The Government as Institutional Entrepreneur in Corporate Governance Reform

Abstract

Governments around the world have become prolific issuers of soft law regulation in the form of corporate governance codes. However, the strategies that governments pursue to ensure the diffusion of the codes have remained unexplored in the literature. Drawing from institutional and sociopolitical perspectives, I hypothesize that governments pursue a combination of different intervention strategies to bring the corporate governance arrangements of firms in line with the issued code. These strategies focus on the mobilization of material resources, the dissemination of rationales and legitimating accounts for corporate governance change, interventions in social structure and the establishment of new social relations. I test my hypotheses in the context of the issuance of the national corporate governance code in Germany and find general support for my hypotheses.