The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation

The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation assesses the contemporary relevance, purpose, and performance of the corporation. The corporation is one of the most significant, if contested, innovations in human history, and the direction and effectiveness of corporate law, corporate governance, and corporate performance are being challenged as never before. Continuously evolving, the corporation as the primary instrument for wealth generation in contemporary economies demands frequent assessment and reinterpretation.

The focus of this work is the transformative impact of innovation and change upon corporate structure, purpose, and operation. Corporate innovation is at the heart of the value-creation process in increasingly internationalized and competitive market economies, and corporations today are embedded in a world of complex global supply chains and rising state and state-directed capitalism. In questioning the fundamental purpose and performance of the corporation, this Handbook continues a tradition commenced by Berle and Means, and contributed to by generations of business scholars. What is the corporation and what is it becoming? How do we define its form and purpose and how are these changing? To whom is the corporation responsible, and who should judge the ultimate performance of corporations? By investigating the origins, development, strategies, and theories of corporations, this volume addresses such questions to provide a richer theoretical account of the corporation and its contested future.

Thomas Clarke is Professor of Corporate Governance at the University of Technology Sydney. He is the Editor of the Elements in Corporate Governance series (Cambridge University Press) and the Inaugural Sir Adrian Cadbury Scholar of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN). He has published over thirty authored/edited books, including Innovation in the Asia Pacific: From Manufacturing to Knowledge Economies (Springer 2018); International Corporate Governance (Routledge, second edition 2017); and the Sage Handbook of Corporate Governance (2012), together with 200 refereed articles and book chapters.

Charles R. T. O'Kelley is Director of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society of Seattle University School of Law. He is an expert in corporate governance and Delaware corporation law. Charles is the author, with Robert B. Thompson, of one of the most widely used casebooks in the field of corporation law, Corporations and Other Business Associations (Wolters Kluwer, Eighth Edition 2017). On behalf of the Berle Center he has organized a series of international inter-disciplinary Berle Symposiums on the nature of the modern corporation. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association.

Justin O'Brien is Director of The Trust Project. He is the General Editor of Law and Financial Markets Review (Taylor and Francis). He is also the author and editor of a series of books on the dynamics of financial regulation with particular reference to capital market governance, including The Future of Financial Regulation (with Iain G. MacNeil, Hart 2010), Integrity, Risk and Accountability in Capital Markets: Regulating Culture (with George Gilligan, Hart 2013), and The Triumph, Tragedy and Lost Legacy of James M Landis (Hart 2017). Prior to taking up a career in academia O'Brien was a journalist and editor with the British Broadcasting Corporation and Ulster Television.