Alison Kemper
University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management
Heisenberg's principals: How activist ratings change corporate boards

Alison.Kemper04@Rotman.Utoronto.ca

Alison's professional background in management and activism led to her interest in the migration of values and institutions across the boundaries between civil society and firms. She seeks to understand how values, practices and institutions favored by civil actors become adopted by firms.

Her theoretical development has led her to believe that firms and civil society are able to mutually evaluate the value of certain practices through the devices of ratings, rankings and indices. In her dissertation, she is examining the impact of governance ratings on publicly listed firms. In future research, she plans to work on firm responses to a variety of rankings and ratings.
Alison has designed and taught Corporate Citizenship at the MBA level and Organization Theory at the undergraduate level for three years. She is interested in using institutional enactment and entrepreneurship theories to teach sustainability and citizenship topics.

Heisenberg's principals: How activist ratings change corporate boards

Governance rankings have grown in prominence and pervasiveness as the basis for judgments about 'good' governance. I examine the responses of a pool of Canadian public firms to the initiation of governance rankings for the period 2002-2007. Over time, Canadian public firms are adopting increasing numbers of governance practices and earning higher scores in national rankings and ratings of board governance. This observation suggests that rankings and ratings may influence rather than simply measure the adoption of governance reforms. I use recent work from performativity theory of the sociology of markets to propose a model for such influence. I find that firms are more likely to adopt a governance practice when they are ranked and when the practice is identified and scored as a best practice. I discuss the results in the context of the financialization of public corporations.