Stock Options

If you own stock, whether it be a few shares or a large portfolio, you have the right to attend annual meetings and to try--like Judy Holiday in The Solid Gold Cadillac--to influence company policy. An increasingly popular tactic, shareholder activism is the muscle in socially responsible investing (SRI). It is the lever behind SRI's greatest successes, such as enlisting companies to adopt the socially responsible Valdez principles or divesting much of corporate America from apartheid-era South Africa.

Social investing pioneers Amy Domini and Peter Kinder have compared shareholder resolutions proposing a change in company policy to the fabled two-by-four whacked against a stubborn Ozark mule: it gets a corporation's attention. "Proxy resolutions [made as a shareholder] open the door to corporate management--reaching private-sector opinion-makers otherwise inaccessible to social activists," say Domini and Kinder.

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