Organizational Publicness and Mortality: Explaining the Dissolution of Local Authority Companies

Organizational publicness is likely to have important implications for the mortality or survival of local authority companies. Majority-owned companies and those experiencing more political control may be less prone to dissolution due to greater government commitment to their survival, than their minority-owned and more politically autonomous counterparts. Using survival analysis to test these ideas, this study finds that dissolved local authority companies in England are more likely to be minority-owned, but have more politicians on their board of directors. They also have fewer directors in total, and tend to take a not-for-profit rather than a profit-making form.