A research agenda for alternative forms of corporate governance in Journal of Management & Organization

The aftermath of the global financial crisis has led to a robust public debate on corporate governance practice in the modern business firm, especially large stock exchange listed financial institutions (O’Shannassy, 2015a). We argue here that this public debate has influenced the academic debate on corporate governance across the range of large, medium-size and small enterprises only to a limited extent at the moment. This is despite the fact there is widespread agreement that researching alternative governance forms (e.g., small family-owned firms) can inform extant theory and have positive practical implications as well. There is also now a growing realization that the dominant research focus on the governance of large, stock exchange listed companies is taking attention away from the fact that these large companies are in decline in actual number (Davis, 2016). This is the case in legal jurisdictions such as the United States and Germany as other lower cost and nimble (e.g., online retailers, pop-up businesses) economic forms of organization emerge (Davis, 2016). Therefore there is need for a greater balance in the academic and executive management literature regarding the types of companies and the size of companies that are the subject of research (O’Shannassy, 2015a). It is not surprising then, that the Academy of Management also highlighted this issue, among others by choosing the theme of Opening Governance as the theme of the Academy of Management Conference 2015 in Vancouver. Despite these calls for study of alternative corporate governance models, at first sight little progress appears to have been made. Even though there is a continuous stream of papers dealing with these issues, the quantity of papers on alternative corporate governance models is small in comparison with papers focusing on traditional governance structures. Conceptual frameworks for analyzing alternative governance models also have not reached a comparable state of maturity. Contributions in this area are only in their infancy but seem promising. For example, work by Grandori (2016) and Puranam, Alexy, and Reitzig (2014) provide useful analytical lenses. From an empirical perspective a positive sign is that in Journal of Management & Organization (JMO) a stream of papers has emerged over recent years which have started to tackle these issues as well. Given this background in this introduction to the themed issue here we would like to make this stream more explicit and point towards a research agenda contributors to JMO could pursue more consistently. Various papers in JMO have presented relevant insights. By making a contribution here in this Editorial at creating an overarching research strategy out of these individual contributions, we hope to spark a debate that will increase research attention on alternative corporate governance forms. To achieve this outcome we compare ‘traditional governance’ with ‘alternative governance’ as it seems to be emerging in JMO. For the sake of brevity, we would like to summarize the dominant view of traditional governance to a few stylized facts. Inevitably, this does not do justice to the variety of research that has been done in this area. However, it serves our purpose here, which is to point to an emerging alternative governance paradigm that is specifically relevant to the ANZAM community. In this approach of stylized facts, the dominant view on corporate governance focuses on three elements. First, the influence of the chief executive officers (CEO) with an emphasis on their transactional behavior; second public companies listed on the stock exchange; and third shareholder value (Kiel & Nicholson, 2003; Taniman & O’Shannassy, 2015). The theoretical tools used to study this dominant paradigm are usually taken from economics and specifically from agency and transaction cost theory.