Traditional approaches to corporate governance, which developed in the USA and UK, have been concerned mainly with the fundamental conflict of interest between shareholders and top management. Whereas shareholders primarily have a financial interest in increasing the value of their shares in the firm, management may be more interested in private consumption (such as luxurious corporate headquarters or a fleet of corporate jets) or the status enjoyed with creating a large, highly visible company through mergers (‘empire-building’). Although this problem was flagged in the academic literature as early as the 1930s (Berle and Means 1932), its appearance as a significant policy issue is intimately linked with the rise of the ‘institutional investor’. These investors are primarily pension funds or mutual funds that manage huge pools of financial assets using modern portfolio techniques, i.e. by investing relatively small amounts of capital in a large number of diversified companies. Companies are monitored mainly through a limited number of quantifiable financial variables and decisions on entering or exiting investments are made on the basis of fairly simple decision rules. Institutional investing is increasingly characterized by intense competition to outperform standardized ‘benchmarks’ such as the weighted share performance of Standard and Poors’s largest 500 companies in the USA or the Financial Times (FTSE) top 100 companies in the UK. Outperformance of these indexes is important for mutual funds to attract retail customers. Pension funds are also increasingly contracting out much of the monitoring and investment work to professional ‘money managers’ whose performance is evaluated on an annual basis. The literature of corporate governance in the USA and UK initially was largely concerned with the point of view of institutional investors and with the relationship between these investors and management as ‘the’ key problem in running companies: what kinds of institutions are available to monitor and motivate management? In this model of corporate governance other problems, such as the nature of company strategy and human resources policy, were subordinated to this primary issue. As a broader range of countries were examined, however, it became apparent that this conception of corporate governance was dominant in only some countries. In many countries shareholders are considered to be only one of a number of key constituencies of the firm, and increasing share price through boosting profitability may be only one of the top priorities (or even a secondary priority) of the firm. Interestingly enough the characterization of this alternative as a ‘stakeholding’ model of corporate governance was coined in the UK by critics of the shareholder model (Hutton 1995; Kelly et al. 1997). According to them one of the strongest contrasts to the UK is provided by Germany, which has not only very different ownership patterns and financial institutions, but also has a very different structure of industrial relations and employee representation and also organization of the firm. Significantly, markets (as opposed to nonmarket institutions) regulate all of these kinds of relationships to a much greater extent in the UK than in Germany. These institutional differences are reflected in different corporate practices, including longer investment time-horizons and a greater concern with the impact of decisions on different constituencies of the firm. It is worthwhile to go into these differences in some detail and to paint a stylized picture of the models as they currently exist, before turning to the issue of recent regulatory changes and the poss