History of Corporate Governance: The Importance of Stakeholder Activism Book

Academic - Financial And Business History - Economics - Law - History; The company archives of England and America are rich repositories of original texts on the subject of governance, a selection of which are published here. Two major issues ripped from the headlines - Japan's prolonged economic slump and the recent Enron debacle in the United States - both point to the importance of corporate governance, the mechanisms that stakeholders use to ensure that their investments are properly used and that any sums owed them for the use of their resources are faithfully calculated and promptly paid in full. Corporate governance seeks, in short, the reduction of the principalagent problem within major business firms. The history of corporate governance, like the history of any subject, can help today's businesses in two ways. First, knowledge of the past can help prevent firms and policymakers from repeating past mistakes. Second, history is also rife with examples of how to do things right. Corporate governance in Britain and the United States in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was far from perfect, yet it was also far from being completely flawed.Anglo-American corporate governance, therefore, offers both warnings and lessons. This new edition from Pickering & Chatto offers a unique perspective on this fascinating historical topic. We present a comprehensive selection of texts drawn from the archives of corporations in England and America. Many of these texts are very rare and very few have ever been re-published before. Corporate governance is an interdisciplinary subject of interest to scholars of history, economics, business history and law. In short this edition fits into the library collection of any institution concerned with history or finance.