PhD Project : Global Private Authority and Corporate Governance

Project carried out by James Perry, MA

This project aims at the development of a description and explanation of the content and role of private authority within the regulation of corporate governance in general and accounting in particular.

In recent years, the evolution of private authority over corporate governance has intensified considerably; one witnesses a tendency towards convergence among competing standards, especially among accounting standards. Yet, given the dominance of economic and legal literature on corporate governance, the political struggle behind this evolution of private authority is largely unaccounted for.

Given these developments, this project focuses on the following research questions.

  • Does private authority lead to a substantial convergence of corporate governance/accounting regulation?
  • Does private authority provide the foundation for a public codification of corporate governance/accounting standards on the national and international level?
  • How can we explain the evolution of private authority on corporate governance/accounting, both in terms of contents and its importance for the regulation of the issue area?


Whereas conventional explanations of the evolution of private authority on corporate governance focus on the functional requirements of liberalised markets for the harmonisation of standards , our transnational political economy approach with institutionalist accounts of multi-level governance focuses on the interaction between economic and institutional structures and the concrete interests of different socio-economic groups.