Paper accepted for international conference

I'm both thrilled and humbled by some news that arrived overnight. A paper that I prepared some time ago, The crucial importance of access to the advancement of governance research (read abstract), has passed through the double-blind review process and been accepted onto the programme of the 10th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance (ECMLG)! The conference is being held at VERN', in Zagreb, Croatia, in November.

The paper discusses the difficulties that governance researchers face when their research is limited to the analysis of secondary data—typically interviews, surveys and questionnaires. It suggests that if researchers study what boards actually do, by observing board meetings directly, then it should be possible to learn enough to provide an explanation of how boards influence company performance outcomes (or not). The paper also includes some preliminary insights, which emerged from a series of boardroom observations conducted as part of my doctoral research. It will be interesting to see how this paper is received. Hopefully, it will give folk the confidence to press on and try different approaches to corporate governance research, to discover if and how boards create value, or whether they simply impose cost.

The full paper will be available on the Research page immediately after it is presented at the conference.