Robert C. Clark is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard Law School. His article, Harmony or Dissonance? The Good Governance Ideas of Academics and Worldly Players, was recently published in the Spring 2015 issue of The Business Lawyer and is available here.
There are numerous players who have ideas about what are good or best corporate governance practices, but different players have different themes. My article, Harmony or Dissonance? The Good Governance Ideas of Academics and Worldly Players, originally delivered as a special lecture and recently published in The Business Lawyer, asks questions concerning ideas about what constitutes good corporate governance that are espoused by different players.
The article dwells briefly on seven categories of players: (1) academics, such as financial economists and law professors who resort heavily to empirical studies; and more worldly players such as (2) legislators, (3) governance rating firms, (4) large institutional investors, (5) corporate directors, (6) law firms that represent corporate clients on the defensive, and (7) courts. Are there discernible trends and patterns in the views espoused by these different categories of actors, despite all the differences among individual actors within each category? I believe there are such patterns, and offer some initial thoughts about the characteristic themes and different patterns of ideas about good corporate governance that we observe among the different categories of players. I then hypothesize about the reasons for these differences. My approach focuses on the motives and incentives driving the different players and how they take shape in the occupational situations inhabited by the players.