Accountable Corporate Governance

This chapter explores the ways in which public standards of accountability are brought to bear on a nominally private institution: the commercial corporation. It considers several classic arguments in favor of widening the set of interests in society that the corporation should serve. These classic positions, it is argued, fail to capture the range of social issues facing the company. A different way of identifying those issues is proposed. This in turn permits one to identify three types of interest that stakeholders have in the company. With these distinctions in place, a map of different types of corporate accountability is drawn, aimed at underpinning policies shaping corporate governance.