Director and shareholder interactions at shareholder meetings: Compromising accountability in the service of colonialism

This research explores director and shareholder two-way face-to-face interactions at the shareholder meetings of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, as reflected in verbatim minutes of those meetings. Shareholder meetings are traditionally viewed as being for accountability. Alternatively, directors may engage in manipulative game-playing through skillful political maneuvering of shareholders, thereby compromising accountability. The research analyzes unique data, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim meeting minutes of 29 shareholder meetings over the period 1895–1925, using manual close-reading interpretive content analysis. Our unit of analysis is the interactions between directors and supportive/approving and dissenting shareholders. Our research question is how did the directors and shareholders interact at the shareholder meetings. We develop a typology of 16 types of interactions the directors and shareholders used in their exchanges. We complement our analysis with illustrations of types of interactions extracted from our verbatim minutes. We demonstrate how powerful directors mobilized supportive/approving shareholders to quash the dissenting shareholders’ voices. Our findings have implications for how modern-day shareholder meetings are conducted.