Corporate governance in the wake of contemporary corporate collapses: Some agenda items for evaluators
| Author | Rick Sarre |
| DOI | 10.1177/1035719X0300300108 |
| Published date | 01 August 2003 |
| Date | 01 August 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Refereed Article |
48 Evaluation Journal of Australasia, Vol. 3 (new series), No. 1, August 2003
Evaluation Journal of Australasia, Vol. 3 (new series), No. 1, August 2003, pp. 48–55
Rick Sarre
Rick Sarre is Associate Professor of
Law, School of International
Business, University of South
Australia. He can be contacted at
<rick.sarre@unisa.edu.au>.1
REFEREED ARTICLE
The number and scope of corporate collapses in recent
times clearly illustrate that corporate accountability
practices are failing to match the rhetoric of managers
responsible for business probity. The malaise has
continued even though regulatory enforcement is
empowered by federal and state law and enforced by
criminal penalties and civil sanctions. Research is now
revealing that regulatory creativity may offer
considerable potential for bringing about good corporate
governance. New regulatory options are thus becoming
increasingly sought after, especially given the
inefficiencies of the current legal frameworks and the
inadequacies of the traditional official line which suggests
that the best response to malfeasance is (simply) more
law. This paper reviews some current research agendas
and evaluative findings. It sets out some evaluative
questions that now need to be explored.
Introduction
Many commentaries have emerged from the corporate collapses of the past three
years, both in the daily press and in the academic literature. Commentators have
drawn upon a number of popular causal theories, among them poor management
(Bosch 2002), inadequate training (Bergman 2000), greed and deliberate fraud
(Sykes 1996), conflicts of interest (Robinson 1996), inattentive auditing (Vinten
1992), poor ethical frameworks (UNDP 2000), inadequate legal and accounting
rules (Baxt 2002) and misguided regulatory oversight (Davis 2001). Policy-makers
are currently drawing upon these commentaries in an attempt to find the
appropriate environment in which companies are more likely to be ‘sustainable’
well into the future, that is, they are less likely to suffer financial catastrophes
along with the attendant financial and other social consequences (Sharma &
Starick 2002). Policy-makers are thus keen to find evidence of ‘what works’ in the
practice of encouraging ‘sustainability’. Corporations and other business entities,
too, have an interest in the evaluative work being commissioned and carried out,
given the literature that links internal evaluation to organisational performance on
Corporate governance in
the wake of contemporary
corporate collapses: some
agenda items for evaluators
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