The notion of ‘ownership of the firm’ is central to conventional treatments of corporate governance, yet there is very little discussion about what this means in practice. In this paper we briefly draw attention to some of the debates around the notion of ownership in various disciplinary fields, and then recount and discuss some of the meanings associated with ownership of the firm that we have found in two empirical studies carried out in the UK and Japan. Our aim is to illuminate and disturb some of the commonly taken for granted notions of what it means to ‘own’ a firm.
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