The Transition to Finance Capitalism and its implications for financial reporting: evidence from the English canal companies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the roles of corporate governance reforms in Malaysia following the 1997/1998 Asian crisis from the perspectives of corporate managers. Design/methodology/approach – The primary evidence used is drawn from a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with Malaysian corporate managers involved in the overseeing of the governance structures within their companies. Findings – This study shows that most interviewees believed that an appropriate corporate governance system could play a role in resolving the problems associated with the interlocking and concentrated corporate ownership structure in Malaysia. However, the effectiveness of the corporate governance reforms in dealing with this issue is questionable. It also reveals that Malaysian companies ‘changed’ their corporate governance practices predominantly to recover (foreign) investor confidence lost during the crisis and to fulfil the legal requirements enforced by the government, where the latter was under pressure from the international community (especially, the World Bank and IMF) to ‘improve’ the Malaysian corporate governance practices after the crisis.