Comparative Corporate Governance: An Interdisciplinary Agenda
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00033 |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | Simon Deakin,Alan Hughes |
THE DIMENSIONS OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
More than sixty years after Berle and Means published
The Modern Corpo-
ration and Private Property,1corporate governance is back on the policy
agenda. Now, as in the 1930s, public concern over the form and style of
management in large corporations has been prompted by a growing
inequality of pay and rewards, a number of spectacular financial scandals,
and the apparent impotence of shareholders in the face of entrenched
managerial interests. Longer-term forces are also at work. As a consequence
of nearly two decades of privatization and deregulation, the powers of
corporate management have been enormously enhanced, as ‘countervailing
power’ in the form of the state and organized labour has been weakened.
Companies are subject to intense and increasing competitive pressures in
final and intermediate product markets; however, the removal of regulatory
constraints, including controls over the transnational mobility of resources,
has left them free to pursue a wider range of strategic options as means of
achieving their economic goals. The impact of corporate decision making
on interests and communities outside the firm has always been considerable.
What has changed is that a large part of the political and institutional
structure through which corporate decisions were at one time mediated, has
been dismantled. As a result, attention has been focused back on to the
internal governance mechanisms of companies.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.
The work on which this paper is based formed part of the Corporate Governance Programme
of the ESRC Centre for Business Research. We thank Giles Slinger and Frank Wilkinson for
comments on an earlier draft. Thanks are due to Andy Cosh and John Roberts with whom
we collaborated, with others, in producing a briefing document for the joint Judge Institute
of Management Studies/ESRC Centre for Business Research Workshop on Corporate
Governance which took place in Cambridge on 11 July 1996, and upon which the present
paper draws in part.
1
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 24, NUMBER 1, MARCH 1997
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 1–9
Comparative Corporate Governance:
An Interdisciplinary Agenda
SIMON DEAKIN*AND ALAN HUGHES*
* ESRC Centre for Business Research, Department of Applied Economics,
University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DE, England
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