Issue Editors: Ulf Larsson Olaison, Andreas Jansson, Jeroen Veldman and Armin Beverungen
Corporate governance as an academic field was hardly present before the 1970s, but has since risen to prominence (Ireland, 2009) and has arguably become dominated by agency theory (Daily et al., 2003). In agency theory, ‘shareholder value’ is typically identified as the legitimate goal of the corporation, and the purpose of corporate governance here becomes to rectify deviations from this ideal (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). The definition of problems and the practical corporate governance solutions prescribed by agency theory have proven to be very effective for law and economics scholars to ‘converge’ upon (Hansmann and Kraakman, 2001) as a normative blueprint of what constitutes ‘good governance’ (Fligstein, 1993; Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000). They have also come to dominate adjacent disciplines such as accounting, strategic management and law (Whittington, 2008; Power, 2010). This ‘optimal’ view of the corporation and... more
