Corporate governance and corporate accountability

Corporate governance is how a company's board, managers, shareholders, and stakeholders control and operate it, distribute power and responsibilities, make decisions, and monitor performance. What makes corporate power accountable, and how are responsibilities and interests balanced within a company? The lessons build an understanding of the structures, relationships, and safeguards that shape accountability.

2 articles, 1 video, 1 book · about 2 hr 17 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   corporate governance · Wikipedia · 50 min read

   Corporate governance in some continental European countries uses a two-tiered board system. Germany's co-determination, established under the German Codetermination Act of 1976, grants workers board seats as stakeholders, separate from those allocated to shareholder equity. The Netherlands adopted a Corporate Governance Code in 2016, updated twice since. In the latest version (2022), the Executive Board is responsible for the company's continuity and sustainable long-term value creation. The Sarbanes, Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), enacted after high-profile corporate scandals cost investors billions of dollars, established requirements affecting corporate governance in the US. It also influenced similar laws in many other countries.

2. Read
   

   "Corporate Governance: The Business Management Principles" · ionos.ca · 4 min read

   Corporate governance focuses on relationships, aiming to create transparency and trust between shareholders and business management, and for investors and the capital market. Compliance, from the company's perspective, focuses on measures required to comply with provisions for organized and successful business management.

3. Watch
   

   Session 3: Corporate Governance - Power abhors a vacuum! · YouTube · 1 hr 23 min watch

   The session examines where power lies in a company, including among shareholders, managers, governments, lenders and employees, and discusses bondholder protections, market inefficiencies and short termism. Assessing this power structure is central to corporate governance because it helps explain how companies make decisions.

4. Book
   

   The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power · Bookshop.org

   Through vignettes and interviews, The Corporation examines and criticizes corporate business practices. The film attempts to compare how corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy.

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