Whose funds?

I threatened that I might get academic, so here goes (not that this is directly related to my course)!

As resident "bife" and financial boffin, I am frequently called upon to translate business documents, including financial statements. Knowing the technical equivalents in English and Portuguese, I had never really worried about the literal meaning of the phrases I translate - literal translation very rarely works.

So it came as some surprise when I realised that "Capitais Próprios" (own funds) is not a literal translation of "Shareholders' funds". In fact, it appears to reveal an underlying difference in attitudes: is a company an autonomous entity or does it belong to the shareholders?

In UK accounting, we are taught that the difference (hopefully a surplus) between assets and liabilities is arithmetically equal to the cash contributed by the shareholders plus their undistributed return on that investment, or accumulated net profits. The Portuguese version implies that the undistributed profits belong to the company itself, until the management decide to distribute those profits. This, in my view, is a fundamentally different attitude and may explain (chicken and egg problem here) the frequent lack of correlation that I have noted, over the years, between management actions and shareholder wishes in Portuguese companies. My sample is small and necessarily unrepresentative, but it's food for thought.

In fact, the "own funds" concept may be better suited to the wider definition of "stakeholders" that prevails today, including shareholders, staff and suppliers. Could I have found subject matter for a bit of research here, or has someone already done it?