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Board diversity has been an important topic in corporate governance. Extant literature examines the overall diversity in the boardroom and its impact. However, since important decisions are usually taken by the committees, it is important to also examine diversity in committees. We use the Coca-Cola Company as the case study and examine its diversity in both audit and finance committees. Our goal is to raise the awareness of researchers, board nominating committees, and diverse directors themselves, as to whether diverse directors are placed in the right positions to allow them to contribute their diverse views and experiences.

We conducted a case study of the Coca-Cola Company using its proxy statement in both 2016 and 2018.

While Coca-Cola’s self-reported board diversity stood at 27% in 2016, and increased to 31% by 2018, the critical audit and finance committees showed a distinct lack of diversity. Focusing on gender diversity for the purposes of this chapter, we investigated two possibilities: (1) that the lack of committee diversity is due to the lack of finance and leadership skills of those board members who were from underrepresented groups, but this possibility does not seem likely, (2) that the presence of a female CFO removed the urgency to place board members from underrepresented groups on the audit and finance committees.

We provide a cautionary perspective on the implementation of diversity policies at the highest levels of an organization. The pursuit of diversity, like other admirable corporate goals, can degenerate into a check-the-box mentality. When this happens, diversity can become viewed as a substitute for real competency rather than a complement to existing competencies.

It is suggested that boards revise the recruiting and selecting process to include more female candidates, and be sensitive how and where those diverse directors can best contribute their perspectives and experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to study and assess the content, functioning and impact of institutional reforms aiming to enhance collective and holistic political leadership at the level of local government.

The authors conduct a comparative case study of two Danish frontrunner municipalities drawing on relevant documents and qualitative interviews with both elected politicians and public administrators.

The authors found that institutional design is effective in promoting collective and holistic political leadership at the local level, even if no formal design options are available and the municipalities have to invent their own designs. Support both from both councilors and administrators is paramount for successful implementation of local political leadership reforms.

Due to the purposive selection of a limited number of cases, the findings cannot be generalized to the population from which the cases are drawn. However, other municipalities may learn from and become inspired by the positive impact of the new institutional designs on collective and holistic political leadership.

Whereas some institutional political leadership reforms aim to enhance the power of the mayor and other reforms aim to create a cabinet or a committee system, the reforms the authors are studying aim to create a space for local councilors to work together across party and sector lines in creating collective and holistic policy solutions. The study shows that it is crucial that local councilors are involved in cross-boundary agenda setting before developing policies in standing committees and endorsing them in the council assembly.

There is a large amount of more or less wicked problems that require the formulation and implementation of innovative policy solutions, which, in turn, call for a clear and determined political leadership. However, local politicians typically suffer from decoupling and tunnel vision. The results show that these problems can be solved through new institutional designs that promote a more collective and holistic political leadership that can take the local community forward.

Few studies have hitherto addressed the need for institutional reforms enabling collective and holistic political leadership through both theoretical and empirical analyses, but that is exactly what the authors try to accomplish.

We investigate whether council audit committees relate to municipal fiscal policies. We find that municipalities with audit committees are associated with greater levels of own-source revenue, in that they finance municipal operations with locally raised revenues driven by charges and fees compared to municipalities without audit committees. Furthermore, municipalities with audit committees are associated with less new debt than those without audit committees, indicating more conservative use of external financing. Overall, our results are consistent with municipal audit committees, in addition to monitoring the financial reporting function, playing an advisory role in fiscal decisions, especially when the cost of local government to citizens is high.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a study carried out to determine the effect of governing boards on the performance of Ugandan secondary schools. Specifically, the study investigated whether governing boards (board role performance, finance committee role performance, board size, frequency of board meetings and board finance expertise) have an effect on the perceived performance of the schools.

This study is cross-sectional and correlational. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey of 271 schools out of which 200 responded. The data were analysed through ordinary least squares regression using Statistical Package for Social Scientists.

The results suggest that board role performance, finance committee role performance, frequency of meetings and finance expertise of governing boards have a significant effect on the schools’ performance.

