational solution to a problem (the agency problem), which might be blocked by the interference of politics (see Michael Jensen, 'Takeovers: Their Causes and Consequences', Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1988), pp. 21-48), we adopt the opposite perspective inasmuch as we seek to understand how and why this form of market rule has in fact come into being, suggesting that a political analysis is indispensable.
72. See Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, 'Globalisation, European Integration, and the Transformation of European Corporate Governance the Rise of a European Shareholder Capitalism', paper presented at the annual convention of the European Community Studies Association (ECSA), Madison, Wisconsin, 31 May-2 June 2001
73. Fabrizio Barca & Marco Becht (eds), The Control of Corporate Europe (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 30.
74. See John C. Coffee, 'Liquidity Versus Control: The Institutional Investor as Corporate Monitor', Columbia Law Review, Vol. 91, No. 6 (1991), pp. 1277-366.
75. Martin Höpner, Wer beherrscht die Unternehmen? Shareholder Value, Managerherrschaft und Mitbestimmung in Deutschland (Campus, 2003), p. 99.
76. See van Apeldoorn, Globalisation, European Integration, and the Transformation of European Corporate Governance.
77. Höpner, Wer beherrscht die Unternehmen?, pp. 104ff.
78. Paul Windolf, 'Die neuen Eigentümer: Eine Analyse des Marktes für Unternehmenskontrolle', Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1994), p. 85
79. Ivo Wildenberg, De Revolte van de Kapitaalmarkt: Over Fusies, Overnames en de Terugkeer van de Eigenaar-Ondernemer (Academic Service, 1990), p. 14.
80. Robert Fitch, 'A Reply to O'Connor', Socialist Register, Vol. 7 (1971), p. 166
81. Paul Windolf, 'Die neuen Eigentümer', p. 81.
82. Henry Manne, 'Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control', The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 73, No. 2 (1965), p. 113
83. see also Jensen & Meckling, 'The Theory of the Firm'.
84. Andrei Shleifer & Robert Vishny, A Survey of Corporate Governance, NBER Working Papers, No. WSSS4 1996, p. 4.
85. John Pound, 'The Rise of the Political Model of Corporate Governance and Corporate Control', New York University Law Review, Vol. 68, No. 5 (1993), p. 1018.
86. Höpner, Wer beherrscht die Unternehmen?, p. 105.
87. Ibid., pp. 139-48.
88. Henk Overbeek & Kees van der Pijl, 'Restructuring Capital and Restructuring Hegemony: Neoliberalism and the Unmaking of the Postwar Order', in Henk Overbeek (ed.), Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy: The Rise of Transnational Neoliberalism in the 1980s (Routledge, 1993), p. 3.
89. Harvey, Limits to Capital, p. 284 (emphasis in original).
90. Overbeek & van der Pijl, 'Restructuring Capital and Restructuring Hegemony'
91. Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations (Routledge, 1998), pp. 51-63.
92. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, 'Maximizing Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance?', Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13-35
93. see also Fligstein, Architecture of Markets, ch. 7
94. Aglietta & Rebérioux, Corporate Governance Adrift.
95. Van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations.
96. Henk W. de Jong, 'The Governance Structure and Performance of Large European Companies', Journal of Management and Governance, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1997), p. 18.
97. Lazonick & O'Sullivan, 'Maximizing Shareholder Value', p. 17.
98. Cf. Aglietta & Rebérioux, Corporate Governance Adrift
99. Robert Boyer, 'Is a Finance-Led Growth Regime a Viable Alternative to Fordism?, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 111-45.
100. Höpner, Wer beherrscht die Unternehmen?, p. 210.
101. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 73.
102. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 167.
103. Including, crucially, the striking down of all state-level anti-takeover laws by the Supreme Court in 1982. Mark Roe, 'Takeover Politics', in Margaret Blair (ed.), The Deal Decade (The Brookings Institution, 1993), p. 335.
104. Blair (ed.) The Deal Decade
105. Douglas Henwood, Wall Street.
106. Michael Useem, Executive Defense: Shareholder Power and Corporate Reorganization (Harvard University Press, 1993)
107. Wildenberg, De Revolte van de Kapitaalmarkt.
108. Höpner & Jackson, 'An Emerging Market for Corporate Control?'
109. Karel Lannoo, 'A European Perspective on Corporate Governance' Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1999), pp. 269-94
110. Karel Lannoo & Arman Khachaturyan, Reform of Corporate Governance in the EU, Centre for European Policy Studies Papers (CEPS, 2003).
