Corporate governance is a means, not an end. Before we can
speak intelligently about corporate governance, we must define its
goals. In much of the recent academic literature on corporate governance,
however, the goals are either ill-defined or assumed without
examination. Academic writers commonly assume that a corporate
governance system should be designed primarily to ensure
that the actions of a corporation's managers and directors accurately
reflecthe wishes of its stockholders.' This assumption rests
in turn on the premise that stockholders, as owners of the corporation,
have the intrinsic right to dictate the corporation's course and
receive its profits. Once this premise is accepted, the recognition of
the separation of ownership and management as the central characteristic
of the modern public corporation2 leads inexorably to the
conclusion that the central goal of corporate governance is to discipline
managers, that is, make managers conform their actions to
the desires of stockholders.
This line of academic analysis has coincided with the rise of
hostile takeovers. Ignoring the quite varied sources and motivations
of hostile acquirors, academic writers have embraced the hostile
takeover as the free-market device to rid corporations of bad
managers and give stockholders their entitled profit in the process.3 Accordingly, these writers have proposed corporate governance
rules designed to ensure that corporate managers and directors
cannot impede a hostile takeover.
Upon examination, however, the unspoken premises of this
body of academic literature are seriously flawed. First, there is no
basis for the assumption of intrinsic rights and entitlements in the
corporate structure. The Anglo-American corporate form is a creation
of the state, conceived originally as a privilege to be conferred
on specified entities for the public good and welfare. While the corporate
form became more widely available as the economy demanded
it, and is now generally available to any business, it remains
a legal creation. As with any legal construct, we must justify
the rules governing it on the basis of economic and social utility,
not intrinsic rights. If alteration of those rules benefits the economic
system and, in the long run, the corporations themselves,
notions of "intrinsic rights" should not stand in the way.
Second, the academic literature has vastly overstated the benefits
of the hostile takeover. Even if one accepts the priority of disciplining
managers, the hostile takeover has proven a particularly
destructive and inefficient means of such discipline. Hostile takeovers
have not led managers to manage more effectively orto create
more successful business enterprises. Instead, together with the
increasing dominance of institutional stockholders, hostile takeover
activity has led to an inordinate focus on short-term results and a
dangerous overleveraging of the American and British economies,
the ill effects of which are only beginning to emerge.
The present lull in hostile takeover activity provides an opportunity
to reexamine our system of corporate governance relatively
free of the high emotions of the 1980s. But the need for reexamination
remains pressing. While the pace of hostile takeover activity
has slowed, reflecting in part the current recession, hostile takeovers
remain very much a part of the corporate landscape and
managerial thinking. Moreover, the growing power of institutional
stockholders, and their increasing willingness to exercise tha