Ouverture de ‘Corporate Governance Communication’

Abstract

The globalisation of the market and the growth of companies into increasingly complex and ramified networks underline the importance of communication and of the information flows that sustain relations between a company’s executive organ, its management, shareholders and other stakeholders. In a complex framework of relationships, corporate governance communication and information are of prime importance to manage consensus in organisations operating on global markets. We can identify three main approaches in the debate on corporate governance communication. The first typically focuses on the shareholder supremacy of corporate policies. This approach in today’s global markets it often finds concrete implementation in companies operating in conditions of competitive scarcity (typical examples of this are corporations operating in oil extraction, energy and similar markets). The second approach refers to the balance between shareholder supremacy and stakeholder interest. In today’s global markets, this policy emerges in conditions of controlled competition, where corporate governance reveals a management power that is absolutely not subordinated to the shareholders. And finally, the third corporate governance policy concerns the conduct of organisations operating with a stakeholder supremacy. This approach is quite recent, developing in the early 1980s due to the globalisation of the markets of large corporations, which introduced networking logics into their corporate policies, tackling new problems of economic and environmental sustainability, with the result that new needs related to more heterogeneous and complex classes of stakeholders have emerged.