111. Politi & Saigol, 'Europe outpaces US in volume of deals'. The record wave of M&A activity in Europe, including a growing number of hostile bids, also shows now sign of receding, see Politi & Saigol, 'Rise in hostile bids pushes M&A to Record'
112. Christopher Brown-Humes, 'Debt and equity markets point to continuing boom in M&A', Financial Times, 4 November 2006, p. 34.
113. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 'Recent Trends: Institutional Investors Statistics', Financial Market Trends Vol. 80, September (2001), pp. 46-52.
114. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 'Shareholder Value and the Market for Corporate Control in OECD Countries', Financial Market Trends, Vol. 69, February (1998), pp. 15-37.
115. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 'The Impact of Institutional Investors on OECD Financial Markets', Financial Market Trends, Vol. 68, November (1997), pp. 15-55.
116. See Höpner, Wer beherrscht die Unternehmen?
117. van Apeldoorn, 'Globalisation, Europeanisation and the Transformation of European Corporate Control', Martin Rhodes & Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, 'Capital Unbound? The Transformation of European Corporate Governance', Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1998), pp. 406-27.
118. Alan W. Cafruny & Magnus Ryner (eds), A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)
119. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration (Routledge, 2002).
120. Hans-Jürgen Bieling & Jochen Steinhilber, 'Finanzmarktintegration und Corporate Governance in der Europä ischen Union', Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2002), p. 41 (authors' translation). Employing the consent of a project in terms of a relatively coherent programme, however, should not be taken to imply that there are no contradictions within the project, nor that a priori one could expect a smooth implementation of the project.
121. For example, Wayne Sandholtz & Alec Stone Sweet (eds), European Integration and Supranational Governance (Oxford University Press, 1998).
122. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, p. 205.
123. See van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration.
124. Hans-Jürgen Bieling, 'Social Forces in the Making of the New European Economy: The Case of Financial Market Integration', New Political Economy, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2003), pp. 203-24
125. see also Jonathan Story & Ingo Walter, Political Economy of Financial Integration in Europe (Manchster University Press, 1997).
126. Bieling & Steinhilber, 'Finanzmarktintegration und Corporate Governance', p. 43
127. van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration.
128. European Commission, Financial Services: Implementing the Framework for Financial Markets: Action Plan, COM (1999) 232, 11 May 1999.
129. Van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism, pp. 173-80.
130. European Commission, Turning the Corner: Preparing the Challenge of the Next Phase of European Capital Market Integration, 10th FSAP Progress Report (2004), available at http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/ internal_market/finances/docs/actionplan/index/progress10_en.pdf (accessed 5 May 2006).
131. Frits Bolkestein, 'Speech at Presidency Conclusion', European Council, Lisbon, 23-4 March 2004.
132. Ibid.
133. European Commission, Modernising Company Law and Enhancing Corporate Governance in the European Union - A Plan to Move Forward, COM (2003) 284 final, 21 May 2003.
134. On the role of discourse in European governance compare Ben Rosamond, 'Imagining the European Economy: "Competetiveness" and the Social Construction of "Europe" as an Economic Space', New Political Economy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2002), pp. 157-77.
135. Charlie McCreevy, 'Regulatory and Supervisory Challenges of Financial Integration', speech at the Lamfalussy London Summer Dinner, London, 27 June 2005.
136. See Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
137. Frits Bolkestein, 'Corporate Governance in Europe', speech at the FESE Conference, Amsterdam, 30 February 2003.
138. Charlie McCreevy, 'The Commission's Financial Services Policy 2005-2010', Exchange of Views on Financial Services Policy 2005-2010 Conference, Brussels, 18 July 2005 (emphasis added).
139. Manne, 'Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control', p. 112.
140. Frits Bolkestein, 'Keynote Speech', FESE Convention, London, 23 June 2003.
141. Frits Bolkestein, 'Speeding up the Consolidation of European Financial Markets', speech held at the Europlace International Financial Forum, Paris, 11 July 2002.
142. European Commission, Financial Services, p. 4.
143. Barbara Dauner-Lieb & Marco Lamandini, The New Proposal of a Directive on Company Law Concerning Takeover Bids and the Achievement of a Level Playing Field, with Particular Reference to the Recommendations of the High Level Group of Company Law Experts set up by the European Commission (European Parliament, 2002), p. 13.
