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Corporate Governance

Overview

  • Credit value: 15 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor and tutor: Professor Sue Konzelmann
  • Assessment: a two-hour examination (100%)

Module description

Corporate governance is concerned with issues of ownership, control and accountability. It raises key issues, for example, in the context of a corporation, how should the interests of directors, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders be prioritised and how can these interests be expressed, aligned and reconciled? More broadly, with the globalisation of product and capital markets, how can economic interests and objectives be reconciled with social and political interests in equity, distributional justice and environmental sustainability? How do national corporate governance systems differ and what are the implications of this for economic performance and sustainability? Are we seeing convergence or divergence of national systems as a consequence of globalisation?

This module explores such questions by placing the corporate pursuit of economic objectives in a wider societal context. Unlike more technical courses where there may well be unambiguously right and wrong answers, here the objective is to understand and appreciate issues of judgment and leadership and the values that inform them.

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will have:

  • knowledge and understanding of the operation of systems of corporate governance at various levels of analysis from the lowest (i.e. the workplace) to the highest (i.e. the global economy)
  • knowledge and understanding of the shared and competing social, economic and political principles and values upon which behaviour and outcomes in the corporate governance system are based
  • knowledge and understanding of the pressures associated with tendencies towards and away from convergence in corporate governance systems at various levels of analysis
  • the ability to apply a combination of social, economic and political reasoning to practical real-world problems of corporate governance and ethics, including problems of business policy, investment and regulation.