Enhancing Firm Sustainability Through Governance ― The Relational Corporate Governance Approach

This book on corporate governance is designed for scholars and researchers in corporate law and governance and regulation, with secondary use in economics, accounting, and management. The book looks at how governance mechanisms, processes, and variables affect each other, and how they affect a company's governance and management structures. It suggests that most governance operates on a "comply or explain" principle, and that this approach does not show how to minimize costs to the corporation, which the author sees as the only relevant factor. The author offers his own system for corporate governance, called the relational corporate governance approach. It is based on the idea that the definition of good governance should be changed to mean minimizing costs to the corporation, on the theory that this will cause maximum profits and only maximizing profits will cause a corporation to be sustainable in the long term. The text is devoted to a system for comparing how little money various governance choices will cost a company. The book notes that the approach does not consider global economic crises, and it has not been empirically tested. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Francesco de Zwart, Lecturer, Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Australia