Owners, Traders and Providers of Capital: the Multiple Faces of Institutional Investors

We draw on a series of in-depth interviews with senior fund managers and senior company executives to explore how different and often-contradictory conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are reflected in the attitudes and perceptions of the actors concerned. We find that while conceptualizations in terms of agency and ownership dominate both academic and popular discourses, the actors conceptualize institutional investors more as financial traders and, from the management perspective, politically powerful resource providers.