Renewing Management and Governance: New Paradigms of Governance?

摘要

Leading scholars have in this roundtable presented statements about renewing management and governance thinking. They have all made reflections and statements based on the crisis in confidence in corporation after the Enron scandal. The article advocates that the corporate scandals have roots in present corporate governance thinking and systems, and that these need to be changed. A general conclusion is that the time is now right to rethink existing paradigms of governance. This article and the statements in the roundtable give input to redirecting practice, teaching and research about governance and ethics. Practice should emphasize the understanding of boards and actual board behavior inside and outside the boardroom, research should move beyond the input-output studies of Fortune 500 firms, and management professors should have a particular task and challenge to reform and implement ethics teaching in business education. The roundtable and this article have been very critical to the dominating shareholder value paradigm, agency theory, the role of business schools and mainstream research. I have, however, no problems seeing the many positive aspects and elements in them. The criticism is most of all directed to the dominance and the uncritical use of agency theory and the shareholder value paradigm. A contingency perspective should be used when exploring and implementing mechanism to restore the "confidence in corporations". The need now is to channel energy and efforts to find counterbalances to shareholder value and agency theory.