Since the financial crisis of 2008, the influence of shareholders on companies has been severely criticized. Shareholders are accused of imposing a short-termist horizon on companies to serve their own stock market interests, but also of not participating sufficiently in the good governance of listed companies. On the one hand, shareholders intervene too much; on the other, not enough! To break this deadlock, policymakers and trade associations alike have come up with the same response: shareholder engagement. In its broadest sense, shareholder engagement refers to the way in which shareholders monitor the companies in which they invest, engage in dialogue with them on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, and vote at general meetings. In this chapter, we will analyze the new responsibilities allocated to shareholders in terms of engagement. We will contextualize shareholder-corporate relations with regard to the history of shareholding and theories of corporate governance, then discuss the new challenges posed by professional investors, and finally examine calls for investor empowerment through shareholder engagement and corresponding theoretical propositions.