Rethinking Top Management Pay: From Pay for Performance to Pay as Fee

The pay of top management in public companies has been a matter of public concern at least since the early 1990s in the UK and USA. How do we/should we think about this pay problem and its solution? This paper proposes an empirically based reconceptualisation of top management pay. The established problem definition is that pay is, or should be, about performance; but remuneration committees and shareholders are apparently unable to enforce this solution. Our response is a twofold attempt to move beyond the established problematisation. First, empirically in terms of problem definition, we present a study of FTSE250 pay patterns which illustrates and explores how top management pay is a kind of fee scaled according to company size. Second, conceptually in terms of solution we argue that the pay as fee re-problematisation opens up new ways of thinking about how top management pay should be controlled and designed.