do corporate investors have any say?

If it was a major investor, yes. Major investors can have a significant say in corporate policies and decisions. They can also sit on the board of directors.

It would be a little harder for a small investor, but even this could be explained, especially if it was a publicly traded company.

This appears to fall into the category of corporate governance. There is an awful lot of material available about this - from academia, legal practitioners, financial analysts, policy makers - take your pick.

Much depends on your scope and interest.You might like to try Google for an initial examination.Or, if this is too large, telephone the reference librarian at your nearest university library.

It only makes sense if your character is on the Board of Directors or an executive with the company. Typically the board of directors and C-suite executives will all be large stockholders in the company.

While a corporation might consider input from an individual major stockholder,
they really have no official say into day to day decisions of a corporation's operations. As a stockholder, even a major one, you're not involved in things like whether to recall a product or deny licensing, or what TV shows to advertise on, approve research, etc. It's a passive investment. That's why average people can invest in companies without being personally exposed to lawsuit. If stockholders were personally responsible for the actions of each company in which they held stock, I doubt many of us would want that kind of exposure.

There are issues that come up for vote by the stockholders (typically, each share of stock held counts for one vote) and they tend to be things like voting on compensation, mergers, whether to retain an auditing firm, split the stock, renew an officer's term. Such votes are typically held once or twice a year. The number of shares needed for one individual stockholder to throw a decision into the yea or nay column would be enormous.

And there are shareholders meetings, but they're largely formality and window dressing. Joe investor can get up and speak his piece and think he's accomplished something, but it's basically semi-annual therapy than functional decision making.

That said, there'd be any number of ways in which a person could rationalize holding a stockholder responsible, especially if he/she was not really versed in corporate matters. Grief or anger can cloud judgment. I could imagine where a mother of a child who died from a medication might conjure blame for anyone who held stock in that pharmaceutical company. Actually, we see this sort of thing in the news all the time. For every ill in the world, there's a company to which someone somewhere will eagerly pin blame, and a talk show or newspaper happy to publicize it.

Investors

Sometimes almost no say at all, and at other times a lot of say. There is no single or simple answer for this. Board members may sometimes try to get enough investors behind them to swing a vote, make policy, etc. This can give a small investor a bit more say.

But like anything else, the one with the most shares has the most say. Barring this, the ones who can put their shares together to give them a majority has the most say.

It's complicated, and your best bet is to read a couple of good books on the subject.

Dario D. said:

Would it make sense for someone to be angered at an investor for a mistake that the company made, and partially blame him?

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Would it make sense? Probably not. Could you explain it and make it sound plausible, as KCH suggested? Probably.

HN

Dario D. said:

I have a simple question regarding what I'm writing.

Do corporate investors have any specific say in the actions of a corporation? Would it make sense for someone to be angered at an investor for a mistake that the company made, and partially blame him?

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When you say "investor," I assume you mean shareholder. That is the more usual term, unless you're talking about a tiny corporation, like a local family-owned one. In small corporations (these are called "closely-held corporations," if you want to google that term), there tends to be a lot of overlap between the various roles: a major investor (shareholder) may also be a board member, and/or an officer of the corporation. So in the case of a closely-held corporation, a major investor would tend to have a lot more influence over what the corporation does, so it would make perfect sense for someone to blame him.

But that's much less true when it comes to what people normally think of when they think of "corporations"--IBM, Microsoft, or smaller but still huge organizations. Shareholders technically have some say in the actions of a corporation, in that they can vote on various issues at the shareholders' meeting, but what issues even get placed on the ballot is generally not up to the shareholders--the board places various issues on the ballot and the shareholders vote. Again, technically, there are mechanisms whereby a shareholder can get an issue placed on the ballot, but it's so difficult it doesn't happen much. And in any case, the issues placed on the ballot are virtually never, like 99.9999999% of the time NOT, anything to do with corporate policy (e.g. "should we lay off 2000 people and move manufacturing to China"). Those types of policy decisions are generally left to the discretion of management, under the supervision of the board (which usually lets management do whatever the hell it wants). So, the shareholders have no say over that.