144. The implementation of the Takeover Directive was slow but was finally completed in 2006. Most Member States have indeed opted out of the board neutrality and the breakthrough rules. For more information on the implementation, see a report by the European Group for Investor Protection, available at http://www.egip.org/docs/EGIP'sconclusions.pdf (accessed 7 December, 2006).
145. Silja Maul & Athanasios Kouloridas, 'The Takeover Bids Directive', German Law Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2004), p. 360.
146. McCreevy, The European Corporate Governance Action Plan.
147. Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets, p. 96.
148. See van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism
149. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, 'Transnational Class Agency and European Governance: The Case of the European Round Table of Industrialists', New Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000), pp. 157-81.
150. In this context, the role of the European Court of Justice is very important. It has repeatedly ruled against golden shares, such as in 2002 (Case C-367/98: Commission vs. Portugal, case C-483/88: Commission vs. France; case C-503/99: Commission vs. Belgium) and 2006 (C-283/04 Commission vs Netherlands).
151. McCreevy, The European Corporate Governance Action Plan.
152. European Commission, Fostering an Appropriate Regime for Shareholders' Rights, consultation document of DG Internal Market (2005), available at http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/ company/docs/shareholders/consultation_en.pdf (accessed 5 May 2006), p. 13.
153. Charlie McCreevy, 'Keynote Address', speech held at the ICGN Annual Conference, London, 8 July 2005.
154. European Commission, Fostering an Appropriate Regime for Shareholders' Rights, p. 14. In light of these shareholder rights principles, the issue of 'one share one vote' has become one of the main points of debate within the regulation of corporate control in the European Union.
155. According to a recent study, 65 per cent of listed companies in the EU apply the 'one share one vote' principle (Association of British Insurers and Deminor Rating, Application of the One Share - One Vote Principle in Europe, 2005, available at http://www.abi.org.uk/ BookShop/ResearchReports/Deminor_Report.pdf, accessed 5 May 2006). More than a third of listed European companies thus still have unequal voting rights.
156. The Economist, condemning 'Europe's unfair voting rights', claims that this 'means that Europe is unlikely to develop soon the lively market for corporate control that it urgently needs' (The Economist 'Corporate governance in Europe. What shareholder democracy?', 23 May 2005).
157. Charlie McCreevy, 'Interview', Financial Times, 17 October 2005, p. 1.
158. For an overview of these debates, see Arman Khachaturyan The One Share One Vote Controversy in the EU, EMI Working Paper No. 1 (2006), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=908215 (accessed 25 November 2006).
159. Ibid.
160. For critical political economy scholarship on EMU see, for instance, Hans-Jürgen Bieling 'EMU, Financial Integration and Global Economic Governance', Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2006), pp. 420-48
161. Alan W. Cafruny & Magnus Ryner, Europe at Bay: The Crisis of European Union (Lynne Rienner, 2007).
162. Bieling, 'Social Forces in the Making of the New European Economy', p. 211.
163. See Lannoo, 'A European Perspective on Corporate Governance'; OECD, 'Shareholder Value and the Market for Corporate Control in OECD Countries'.
164. On this, see also Charlie McCreevy, Statement by Charlie McCreevy on the Adoption of the European Parliament Opinion on the Cross-Border Mergers Directive, Brussels, IP/05/551(2005).
165. Bernard S. Black, 'The Legal and Institutional Preconditions for Strong Securities Markets', UCLA Law Review, Vol. 48 (2001), pp. 781-805.
166. Frits Bolkestein, 'The EU Action Plan for Corporate Governance', speech held at the Conference on the German Corporate Governance Code, Berlin, 24 June 2004.
167. Charlie McCreevy, 'Europe must embrace market forces', Financial Times, 12 May 2005, p. 19.
168. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), OECD Principles of Corporate Governance (OECD, 2004), p. 36.
169. Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets, p. 5.
170. See the Commission's proposal COM (2005) 685 final, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/com/2005/com2005_0685en01.pdf
171. McCreevy, The Commission's Financial Services Policy.
172. Christopher Gibson-Smith, 'Brussels can help the markets to help themselves', Financial Times, 27 July 2005, p. 17.
173. More empirical research underlining the role of transnational capital market actors in the politics of the transformation of corporate governance regulation can be found in Overbeek et al., Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation.