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: Governmentality, Corporate Governance and EthicsSed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Corporate Governance: Does Any Size Fit?

ISBN: 978-0-76231-205-4, eISBN: 978-1-84950-342-6

Publication date: 23 June 2005

Abstract

This paper seeks to challenge a tacit, but nevertheless prevalent, notion that a robust corporate governance framework will, as a matter of course, engender good corporate social responsibility and, thereby, ‘ethical’ decision-making. It does so by drawing, in the first instance, on an example of apparent good corporate social responsibility and exposing the possibly unethical dimensions of the incident. The paper suggests that corporate governance always has a subjective ethical dimension and that such regimes are best understood as ‘regimes of practice’ – actions, actors and discourses – that shape and mould both thinking and action. Such regimes, it is posited, can best be explored by looking at actual instances or events of significance and analysing these. The paper then offers the example of international pharmaceutical companies’ HIV/AIDS drugs pricing policies, especially in South Africa, as such a critical incident and interrogates it using the ‘analytics’ approach outlined by Dean (1999). The principal aims of the paper are to demonstrate that corporate social responsibility and corporate governance regimes are not neutral processes but aspects of ‘governmentality’ and to offer a technique, analytics, by which such processes can be explicated.

Citation

Boden, R. (2005), ": Governmentality, Corporate Governance and EthicsSed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?", Lehman, C.R., Tinker, T., Merino, B. and Neimark, M. (Ed.) Corporate Governance: Does Any Size Fit? (Advances in Public Interest Accounting, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 71-94. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1041-7060(05)11004-9

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited