De l'idéologie et de la philosophie en gouvernance d'entreprise

Corporate governance, as a subject, has long been marginalized. The number of articles dedicated to it has also dramatically increased in the past ten years. The field has been investigated in several dimensions, mainly in corporate strategy, in corporate finance and in organizational behavior. Thus, each academic discipline has set up some rather different theoretical views. But these differences also can be explained by old ideological and philosophical conflicts. Philosophic ideas from authors like Machiavel and Kant, or Locke and Marx are essential to understand the contemporaneous theories of corporate governance. They have irreconcilable points of view about the nature of man, and the optimal way to organize society. For this reason, a unification of governance theories will probably be a hard task.