Governing Globalization? The State, Law, and Structural Change in Corporate Governance

Current analysis of the 'globalization' of the activity of capitalist corporations tends to argue that the legal institutional frameworks of the nation state are of little importance in determining the governance of those corporations, and that the regulation of those corporations therefore is impossible. This view simply ignores the role that those frameworks do in fact play. In this paper, various styles of corporate governance are analysed in terms of the influence of the company law, financial market regulation, and employment law promulgated by nations or nation state groupings. Rather than the globalization of corporate governance reflecting the unimportance of the nation state, it reflects a change in the style of regulation.