A Relational Approach to Corporate Governance Design

The paper outlines a new pluralistic method for analyzing, assessing and improving corporate governance structures in their traits relevant both for financial and for human capital providers. The framework seeks to enlarge the rather universalistic approach to governance structures ranking used in the economic (principal-agent) approach, introducing sensitiveness to some relevant contingencies. Among the contingencies, task complexity and innovativeness is supposed to matter, as well as the configuration of motivations and preferences of capital providers which are supposed not to be uniform but to be predictable in their main configurations. The framewok is design-oriented and aimed at improving corporate governance configurations in a generative way, based on the discovery of superior matches between the preferences of different cathegories of capital providers over governance mechanisms (rather than focused, as usual, on the comparative assessment of discrete realized models). The approach is relational in two ways: it builds governance structures on pairwise analyses of effective matches among preference configurations; it builds governance structures as nexuses of complementary governance mechanisms (effective matches among mechanisms).