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The purpose of the paper is to show what Asset managers undertake to operate in accordance with the Statement of Institutional Shareholders' Committee (ISC) whenever they engage with portfolio companies on behalf of their institutional investor clients. The Statement (2002) states that institutional shareholders have a responsibility to make considered use of their votes, and to enter into a dialogue with companies based on the mutual understanding of objectives.

A survey study of Asset managers was conducted to evaluate their adherence to the ISC Principles.

The findings in the paper show that fund managers routinely analyse information concerning those companies in which they invest, and have meetings with company managers. Managers are also involved in activities to promote standards of corporate governance and corporate accountability. It is also found that managers' experience in managing deal flows, funds' specialization and engagement specialists are the key drivers of adherence to the ISC Principles.

The paper highlights the importance of specific fund capabilities for monitoring and controlling portfolio companies.

Two sets of factors stimulated widespread interest in new technology in the national newspaper industry in 1975: the worsening economic situation of the press, discussed fully in the Interim Report of the Royal Commission on the Press, published in March 1976, and the expanding use of computerised photo‐composition systems abroad, especially in the United States. The overall economic situation of national newspapers, both quality and popular, in 1975 was weak, and was expected to worsen; between 1970 and 1975 the quality dailies made a total profit of £380,000 on an annual turnover of £50 millions, the heaviest losses occurring in 1975. At the same time, increasing awareness of American experience suggested that the use of computerised photo‐composition techniques could lead to major savings in production costs.

Since 1979, the Conservative government in the UK has introduced wide‐ranging and detailed regulations for the conduct of union internal affairs; a number of other Western industrialized countries have not done so (or have not done so to the same extent) but have continued their tradition of relying on unions themselves to establish democratic procedures. Alternative views of the role of the state in industrial relations underlie these differences. A second, linked article, appearing in Employee Relations (Vol. 15 No. 4), examines state approaches to union autonomy in the context of attitudes towards other controls on union activities and attempts to explain the successive shifts in British policy in the UK since the 1960s.

In 1976, the Conservative Party expressed the view that trade unions were “… imperfectly democratic”. Subsequently they returned to this theme in a Green Paper on Union Democracy in 1983 which expressed strong reservations about the electoral practices of trade unions. The Conservatives were concerned that unrepresentative union leaders “misuse(d) the wealth and power” of their unions for their own political ambitions. They noted the growing proportion of trade unionists voting Conservative and contrasted this with the continued dominance of the trade union movement by leaders sympathetic to, if not actually members of, the Labour Party. From this the Conservatives concluded that the voting system used in union elections was defective.

This is the second of two linked articles on the question of union autonomy; the first appeared in the previous issue of this journal. It considers state control and approach to union autonomy in the wider context of state controls on unions′ bargaining activities including industrial action. Two questions are posed: whether there is any “balance” between state respect for union autonomy and state confidence that union collective bargaining activities take place within a legally prescribed framework; and how the state in the UK was able to shift so rapidly from the traditional, voluntary approach and the incipient neo‐corporatism of the 1970s, to the detailed and onerous regulation of union internal and external activities in the 1980s and 1990s.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of human capital in venture capital organizations. New trends in investor behaviour have emerged in recent years. There is evidence to suggest that venture capital (VC) firms involve themselves more actively in the companies in which they invest through influencing company strategy and through using their knowledge and contacts to introduce portfolio companies to networks of suppliers and customers, professionals and alternative sources of finance.

Using survey data, the paper empirically examines the VC firms' propensity to engage in terms of the factors that make some firms more active than the others.

Specifically, the paper finds and identifies those mechanisms that are used by VC firms to develop their engagement practice, including human capital and specialized deal flow. The paper also addresses the question of the effects of VC firm engagement on performance.

The paper makes a contribution in terms of the way human capital performs in venture capital organizations and how public policies can explicitly take into account the human dimension of the investment process.