Corporate Governance and Firm Organization: Microfoundations and Structural Forms

Citation

Mesure, H. (2009), "Corporate Governance and Firm Organization: Microfoundations and Structural Forms", Society and Business Review, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 81-82. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680910932496

Anna Grandori is a Professor of Organizational Theory at the Bocconi University (Italy). She has been the Co‐editor of Organization Studies. She is currently Editor‐in‐Chief of the Journal of Management and Governance. She has been a co‐ordinator in international academic associations (EGOS in particular). Her research areas are: organization and governance theory; corporate networks and decisional and negotiation processes and rationality theories.

This collective book contains chapters from leading international management scholars, including: Masahiko Aoki, Margaret Blair, John Child, Alvaro Cuervo‐Cazurra, Bruno Frey, Anna Grandori, Joseph Lampel, Ryon Lancaster, William Lazonick, Siegwart Lindenberg, Patrick Moreton, Margit Osterloh, Michael Piore, Andrea Prencipe, Suzana Rodrigues, Mark Roe, Giuseppe Soda, Steen Thomsen, Brian Uzzi, Paul Windolf, and Todd Zenger. Some of the contributions are very conceptual (such as Grandori's introduction or Piore's chapter), some support or illustrate their analysis by empirical or statistical data or cases. This book seems to have been edited for a scholars PhD student since the reading needs to be familiar with the theories about corporate governance especially with agency and property rights.

The main objective of the book is to challenge the dominant “agency theory”. The authors contests the usual approaches of corporate governance – such as legal studies, organization studies, economics and finance, sociology, psychology – that fails to take account of the varied and complex behaviour actors within the corporation. Instead, the cognitive and motivational foundations of governance problems are re‐worked to produce a new conception of corporate governance and the structural forms it can take. The central idea of the book, that gives its cohesion to the contributions, is that there is no one best way in governance as in organization. Therefore, the form and the effectiveness of corporate governance are more matter of contingency than dogma. The book contains 16 chapters that are distributed in three parts.

The first part “Contingent Structure and Multiple Rightholders” is made of five chapters that are dedicated to the exploration of some possible factors that influence corporate governance such as: complementary institutions for Masahiko Aoki or separation between owners and managers for Margaret Blair. The second part “Beyond Control and Alignment: Non‐economic Objectives and Relational Governance” counts six chapters that run around the critic of the classic incentive‐alignment approach and try to provide alternative analysis especially relational approaches to market exchange. The Part 3 “Explaining the Difference and Change in Corporate Governance Systems” focuses on factors that can explain the difference between corporate governance systems throughout the world, industries and even in a same country. “Corporate Governance and Firm Organization” provides an alternative approach about corporate governance issues.

This book can be partly associated to the Egos school that tries to contest the dominant approach of business. Finally, this book brings a strong support to the thesis according to witch there is no unique and optimal choice in corporate governance since there are a lot of (endogenous and exogenous) factors that shape corporate governance and its efficiency. It comforts those who think that the diversity of business and firms is a condition for prosperity and democracy.