As the other poster said, all of this falls within the realm of corporate governance. I've studied this in law school, and the basics are what I just wrote above: in small corps, yeah, shareholders usually wield power, but that is either not legal power (i.e. the shareholder doesn't have any legal right to direct management's actions, but in practice management listens to the shareholder because they want him/her to keep investing), or, when it is legal power, it's because the shareholder is not just a shareholder, but also someone with legal decision-making authority (i.e. a member of the board or a corporate officer). But in large corporations (like, large enough for their shares to be traded on the stock exchange), shareholders have approximately no power. The only shareholders who do have some sway are large institutional investors (e.g. the financial companies who sell mutual funds, and thus who have TONS of money from all their mutual-fund customers to sink into share purchases). But institutional shareholders are institutions, not individual people, so that wouldn't work for your story.

If you say a little more about what the situation you're envisioning is, I could perhaps be a bit more helpful.

Dario D. said:

What I want is for a character to simply make a gesture against a stockholder for assuming that he was one of the shareholders that pressed for a bad action. It's almost like saying, "Well, you were one of the guys who tried to get the company to do so-and-so evil action, so screw you." He's not a big stockholder, but still responsible in small part for casting his vote in favor of corrupt actions.

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That might make sense emotionally, as in the other poster's example of a grieving mother flipping out, but it would only make sense realistically if the corporation were small. In other words, if you're talking about some dude who happens to own some stock in a publicly-traded corporation, the person blaming him would have to be either a nutcase or in the grips of very strong emotion (grieving mother etc.). If you don't want the blamer to be that way, if you want the reader to understand why this really does make sense to the blamer, then it would have to be a small corporation with not very many investors--like, a local company of some kind.

Dario D. said:

I see what you're saying, but wouldn't it make sense to blame someone who cast his vote in favor of a corrupt action?

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The thing is, shareholders don't even get the opportunity to cast their vote in favor of a corrupt action. The things they get to vote on at the annual meetings (at which most shareholders vote by proxy--it's like an absentee ballot) are incredibly boring. It's stuff like "should we extend the term of members of the board of directors from three years to four," "should we expand the board from 6 people to 8 people including two more outside directors," blah blah, incredibly boring stuff.

Actual corporate policy, like "should we stop making this dangerous product," "should we fire the CEO," "should we stop using this toxic chemical," "should we cook the books" (haha), or "should we close our Indiana plant and outsource to China" are never voted on in shareholder meetings. Those decisions are not up to the shareholders. They're up to management or, in certain cases (e.g. should we fire the CEO), the board of directors. I can't think of anything that could conceivably be considered a "corrupt corporate action" that the shareholders would even be asked for their input on, let alone that the shareholders would get to cast deciding votes on.

Dario D. said:

In light of that, does it make sense to walk into a corporate office, notice an ill-voting shareholder, and lend him a sneer? I know he didn't have a huge impact on the vote, but he voted regardless

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Apart from the huge problem I just mentioned above--so, even assuming that for once the shareholders somehow got to vote on something meaningful/corrupt--there are two problems with that scenario:

- First off, if person A walks into the headquarters of corporation C and sees shareholder B there, how does A know that B is a shareholder? Not to mention, what the heck is B even doing there--the only shareholders you're likely to see at a corporate office are employees who happen to be shareholders because they have stock options.

- And second, even if there's a plausible reason for B to be there AND A somehow knows B is a shareholder, how does A know which way B voted, or even whether B voted at all? If you've got a big corporation, you may be talking tens of thousands of shareholders, all of whom get proxy-voting materials in the mail, many of whom just throw the stuff away and don't even bother voting (why bother, when all you're asked to vote on is incredibly boring stuff). And for those who do bother to vote, it's a secret ballot, like pretty much every other ballot in this country. There's no way for A to know how B voted, unless B tells him.

So... all this is a long way of saying "no." Sorry! But at least, by ditching that idea, you're avoiding a major factual mistake. Like I said earlier, there are ways you could do this: either (1) a small corporation in which the shareholder has actual influence, whether because he's also a board member or officer, or because he's a major investor who can actually call up management on the phone and be listened to; or (2) the person who gets mad at the shareholder is a nutcase or a grieving mom or [insert other hugely emotional type of person here]. Those are the only ways I can think of that this scenario could be plausible.