The authors measure some of the variables qualitatively and perceptively contrary to, for instance, the commonly used quantitative measures of performance, but process factors which are inherently qualitative in nature can better explain variances in secondary schools’ performance. Thus, in this study, the authors do not claim highly refined measurement concepts. More research is therefore needed to better refine qualitative concepts used in this study. The results too suggest that board and finance committee role performance and finance expertise of the board are more important for performance of a school than board size, and frequency of meetings which academics have been focusing on. These findings call for more research to validate the posited relationships.

The results are important for governing board policy development; for example, in terms of prescribing the qualifications for schools’ governing board members and also finance committee board members.

This study shows that one way to capture the influence of all governing boards’ roles including service role is to adopt a perception-based approach which asks respondents to what extent they think governing boards fulfil all their roles. Unlike previous studies which used proxies for board role performance such as proportion of non-executive directors and board size for monitoring and control and resource provision, the study incorporates proxies as well as perception-based measures of board role performance to determine if governing boards have a significant influence on the performance of Uganda secondary schools.

Audit committees have a relatively long history dating back to the nineteenth century. It is only in recent years that their use has been popularized again in the private sector. Fundamentally, it is often argued that audit committees exist to mediate between executive directors and auditors while providing an overall enhancement of corporate accountability. One of the recent effects of the drive to incorporate business methods into other sectors has been the establishment of audit committees. It does, however, pose the question of the role of these committees which are operating in a different context from their origins. Looks at the operation of audit committees in a defined sector, namely universities. Using a postal questionnaire, all directors of finance (or equivalent) in UK universities were surveyed to establish whether or not audit committees existed in their institutions, the purpose being to determine the extent of audit committees, the reasons why they have or have not been established, and the advantages and problems encountered with them. One interesting result that arose with implications for accountability and governance was that in universities the stewardship and strategic policy‐making functions are generally separate and that audit committees report only on the former. This is in contrast to the situation in the private sector where both functions are generally combined in the activities of the board of directors. Because there is considerable overlap between the membership of audit committees and the boards of directors, it could be argued that this provides the potential for a greater degree of accountability and governance than currently exists in universities.

This paper aims to report the findings of semi‐structured interviews with management, external auditors and audit committee members in Malaysia concerning the role of the audit committee in resolving auditor‐client disagreements.

An exploratory case study method was applied in seven publicly listed companies in Malaysia. In each company interviews were conducted with an audit committee chair/member, the finance manager/CFO and the external auditor.

The study finds that, when the issue is very material, the audit committee plays a mediating role as a third‐party intermediary who provides assistance to resolve the dispute. The authority of the committee to act as a mediator comes from its oversight responsibilities, its understanding and awareness of possible issues and the members' accounting and business expertise. Mediation techniques used include controlling the agenda, gathering information, advising and solving problems. With two exceptions, the interviews indicate that the audit committee does not take sides when helping to resolve a dispute. The outcome from the mediation process is generally a compromise solution.

The study is based on 21 interviews undertaken in Malaysia. Hence, the findings may not be generalizable to other cultures and jurisdictions. Further, while a number of mediation techniques used by audit committees are identified, the paper does not examine in‐depth the mediation processes used in resolving disagreements.

The study extends the auditor‐client negotiation literature by examining whether the audit committee plays a mediating role to help resolve disagreements. The findings demonstrate that audit committee effectiveness can extend beyond a pure oversight role to more active involvement in resolving contentious accounting issues.

This paper examines the determinants of success in seeking local government earmarked funding. We compile data of the aggregate amounts of the New York City Council discretionary expense grants received or requested by each council district every year during 2011-2013. The statistical results show that the allocation of the expense grants are politically motivated with more earmark funds flowing to the districts council leaders and key committee chairpersons represent. Furthermore, constituents of key committee chairpersons are more successful in the earmarking process. Districts with larger African American population have lower success ratios possibly because they request significantly more earmarks. These empirical findings are consistent with anecdotal perceptions that earmarking is not substantially effective in meeting community need.

Recent financial scandals in the private sector have led to widespread speculation that public organizations may be susceptible to similar events of financial misconduct and should, therefore, be required to adopt similar strategies to those that are mandated of private-sector corporations under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This paper looks at one of those strategies by examining the use of audit committees in U.S. local governments. Specifically, this paper explores (1) why local governments have heretofore voluntarily created audit committees, (2) the perceived benefits and problems of audit committees, and (3) whether the use of audit committees is compatible with the principal-agent logic that underlies their promotion.