New perspectives on board research

Abstract

Research on boards of directors is at a crossroad. This special topic forum is devoted to providing new directions to research on corporate boards, by renewing paradigms and shedding light on behavioural practices and board effectiveness. In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing interest of scholars and practitioners towards boards and governance issues, going beyond the classical assumptions and expectations that are deeply rooted into a financial economics perspective. The need to suggest ‘‘New Perspectives on Board Research’’ arises both from practice, as boards confront conflicting demands, and from community of governance scholars at large. As such, the theme of our Special Issue appears to be a timely contribution; it is witnessed by an emerging stream of literature on boards of directors that challenges structuralism, a mono-theoretical approach and an overemphasis on quantitative methods. In less than a decade mainstream journals have opened a debate about future directions in research about boards of directors. Daily, Dalton and Cannella in a preface to a special issue in The Academy of Management Review in 2003 called for