The Accumulation of Knowledge of Boards of Directors Contributions from 100 Student Reports

Considerable attention has been directed towards corporate governance issues in recent years. There are however various limitations in the international mainstream research on boards of directors. Few studies address research questions beyond investigating the relationship between board composition and company performance. Most research is moreover based on empirical evidence from large publicly held US corporations. This paper summarises the accumulated knowledge from 100 student reports on boards of directors in Scandinavia. The contributions of the reports show the need to explore the influence of various contingencies, and also to take various stakeholder perspectives into account when researching corporate governance and boards of directors. The reports also show the need to go beyond counting only numbers of directors to gain insight into board working structures and relationships between directors and managers. Several advantages compared to the US mainstream research tradition can in this connection be found in Scandinavian research about boards of directors.