Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The New Corporate Governance in Theory and Practice$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.

Stephen Bainbridge

Print publication date: 2008

Print ISBN-13: 9780195337501

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2009

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337501.001.0001

The Future of Corporate Governance: Director or Shareholder Primacy

Chapter:
(p. 201 ) CHAPTER 5 The Future of Corporate Governance: Director or Shareholder Primacy
Source:
The New Corporate Governance in Theory and Practice
Author(s):

Stephen M. Bainbridge

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337501.003.0006

This chapter argues that director primacy, not shareholder primacy, should be the future of corporate governance. Specifically, it argues that shareholder primacy is flawed both as a positive and as a normative account of corporate governance. Accordingly, efforts to extend the shareholder franchise are fundamentally misguided. In public corporations of the sort with which we are concerned, shareholder voting has very little to do with corporate decision making. To the contrary, the separation of ownership and control observed in such firms is inherent in the basic structure of the law of corporate governance.

Keywords:   governance, voting, ownership, control

Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .