Marie-Soleil Tremblay

Corporate governance and accountability of state-owned enterprises: relevance for science and society and interdisciplinary research perspectives

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes and challenges, their relevance and the research opportunities the field presents. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews prior literature and outlines the need to analyse challenges for corporate governance and accountability of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as a precursor to introducing the contributions to this special issue. Findings - Corporate governance, accounting and accountability of SOEs are crucial and growing topics in public management and other research disciplines. Public service provision and budget consolidation cannot be realized effectively and efficiently without powerful governance and management of SOEs. However there are significant corporate governance challenges and important empirical research gaps in comparison to other fields. Broader theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, accountability mechanisms and sector/context are identified and discussed and encouraged in future research. Research limitations/implications - This paper aims to stimulate interdisciplinary research on emerging issues affecting governance and accountability of SOEs considering their growing importance in the society and their changing nature. Practical implications - Effective mechanisms and good practices may contribute to better performance of SOEs. Findings may help politicians, administrations, board members, auditors, consultants, scholars and the media striving for improvements around the world. Originality/value - The paper condenses theoretical and empirical findings to highlight the relevance of this field and important research gaps. The special issue offers an empirical examination of interdisciplinary literature and innovative experiences of SOEs to strengthen public service motivation, board composition and roles, trust and control, transparency, public value and to enhance the ability to manage, steer and monitor contracts, performance and relationships.

Sense-Making in Compensation Committees: A Cultural Theory Perspective

Drawing on Mary Douglas’s cultural theory, our research analyzes the cultural schemes or biases mobilized by compensation committee (CC) members, in the context of public companies, when making sense of their committee’s work. Relying on semi-structured interviews mostly conducted with CC members in Canada, our analysis brings to the fore the production of moral and rational comfort within the boundaries of the individualistic and hierarchical culture. Under an individualistic bias, the compensation market is seen as natural, providing conditions of possibility that serve to establish fair compensation through the creation and enforcement of contracts. Under a hierarchic bias which emphasizes principles of objectivity and measurability, members of CCs tend to conceive the design of compensation policies as an act of expertise, relying extensively on consultants and measurement techniques to determine acceptable reward boundaries. Not only does our paper contribute to corporate governance literature by providing insight into a central aspect of CCs, that is to say CC members’ ways of thinking and doing, but the juxtaposition of cultural theory with CC empirics provides us with the opportunity to reflect and theorize on the issue of cultural change.

Illusions of Control? The Extension of New Public Management Through Corporate Governance Regulation

This study investigates the process of adoption of a new governance regulation in the public sector. The empirical setting of this article is the adoption by the Quebec government of regulation regarding the role of boards for 24 government enterprises. Building on a Latourian framework, the investigation relies on the analysis of parliamentary debates, commission hearings, and interviews with key participants. Plans to “improve” governance were initially presented in generic formats in electoral promises of reform. Plans were then promoted through the construction of linkages with global and local scandals, as well as references to discourses about increasing distrust of public institutions and the absence of markets as a means to control behaviours. My analysis suggests that regulation offered as “modernization of governance” and viewed as an irreversible phenomenon to which one cannot oppose, may be an illusion of control within the public sector. Ideals of modernized governance continue to spread in society through their construction in “laboratories” (e.g., commission hearings), where effectiveness in various jurisdictions is assumed and not questioned by governance experts, accountants and their technologies.

Gender on board: deconstructing the “legitimate” female director

Purpose - – Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding the presence of female directors are constructed in the boardroom, and the role of symbolic violence in the process. Design/methodology/approach - – The authors carried out the investigation through a series of 32 interviews, mostly with board members in government-owned, commercially focussed companies in Quebec. The study was conducted in the aftermath of the adoption of a legislative measure aiming to institute parity in the boardroom of government-owned companies. Findings - – The analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are predicated on two main discourses, as conveyed through board members when interpreting the presence of female directors. In the first discursive representation, feminine gender is naturalized and mobilized by participants to support (quite oftentimes in a rather apparent positive way) the distinctive contributions that femininity can make, or cannot make, to the functioning of boards. In the second discourse (degenderizing), the question of gender disappears from the sense-making process. Women’s presence is then justified and normalized, not because of their feminine qualities, but rather and uniquely for their competencies. Research limitations/implications - – While, from a first level of analysis, the main discourses the authors unveiled may be considered as potentially enhancing women’s role and legitimacy within boards, from a deeper perspective such discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic violence to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people. For example, the degenderizing discourse misrecognizes that a focus on individual competency contests overlooks the social conditions under which the contesters developed their competencies. Practical implications - – Provides awareness and a basis for directors to understand and how symbolic power covertly operates in apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance and challenge assumptions. Social implications - – Implications in terms of policy making to promote board diversity are discussed. This is particularly relevant since many countries around the world are considering affirmative-action-type regulation to accelerate an otherwise dawdling trend in the nomination of women on boards. Originality/value - – The research is the first to empirically address the notion of gendering in the boardroom, focussing on the construction of meanings surrounding the “legitimate” female director. The study is also one of few giving access to a field where a critical mass is attained, allowing the authors to investigate perceptions regarding the extent to which the order of things is altered in the boardroom once formal parity is established. Finally, the study sensitizes the authors further to the pertinence of investigating how symbolic power covertly operates in today’s society, including within apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance.