Comparative Corporate Governance: Beyond ‘Shareholder Value’

Soo Hee Lee, Jonathan Michie and Christine Oughton
Additional contact information
Soo Hee Lee: School of Management and Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK. Tel: 44-20-7631 6771 Fax: 44-20-7631 6769 Email: s.lee@bbk.ac.uk
Jonathan Michie: School of Management and Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK. Tel: 44-20-7631 6761 Fax: 44-20-7631 6769 Email: j.michie@bbk.ac.uk
Christine Oughton: School of Management and Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK. Tel: 44-20-7631 6768 Fax: 44-20-7631 6769 Email: c.oughton@bbk.ac.uk

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 2003, vol. 14, issue 2, 81-111

Abstract: This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue on comparative corporate governance as well as providing a critical review of the literature on globalisation, comparative economic organisation and corporate governance systems. Despite the widespread rhetoric of global convergence and market-led institutional reform, we argue that national specificity and societal variance of institutional arrangements are still conspicuously resilient in reality and pertinent to issues of regulation, policy and business strategy. Our discussion focuses on the limitations of agency theory and its primary objective, shareholder value maximisation, on the one hand, and the determinants and consequences of institutional diversity across societies on the other. In particular, we suggest that the integration of the literature on employee participation and innovation systems into comparative institutional analysis will serve as a promising alternative to shareholder-centred theories and policy prescriptions while complementing the arguments based on legal and political origins of national systems. While the contributions to the special issue broadly share the basic tenets of our argument, they also address, in commendable rigour and depth, other issues, such as: trust and social relationships; societal and moral foundations of economic behaviour; institutional transferablity; and corporate control and power relations in society.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jie.sagepub.com/content/14/2/81.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jinter:v:14:y:2003:i:2:p:81-111

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().