The Routledge Companion to Business Ethics

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Corporate governance

Ann K. Buchholtz^*

Corporate governance is in crisis mode. For over a decade, a surge of financial scandals and management failures have led to a record number of bankruptcies filed, billions of dollars of wealth destroyed, and countless jobs lost. Not surprisingly, these failures have eroded the public’s trust in corporate governance, “every one of the mechanisms set up to provide checks and balances failed at the same time,” declared Robert Monks and Nell Minow (2008: 3). Corporate governance should be able to steer companies away from such failures and toward sustainable success so that the considerable resources entrusted to business are put to good use. As Guhan Subramanian (2015) noted, “with trillions of dollars ...