Edging toward ‘reasonably’ good corporate governance

Over four decades, research and policy have created layers of understandings in the quest for “good” corporate governance. The corporate excesses of the 1970s sparked a search for market mechanisms and disclosure to empower shareholders. The UK-focused problems of the 1990s prompted board-centric, structural approaches, while the fall of Enron and many other companies in the early 2000s heightened emphasis on director independence and professionalism. With the financial crisis of 2007-09, however, came a turn in some policy approaches and in academic literature seeking a different way forward. This paper explores those four phases and the discourse each develops and then links each to assumptions about accountability and cognition. After the financial crisis came pointers n policy and practice away from narrow, rationalist prescriptions and toward what the philosopher Stephen Toulmin calls “reasonableness”. Acknowledging that heightens awareness of complexity and interdependence in corporate governance practice. The paper then articulates a research agenda concerning what “reasonable” corporate governance might entail

Investeringen en kredietbeperking

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Unknown is unloved? Diversity and inter-population trust in Europe

With more than 400,000 trust evaluations, we examine inter-population trust in the European Union. We focus on social capital theory explanations in a context where European inhabitants from 20 countries rate trust in the populations of 27 other European countries and in their own national population. We emphasize the role of ethnic heterogeneity, but we extend the research by studying the importance of the presence of specific European migrants in a country for trusting this population as a whole. Moreover, we consider the relation with the citizen’s country and characteristics of the trusted populations’ country. We use the European Election Studies, showing that diversity is important for explaining trust in other populations and trust in one’s own population – but opposite to what is expected by Putnam