Entrepreneurs and Democracy: A Political Theory of Corporate Governance

Description

What legitimizes power within a corporation? This question is of concern to the millions of citizens whose lives depend upon the fate of business corporations. The rules, institutions and practices of corporate governance define the limits of the power to direct, and determine under what conditions this power is acceptable. Effective corporate governance has long been defined in terms of economic performance. More recent studies have focused on philosophical, political and historical analyses. Entrepreneurs and Democracy unites these strands of inquiry - the legitimacy of power, the evolution of multiple forms of governance and the economics of performance - and proposes a framework for future study. It explores the opposing tensions of entrepreneurial force and social fragmentation that form the basis of legitimate corporate governance in modern societies. In doing so, it identifies a common logic that links both the democratization of corporate governance and the growth of economic performance.

Harry Korine is Teaching Fellow in Strategic and International Management at the London Business School and Senior Research Fellow at the French Corporate Governance Institute (IFGE, Lyon). In addition to his academic and consulting activities, he is the Chairman of the Board of Forma Futura Invest AG, an independent asset management firm based in Zurich. Pierre-Yves Gomez is Full Professor of Strategic Management at EM Lyon and Director of the French Corporate Governance Institute (IFGE, Lyon). He has published several award-winning books in French and English including Trust, Firm and Society (1997) and, with Harry Korine, The Leap to Globalization (2002).

Advance praise 'This is a most timely analysis of the conceptual basis for corporate governance. Focusing on the historical development of shareholder primacy, the book provides a superb platform for understanding the coming era of Sovereign Wealth and it is just in time. Informed citizens will need the learning in this book in order to understand how political states will fit into the economic world on a base beneficial to both. The ideal of democratization of economic values, following de Tocqueville, is a perilous voyage for which this book is a fine route map. Everyone can benefit from understanding the underlying precepts of tomorrow's dialogue.' Robert A.G. Monks, Founder of ISS, the Corporate Library, the LENS Fund and Governance for Owners; author of Corporate Governance (with Nell Minow) 'Thanks to financial globalization, corporate governance has become a central topic on the minds of scholars in a variety of academic disciplines. Historians and legal scholars focus on the evolution of corporate governance institutions across diverse national contexts; political philosophers are oriented to questions of the legitimacy of corporate power; and economists analyse the economic performance consequences of different forms of corporate governance. Yet cross-disciplinary discussion is lamentably rare. In Entrepreneurs and Democracy, Gomez and Korine provide a unifying framework to enable interdisciplinary discussion rooted in a classic liberal model of political governance.' Jerry Davis, Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan 'If one benchmark for management and organization theory should be that it is relevant to practice and realistic in its assessment of it, then corporate governance must be judged a failure. On its watch the inability to pick empirical trends were legion, with Enron only being the most notable. Restricted theories, such as principal-agency theory, together with an excessive focus on performance and a merely ceremonial attention to legitimacy, together with the institutional specificities of comparative cases, entailed that economistic theory prevailed and the essential politics of governance and the processes of governmentality were under-specified. No more! Gomez and Korine have written a book that should rescue corporate governance from its ideologies and failures, restoring concern with governance where it belongs - as centrally located in classical political questions, by reconnecting issues of the political legitimacy of power in the corporation, the historical evolution of corporate governance forms, with questions of economic performance.' Stewart Clegg, Research Professor and Director of the Centre of Management and Organization Studies, University of Technology, Sydney