Corporate Governance in Contention

Corporate governance is a complex idea that is often inappropriately simplified as a cookbook of recommended measures to improve financial performance. Meta studies of published research show that the supposed benign effects of these measures - independent directors or highly incentivised executives - are at best context-specific. There is thus a challenge to explain the meaning, purpose, and importance of corporate governance. This volume addresses these issues. The issues discussed centre on relationships within the firm e.g. between labour, managers, and investors, and relationships outside the firm that affect consumers or the environment.

The essays in this collection are the considered selection by the editors and the contributors themselves of what are seen as some of the most weighty and urgent issues that connect the corporation and society at large in developed economies with established property rights. The essays are to be read in dialogue with each other, giving a richer understanding than could be obtained by shepherding all contributions into a single mould. Nevertheless taken together they demonstrate a shared sense of deep concern that the corporate governance agenda has been and still is on the wrong track. The contributors, individually and collectively, identify in this compendium both a research programme and a platform for change.

Ciaran Driver is Professor of Economics in the School of Finance and Management at SOAS, University of London. His main research interests are capital investment, innovation, and corporate governance. He has been attached to several global business schools; advised several government and inter-governmental organizations; and held visiting posts in the US, South Africa, and the Australian National University. Recent publications include a chapter in the Sage Handbook of Corporate Governance (2012); work on R&D (Research Policy 2012); economics of advertising (Journal of Economic Surveys 2015); and executive pay (Industrial and Corporate Change 2017). He co-authored with Paul Temple The Unbalanced Economy, Palgrave Macmillan (2014) and was also a co-author of Beyond Shareholder Value, a compendium published by the TUC, SOAS and NPI (2014). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Trustee of the New Economics Foundation.


Grahame Thompson is Emeritus Professor at The Open University, UK. Between 2008 and 2016 he was Visiting Professor first at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School and then Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at Copenhagen University, Denmark. His latest books are The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere? (OUP, 2012) and Globalization Revisited (Routledge, 2015).