A New Wave in the History of Corporate Governance

Abstract

This special issue showcases a new wave of historical research on corporate governance. The new wave is reacting to the exhaustion of the intellectual agenda of the initial scholarship devoted to the question of the emergence and variable development of corporate governance systems in different national economies. Indeed, in many ways the new wave represents a moment of genuine intellectual liberation. Much of the old literature focused nearly exclusively on questions regarding the concentration or dispersion of ownership, and attendant issues of the strength of minority protections, the role of banks, and the depth of the securities market in different countries. New wave scholars are asking historical questions about types of corporate governance and the evolution of national systems that literally could not be seen within the categories of the old debate—or if they could be seen, were thought to be so tangential to the dynamics of efficient governance that they were ignored. How is it possible, for example, for there to have been a deep securities market and strong universal banks in pre World War I Germany? Or, what role in national economic development did pyramid holding structures playin turn of the century Japan? Did the existence of a legal alternative to the joint stock company, such as the private limited liability company (PLLC) affect the manner in which different countries embraced the joint stock corporation? New questions have also stimulated search for new kinds of data, and most of the new wave historians of corporate governance have been immersed in archival research that was simply not characteristic of the work that their predecessors undertook. This close archival work has in turn generated new observations and new questions. How did the various stock exchanges in the USA between 1880 and 1930 actually work? Who bought what, where, how, and to what effect? Or, how did the cosmopolitan character of London impact the relationship between finance and the large and numerous British global corporations? How was family ownership concretely related to the dispersal of stock? All of the above questions are posed and, to a degree, answered by the essays in this issue. The purpose of this brief introduction will be to outline why those are interesting and quite new questions in the context of the historiography of corporate governance. The first section will outline how the first wave of research into the comparative history of corporate governance exhausted itself and, thereby, created the possibility for new wave scholars to pose alternative sorts of questions. The second section sets out the thematic and methodological distinctiveness of the new wave of research. The third section outlines the specific contributions to the special issue.