Ordering Top Pay: Interpreting the Signals* Stephen J. Perkins and Chris Hendry London Metropolitan University and Visiting Fellow, Sir John Cass Business School, City University, London; Sir John Cass Business School, City University, London  Boardroom reward continues to attract controversy, despite the structural changes in corporate governance arrangements over the past decade. This study responds to Pettigrew’s (1992) call to eschew over-ambitious attempts to demonstrate causality in the area of executive management and firm performance, in favour of redressing the overwhelmingly prescriptive bias in the literature. A simple but important task is to ‘begin to provide some basic descriptive findings about boards and their directors’, and open up ‘the black box of board behaviour’ – in this case, that of board remuneration committees. Interpretations of comparative market signals play a part in deliberations between the leading actors responsible for determining executive directors’ salary, bonuses and other emoluments. But the position is more deeply textured than the reified influence of (global) market forces sometimes implied in the normative literature. The study reported, based on qualitative interviews, taps in to the nuances of decision taking in respect of boardroom reward management, including remuneration committee members’ reactions to corporate governance reforms. Such initiatives locate non-executive directors in the role of intermediaries in the principal-agent relationship, explicitly assigned to resolve the conflict of interest inherent in boardroom remuneration systems, while simultaneously they are expected to play a team role as board members responsible for the overall strategy and operation of the company. The study is indicative: an attempt to open up research questions around the context and process of boardroom reward management that earlier analyses may have ignored or overlooked. INTRODUCTION [1] ‘Alleged compensation excesses at leading UK companies’ (Conyon and Peck, 1998a, p. 146) in recent years have attracted extensive press criticism and ‘a legion of academic articles’ (Baden-Fuller, 2000, p. 475). The contribution of academic research to this debate for a long time was focused on searching for economic rela- Journal of Management Studies 42:7 November 2005 0022-2380 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Address for reprints: Chris Hendry, Sir John Cass Business School, City University, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ, UK (c.n.hendry@city.ac.uk).