It’s shareholder meeting season again, corporate America’s version of Groundhog Day.

This is the time of year when company directors venture out of the boardroom to encounter the investors they have a duty to serve. After the meetings are over, like so many Punxsutawney Phils, these directors scurry back to their sheltered confines for another year.

This is a bit hyperbolic, of course. But institutional investors argue that there’s a troubling lack of interaction these days between many corporate boards in the United States and their most important investors. They point to contrasting practices in Europe as evidence that it’s time for this to change.

“It’s a very different culture in the U.S.,” said Deborah Gilshan, corporate governance counsel at RPMI Railpen Investments, the sixth-largest pension fund in Britain, which has 20 billion pounds, or about $30 billion, in assets. “In the U.K., we get lots of access to the companies we invest in. In fact, I’ve often wondered why a director wouldn’t want to know directly what a thoughtful shareholder thinks.”

As Ms. Gilshan indicated, directors at European companies routinely make themselves available for investor discussions; in some countries, such meetings are required. Many directors of foreign companies even — gasp — give shareholders their private email addresses and phone numbers.