BU Research Blog

Prime Minister Theresa May has recently mooted a Germanic-turn for corporate governance in the UK, an echo of a heated debate over the shape of boards of directors in listed companies raging over the past 25 years. By coincidence, BU’s Donald Nordberg, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management, has been examining the controversies over board design since the Cadbury Code was written in 1992, as investors, corporate chairmen and others wrestled with whether to recommend continuing with unitary boards or follow the German model of dual boards with worker representation. His paper, “Contestation over board design and the development of UK corporate governance,” has just won the prize as Best Paper in Management and Business History at the British Academy of Management conference in Newcastle. Could history be about to repeat itself? The conference paper is at http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/23744/.