Ownership responsibilities and corporate governance: The crisis at Rolls Royce, 1968-71

Despite the wealth of primary materials available and the insights which business historians can make to our understanding of corporate governance, applied work on the operation of internal and external mechanisms of corporate governance is sorely missing in the literature. This article attempts to address that omission. Theoretical insights on ownership behaviour are used to assess how owners behave in practice using previously un-utilised source materials relating to the crisis at Rolls Royce. We find standard theoretical approaches to ownership behaviour to be sorely lacking. We find, instead, that the key players were the merchant banks. We also find perceptions of government policy to be an important explanatory factor behind the behaviour of owners and managers, and, as such, suggest that this event in business history is important not only in its own right but in determining future corporate governance in this country.