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This paper aims to investigate the intersection between corporate governance and management accounting information within the board meeting of an English further education college.

The empirical fieldwork uses an interventionist approach. Board members’ mental models of a management accounting boundary object are analysed.

The paper supports Parker (2007) and Cornforth and Edward’s (1999) observation that within a board meeting, collaborative “micro-management” type talk is considered to lie outside the acceptable remit of non-executive and executive board member interaction. Such an attitude can prevent an intertwining of management accounting information and other mental models of an organisation occurring. This can preclude management accounting information from rendering an organisation visible, in an expansive manner, within a boardroom.

Interventionist researchers working within the black box of the board are encouraged to design more radical and collaborative interventions than the interview/report format used here.

Non-executive directors might benefit from being offered the opportunity to interact with management accounting information outside the formal board meeting and committee structure.

A deeper understanding of how directors’ mental models, boardroom behaviours and attitudes influence their interaction with management accounting information is offered. Insight into the limitations of using management accounting information in the boardroom is developed.

This purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of board and audit committee meeting frequency.

The determinants studied are related to the ownership structure and to the board characteristics. The study is conducted in an agency setting featured by high ownership concentration and large insider shareholders. Hypotheses are developed based on agency theory. The empirical evidence is provided by a sample of Italian listed companies. Negative binomial regression is used in the multivariate analysis to test the relationships. Robustness checks provide further empirical support.

The paper finds that insider ownership negatively impacts – either on the board or on the audit committee meeting frequency – whilst the proportion of independent directors in the board has a positive impact. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that insider ownership and board independent monitoring are substitute control mechanisms. The findings also show that audit committees are more active in larger firms.

The paper provides an agency theory‐based explanation of the board and the audit committee meeting frequency, in a setting featured by large controlling shareholders.

This paper examines whether increased director workloads are benefiting firms or are causing directors to become too busy, resulting in lower director attendance and weaker firm performance.

This paper conducts empirical analysis of the relationships between meeting frequency, director attendance rates and firm performance using archival data from Australia.

Attendance rates for both outside and inside directors decrease as they are required to attend more meetings. The benefits firms obtain from holding additional meetings are significantly eroded by lower director attendance.

This study brings together the literatures on meeting frequency, director busyness and firm performance to show that increased director workloads are only beneficial to firms if directors do not become too busy to fulfill their obligations to shareholders.

This study aims to open up the black box of the boardroom by directly observing directors’ interactions during meetings to better understand board processes.

We analyze videotaped observations of board meetings at two Australian companies to develop insights into what directors do in meetings and how they participate in decision-making processes. The direct observations are triangulated with semi-structured interviews, mini-surveys and document reviews.

Our analyses lead to two key findings: while board meetings appear similar at a surface level, boardroom interactions vary significantly at a deeper level (i.e. board members participate differently during different stages of discussions), and factors at multiple levels of analysis explain differences in interaction patterns, revealing the complex and nested nature of boardroom discussions.

By documenting significant intra- and inter-board meeting differences, our study challenges the widespread notion of board meetings as rather homogeneous and monolithic, points towards agenda items as a new unit of analysis and highlights the need for more multi-level analyses in a board setting.

While policymakers have been largely occupied with the “right” board composition, our findings suggest that decision outcomes or roles’ execution could be potentially affected by interactions at a board level. Differences in board meeting styles might explain prior ambiguous board structure-performance results, enhancing the need for greater normative consideration of how boards do their work.

This study complements existing research on boardroom dynamics and provides a systematic account of director interactions during board meetings.

To demonstrate transparency and accountability, the three boards in this study are required to meet in public in front of an audience, although the boards reserve confidential issues for discussion in private sessions. This study examines boardroom public accountability, contrasting it with accountability in board meetings held in private. The study adopts Erving Goffman's impression management theory to interpret divergences between boardroom behaviour in public and private, or “frontstage” and “backstage” in Goffman's terminology.

The research observes and video-records three board meetings for each of the three boards (nine board meetings), in public and private. The research operationalises accountability in terms of director-manager question-and-answer interactions.

In the presence of an audience of local stakeholders, the boards employ impression management techniques to demonstrate accountability, by creating the impression that non-executive directors are performing challenge and managers are providing satisfactory answers. Thus, they “save the show” in Goffman terms. These techniques enable board members and managers to navigate the interface between demonstrating the required good governance and the competence of the organisations and their managers, while not revealing issues that could tarnish their image and concern the stakeholders. The boards need to demonstrate to the audience that “matters are what they appear to be”, even if they are not. The research identifies behaviour consistent with impression management to manage this complexity. The authors conclude that regulatory objectives have not met their transparency aspirations.

For the first time, the research studies the effect of transparency regulations (“sunshine” laws) on the behaviour of boards of directors meeting in public. The study contributes to the embryonic literature based on video-taped board meetings to access the “black box” of the boardroom, which permits a study of impression management at board meetings not previously possible. This study extends prior impression management theory by identifying eleven impression management techniques that non-executive directors and managers use and which are unique to a boardroom context.

Pressures from non-profit sport organizations’ (NPSOs) external environment influence governance structures and processes. Thus, this study explores the impact of external factors on NPSO board decision making.

