Corporate Governance / حوكمة الشركات

Corporate governance, a term that scarcely existed before the 1990s, is now universally invoked wherever business and finance are discussed.

The subject has spawned consultancies, academic degrees, encyclopedias, innumerable articles, conferences, and speeches. 

Almost all the OECD nations are currently revising their corporate governance practices or have recently done so (OECD, 2003), while the establishment of a viable corporate governance system has

become a priority objective for emergent economies from Latin America to China.

In the midst of so much interest, the underlying issues of the subject are always in danger of being swamped.

Moreover, since ‘good governance’, like ‘fair trade’ and ‘free competition’, is an abstraction that commands near-universal respect but diverse interpretation, it has also become the destination board for a bandwagon carrying those who would, in fact, take the corporation in myriad directions.

Not merely does the term corporate governance carry different interpretations, but its analysis also involves diverse disciplines and approaches.

For example, the behavior of senior managers is variously constrained by legal, regulatory, financial, economic, social, psychological, and political mechanisms which are themselves sometimes substitutes and sometimes complements. Academic researchers, predominantly coming from a single subject background, will typically explore the operation of merely a subset of these and then in the context of the priorities of their own discipline.

This inevitably means that research on the subject becomes Balkanised and less accessible.

The quantity and variety of material being produced on corporate governance has forced us to be selective in compiling this volume. The book aims to bring together scholars from a variety of backgrounds, particularly accounting and finance, economics, and management, to present a series of overviews of recent research on issues within corporate governance and on governance developments within particular countries and institutional regimes.

Coverage of the subject has inevitably involved a trade-off between breadth and depth, and in largely restricting ourselves to these business disciplines we have been mindful of the need for coherence. This is not to say that other perspectives, perhaps drawing upon social sciences including politics and sociology, would not have a valid contribution.