Trust, Accountability and Purpose
The Regulation of Corporate Governance

Explores how corporations can rebuild trust through organisational and regulatory design across interlocking themes.

Justin O'Brien (Author)

9781108748506, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2019

75 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.15 kg

The collapse of trust can be found across all of our institutions but most of all in finance. This Element seeks to answer an existential question: how to rebuild trust in distrusting times? Integrity, responsibility and accountability must be embedded into corporate mission statements, values and codes of conduct. Through organisational and regulatory design across five interlocking themes - legal, regulatory, managerial, ethical and social. What is required is substantive rather than technical compliance; warranted rather than stated commitment to high ethical standards; effective deterrence strategies; enhanced accountability; and a shared commitment to risk within negotiated, binding and enforceable parameters.

1. Introduction – how to rebuild trust in distrusting times
2. The existential crisis facing the liberal order
3. Resilience as the organising framework for reform – the dangers of metaphors in financial regulation
4. Corporations, markets and morals
5. Contracting integrity – legal and social licences
6. Reconnecting law and morality through principle.

Subject Areas: Corporate governance [KJR], Business ethics & social responsibility [KJG], Business strategy [KJC]