Using a sample of six NPSO boards (two national, four provincial/territorial), data were collected via 36 observations, 18 interviews, and over 900 documents. A thematic analysis was conducted via NVivo 12.

Results identified two external factors impacting NPSO board decision making: the sport system structure and general environment conditions. External factors impacted NPSO board decision making in terms of duration, flow, interaction, and scrutiny.

Results demonstrate the need for NPSO boards to engage in boundary-spanning activities whereby external information sources from stakeholders are incorporated to make informed decisions. Practically, NPSO boards should harness virtual meetings to continue their operations while incorporating risk management analyses to assess threats and opportunities.

This study aims to examine the influence of corporate governance (CG) mechanisms and ownership structures on corporate governance disclosure (CGD) in listed Mauritian companies.

Multivariate regression techniques, both static and dynamic panel data models, were employed to analyse the effect of the determinants on the CGD level of 42 Mauritian listed companies (38 non-financial and four financial firms) from 2009 to 2019.

In the static model comprising 42 firms, CG attributes such as board size, board meeting frequency, CG committee meeting frequency and audit committee meeting frequency are major determinants of CGD, whereas ownership structure variables such as managerial ownership and institutional ownership do not influence CGD. In the dynamic model, only the CG meeting frequency is a major determinant. The determinants of CGD vary between non-financial and financial firms.

This study is limited to CGD in listed firms, excluding mandatory disclosures and unlisted firms. Future research can use qualitative approaches to better understand CGD behaviour with an extension to mandatory disclosures and non-listed firms.

Policymakers can rely on determinants to draw policy measures to raise CG standards further. Domestic and foreign investors may also depend on the determinants of their expectations of CGD while making investment and credit decisions.

This study contributes to the extant literature by examining a new determinant of CGD: CG committee meeting frequency. It also investigates any differences in the determinants between financial and non-financial firms with different listing status.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the frequency of board meetings as an index for board activity including their monitoring role.

The research sample is composed of 120 UK firms based on their market capitalization for the period from 2003 to 2008. The study applies multinomial logistic modelling and conditional logistic modelling to investigate the frequency of board meetings.

The study finds that board size and structure are positively related to the frequency of board meetings. In addition, a negative impact of audit committee diligence on the frequency board meetings is reported. The study finds no evidence that the frequency of board meetings are reduced when there is a CEO duality. Finally, the results show that firm size, leverage, free cash flows, and Tobin's Q have an impact on the frequency of board meetings.

This study shows the factors that affect the board effectiveness in the UK, namely that board meetings, board composition, and board size, are key indicators for good internal governance practices and, in turn, enhance board monitoring activities.

The research offers the first major study to examine the determinants of the frequency of board meetings in UK non‐financial firms. The paucity of the UK literature regarding board effectiveness in the UK reinforces the empirical importance of the results for researchers, managers, and UK policy makers.

This paper aims to examine the effects of corporate governance mechanisms (board chairman independence, board independent director meeting attendance, audit committee size and audit committee meetings) on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) and its individual component disclosures of listed firms in Saudi Arabia.

The study used unbalanced panel data obtained from the Bloomberg data set over 11 years, from 2010 to 2020.

The findings indicate that board chairman independence (BCI) and audit committee size (AC size) have a significant negative and positive association with ESG disclosure, respectively. However, the results show that board independent director meeting attendance (BIMA) and audit committee meetings (AC meetings) do not significantly influence ESG disclosure. Regarding the individual dimensions (components), the results show that only BIMA has a significant negative association with environmental disclosure. Besides, only BCI and AC meetings have a significant positive association with social disclosure. Also, only BIMA and AC size have a significant positive and negative relationship with governance disclosure, respectively.

The study used a sample of 29 listed companies in Saudi Arabia. Each firm has at least four years of ESG disclosures. Besides, the paper considered only four corporate governance attributes, comprising two each for the board and audit committee.

The results provide insights to regulators, boards of directors, managers and investors to enhance ESG and its components’ reporting toward the sustainable operations and better performance of Saudi firms.

This study is among the few that provide empirical evidence on how some essential corporate governance attributes that have not been given adequate attention by prior studies (board chairman independence, board independent directors’ meeting attendance, audit committee size and audit committee meetings) influence not only ESG reporting as a whole but also its individual dimensions (components).

This paper aims to furnish incremental insights on dividends and corporate governance (CG) by addressing the relationship between board meeting frequency and board independence with dividend payout. In particular, this study aims to investigate whether CG attributes are substitutes to control agency problem within the Malaysian context.

This paper examines panel data on a sample of 114 Malaysian firms (798 observations) for seven years from 2002 to 2008.

Based on 798 firm-year observations for the period from 2002 to 2008, the results show significant negative relationship between CG (board independence, board meeting frequency) and dividend payout. This suggests that CG and dividend payout are substitutes in reducing agency costs. Our study provides empirical evidence consistent with the “substitution argument”, indicating that firms with weak CG need to establish reputation by paying more dividends. Specifically, the findings indicate that firms with a higher proportion of independent directors and boards of director that meet more frequent pay lower dividends.

This paper provides evidence on previously untested governance characteristics in relation to how they act as substitute mechanisms with dividends for reducing agency costs. The results builds a strong case for the fresh strand of knowledge on dividends and CG which tests each CG variables to understand each of its unique relationship with dividends in line with the dividends outcome or substitute theory.