Corporate Foundations and Their Governance: Research Development and Future Prospects

Abstract

Corporate foundations and their governance research are increasingly the focus in the transformation process of corporate governance to social organization governance. This paper summarizes that as a kind of non-profit social organization, corporate foundations, which are born out of profitable enterprises, may not only become vassals of enterprises, but also face other development problems such as investment regulatory delays, lack of reputation evaluation and poor social supervision in the process of achieving their public interest missions, because of many motivations such as strategic philanthropy and professional charity. It argues that to strengthen legal supervision is admittedly important to solve these problems, but because corporate foundations are boundary organizations that are closely linked with profitable business, and have different separation of four powers mode, it is more important to design a complete corporate foundation governance system by applying governance thinking. Based on this, this paper clarifies the governance boundary of corporate foundations, and comments on internal & external governance stakeholders in detail. Then it finally constructs the whole framework of corporate foundations governance mechanism research, and identifies the key questions and clues in the future research. It not only can provide new ideas for studying corporate foundation governance and enrich the theory of social organization governance, but also can offer a useful reference for the healthy development of corporate foundations, and then the improvement of the social security system in China.