Since the middle of the nineteen-eighties, the French system of corporate governance has undergone some major transformations. Originally, it was dominated by the State’s important weight in the structures constraining managerial discretion in some of France’s largest firms. But, the public administration has increasingly retired from its active role in corporate governance matters. This paper addresses the question of a theoretical explanation of the observed phenomenon of the dynamics of governance. The conceptual framework we propose is to a great extent based on the economic theory of institutional change. It strongly emphasizes the role of so-called ‘organizational entrepreneurs’, who lead the initiative aiming at a transformation of existing structures. In this context, a country’s shared mental pattern is, however, supposed to be a force enhancing path dependence. Theoretical propositions are deduced and applied to the case of the French corporate governance system. The analysis of the latter’s evolution yields some encouraging results, indicating that the proposed theory seems globally consistent with empirical facts.
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Paper provided by Université de Bourgogne - Latec/Fargo (Research center in Finance,organizational ARchitecture and GOvernance) in its series Working Papers FARGO with number
1040701.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1997.
" A Survey of Corporate Governance,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 52(2), pages 737-83, June.
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Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer, 1999.
"Corporate Ownership Around the World,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 54(2), pages 471-517, 04.
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