The Cross-National Diversity of Corporate Governance:

Corporate governance lies at the heart of contemporary debates over internationalization and varieties of capitalism. Despite this growing attention to cross-national diversity, a unified comparative framework remains elusive. This article develops a theoretical model to describe and explain variation in corporate governance among advanced capitalist economies. It identities the social relations and institutional arrangements that shape: (1) who controls corporations, (2) what interests corporations serve, and (3) the allocation of rights and responsibilities among corporate stakeholders. Our "actor-centered" institutional approach explains firm-level corporate governance practices in terms of institutional factors that shape how actors' interests are defined ("socially constructed") and represented. Specifically, we predict how different national institutional domains will influence the respective dimensions of three key stakeholders (capital, labor and management) in the corporate governance equation. Our model has strong implications for studying issues of international convergence by exploring the institutional interdependencies, complementarities and tensions within national settings.