Governance in the Making—A View from Academe

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/bl.30076
• Date: 01 May 2017
• Author: Sue Konzelmann
• Published date: 01 May 2017

6 BOARD LEADERSHIP

Governance in the Making—

A View from Academe

by Sue Konzelmann

Dr. Sue Konzelmann is Reader in Management in the Department of Management

atBirkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom, who has been directing the

Postgraduate Programmes in Corporate Governance and Business Ethics at that

institution since 2003. She is also the founding director of the London Centre for

Corporate Governance and Ethics. Here, she reects on the changes she has seen

over the intervening years.

Early Days

I

got into corporate governance quite

by accident. It all started with my

internship in Industrial Relations at

Usines Gustave Boel, a steelworks in La

Louviere, Belgium, which formed part

of my master’s in international business

studies from the University of South

Carolina in 1984–1985. That experi-

ence, during a period of significant

restructuring and concessionary collec-

tive bargaining, sparked my interest in

the steel industry and desire to pursue

a PhD. I did my PhD dissertation at

the University of Notre Dame (UND) in

Notre Dame, Indiana, on “Technologi-

cal Integration and Fragmented Labour

Market Structures: The Decline and

Restructuring of the American Steel

Industry” during the mid to late 1980s.

This was a period of major upheaval—

and deindustrialization—when the

stock market was being theorized as

an efficient “market for corporate con-

trol” and, on this basis, was being used

to restructure industry. At the time, I

didn’t recognize this as being related

to “corporate governance” because

my main focus was on the influence of

labor-management relations and work

systems on firms’ ability to respond to

intensifying competitive pressures.

My then PhD supervisor, Frank

Wilkinson—now a long-time mentor,

colleague, and friend—was a visitor to

UND from the University of Cambridge,

as was Agit Singh, whose seminal work

on takeovers played an important role

in my own later research. In 1998, at

least in part because of these connec-

tions, I was invited to spend my sab-

batical from Indiana University South

Bend (IUSB) at the University of Cam-

bridge’s Centre for Business Research

(CBR), where I became involved in

research on corporate governance with

Frank, Agit, Simon Deakin, and oth-

ers. This research largely focused on

the question of whether the managers

of publicly traded companies faced a

“corporate governance constraint” on

the approaches they were able to take

in managing their human resources as a

consequence of having to prioritize the

interests of shareholders over those of

all other stakeholder groups, particu-

larly workers.

For several years I returned to Cam-

bridge each summer to continue and

extend this research and to deepen

my collaboration with colleagues in the

CBR; and in 2001, I took a year’s leave

from IUSB to help direct a CBR research

project on these themes, which was

extended to a second year when I

joined a related collaborative project

with MIT. During these two years, I also

contributed to the teaching of corpo-

rate governance in the Judge Business

School’s MBA program and in the Law

School with Simon Deakin.

In 2002, Birkbeck advertised a post

to direct their newly established MSc

and MRes programs in Corporate Gov-

ernance and Business Ethics, to which

I successfully applied. In the autumn of

2002, I taught the “Systems of Corpo-

rate Governance” module to the first

class to enter this program, returning

as director during the summer of 2003.

The rest is history.

A Corporate Governance and

Business Ethics Program Is Born

I can only speculate on the origins of

the corporate governance program at

Birkbeck, since I was not there when it

was set up. As I said earlier, I applied for

and was offered the position of being

the first director of these programs in

2002; after a brief return to the States

to sell my house, say my good-byes to

friends and colleagues, and return to the

United Kingdom with my three senior-

citizen cats, I formally assumed the post

in the summer of 2003, the second year

that the program was delivered.

I imagine that the origins of the pro-

gram can be located in the events of

the 1990s, when the United Kingdom

took the lead in corporate governance,

following the collapse of a number of

prominent British public companies as

a consequence of a perceived lack of

accountability on the part of top execu-

tives. Examples include Polly Peck (1990),

the Bank of Credit and Commerce Inter-

national (1991), and Barings Bank (1995).

In 1991, the “Cadbury Committee”

on Financial Aspects of Corporate Gov-

ernance was set up. Its 1992 report con-

stituted the first code of “best practice”

in corporate governance, which was

added to the London Stock Exchange’s

listing rules on a “comply or explain”

basis. This served as a model for other

countries’ codes of corporate gover-

nance, which have proliferated since.

In 1995, the Greenbury Report on

Executive Pay was produced, followed

by the 1998 Hampel Report reviewing

the Cadbury and Greenbury reports.

The dot-com stock market bubble

collapsed in 2001, so the establishment

of the first postgraduate program in cor-

porate governance by Birkbeck’s Depart-

ment of Management is indeed timely.

I later learned from graduates of the

program that, at the time, this was the

only program in the world with the words

corporate governance in its title. So it

attracted students from all around the

world. Since then, while other postgradu-

ate programs offer modules in corporate

governance or focus on areas within cor-

porate governance, Birkbeck’s program is

unique in its breadth of focus—students