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English chartered companies began to trade with both the Ottoman and the Mughal states in the last decade of the sixteenth century. In India, as recent work has shown, the rudiments of an English polity were established very early and eventually metastasized into a sizeable colonial empire. In Turkey, on the other hand, no “company-state” ever took root. This paper endeavors to explain this divergence from the perspective, not of the highly “successful” East India Company, but of the “failed” (and much less well-studied) Levant Company, which, with short interruptions, maintained a monopoly English trade with the Ottoman Empire from 1592 until 1803. The paper offers an account of this divergence that emphasizes the importance of an independent overseas administrative apparatus, something that the EIC had but that the Levant Company lacked. The Levant Company lost control of its overseas administration in the 1630s, when the Crown began to regard the Ottoman Empire as too diplomatically important to leave England’s representation there to “mere merchants.” Thereafter, the company was at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis rival commercial organizations that, because they had established a territorial base, could control and cheapen production in the colonial sites with which they traded.

This paper aims to present the outcomes from 40 one-to-one semi-structured interviews and 12 focus group sessions with company secretaries, chairmen, CEOs, chief financial officer (CFOs), senior independent director (SIDs) and NEDs, about the role of the company secretary.

Lukes’ (1974, 2005) third dimension of power is engaged in thematic analysis of this strategic leadership role and its contribution to Board effectiveness.

The findings identify “discretionary capacity” as being critical to effective role contribution.

Whilst the inquiry included international participants, e.g. multi-national Board members and company secretaries, it was conducted within the UK.

Having a range of discretion is particularly necessary at this time, when the new governance regime is broadening its demands on the role of the company secretary to interact with wider stakeholders.

Better Board effectiveness is critical to broader sustainability of business in society.

An emergent model of the company secretary role is offered as a tool for building discretionary capacity, based on key technical, commercial and social characteristics, in their contexts – understood together as “Breadth” and “Majesty”. Breadth establishes a competency, whereas majesty, the refined high-level social qualities. This study concludes that the company secretary role is highly dependent on the preferences of the chairman, in enabling them to make an effective contribution to the Board.

In view of organizational inertia, with the occurrence of a major event, though resource rigidity minimizes, however simultaneously, it increases process rigidity, which creates difficulties in motivating managers and dealing with the agency problem. Therefore, keeping in mind the high demand created by the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and Naya Pakistan Housing Scheme in the cement sector of Pakistan, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate governance (CG) on the cost of equity (COE) in the cement sector, to deal with the problems surging during and after the completion of these projects and highlight further opportunities for the cement sector of Pakistan.

CG is a qualitative concept therefore, eight proxies have been used to measure it along with the two control variables. This study uses balance panel data of six years from 2012 to 2017, collected from 18 companies of the cement sector of Pakistan. Descriptive statistics have been used to describe the data, correlation matrix to see the nature of the relationship, and Pooled OLS as the estimation technique, while to analyze the data a statistical package 13 has been used. To measure the COE, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has been used.

Regression results suggest that block ownership, insider ownership and the board size are insignificant, while CEO tenure is negatively and significantly associated with the COE. Non-executive directors, independence and CEO duality are insignificant; however, diversity is positively and significantly associated with the COE. Moreover, the mean value of the COE is 8.22 percent for the cement sector, while the coefficient of determination of the model under study is 74 percent.

This paper is based on the data from the cement sector of Pakistan only. Therefore, this is the reason that these results cannot be generalized on the whole economy of Pakistan.

This study helps in finding out the COE value specific to the cement sector, which will help this sector to evaluate the capital budgeting decision more precisely and accurately than before. Moreover, the association of diversity as positive, while independence as negative with the COE highlights a room for improvement in the implementation of CG codes by SECP. This study also helps to mitigate the impact of inertia, the after-effects of high demand, and managing the agency problem in the cement sector.

This is the first study using CG data collected just after the revised promulgation of CG codes in 2012, along with a wide range of eight proxies measuring CG and its impact on the COE in the cement sector.

Traces the evolution of the corporation in England, from Greco‐Roman times to the Joint Companies Act of 1862. The evolution suggests a supply of the corporate form that responded to the demands of the marketplace. With the growing specialization of labour in the markets, the corporate form came to be more specialized itself, ending with the enactment of universally available limited liability incorporation.

Corporate governance has experienced numerous changes in chime with the exigencies of the time during which it has been introduced or the context in which it has been practiced. Its gestation can be divided into three stages of development namely the traditional governance, the current transitional governance, and the upcoming sustainable governance. Traditional governance refers to the period hitherto the industrial revolution when corporations have not yet been formed, in today’s sense, but the governance structures were already in place in the existing entities at the time. Transitional governance refers to a period between the industrial revolution and the information age when corporations started to rise as a new economic entity. Reviewing the dominant corporate governance models are integral to understanding the transitional era. At the end of the transitional governance era, a transmogrification in corporate governance is underway to prepare itself for the coming age of sustainability. Sustainable governance integrates the principles of systems thinking and appreciates the complexity of decision-making environment, contrary to its former iterations that welcomed oversimplification of interactive messes (systems of problems). The objective of this chapter is to review corporate governance developmental transition toward sustainable governance and its role in the age of sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the origins and evolution of auditing and control by linking the changes in the manner in which the audits were conducted with the changes in the institutional function and development of the English East India Company (EIC).

Using Sunder’s contract theory of a firm as an interpretive framework, this paper introduces to the debate material documenting the evolution of the auditing practice during a period of 40 years using the single case of the EIC.

Auditing in the EIC evolved from a simple adjudication on allowable expenditures to ex post verification of transactions, and from using volunteers to paid auditors. Initially, the company was organized into a series of separate, terminable stocks, and simple verification by volunteer auditors chosen from among the shareholders was sufficient to secure the latter’s interests. When the increasing number, size, and complexity of transactions by the EIC rendered the adjudication approach insufficient, ex post verification of financial transactions was added. With a clearer separation between ownership and control at the time of the introduction of permanent joint stock, the audit function assumed a more professional form.

This paper contributes to the research on the early modern period at a time of the formation and rapid development of the first joint-stock organization. It offers a dynamic picture of the evolution of control and auditing as a response to the growth of business, organizations, and the attendant challenges of governance.