ABSTRACT
The topic of Corporate Governance strongly emerged in the United States, at the beginning of the 80s. The increasing competitive pressure of the period, in fact, brought to a deep and complex process of restoration for companies and organizations.
The very high amount of mergers, that characterized the 80s in the United States, is a significant marker of that decade evolution trend. Just bear in mind that all major buyouts in the USA, between 1955 and 1989, took place after 1982. Moreover, in the American financial setting, historically characterized by the essential presence of spread shareholding companies, some issues like the separation between government and property, the shareholder protection and the boards of directors representation have been taken in serious consideration since long.
Some famous business crises, between the XIX and the XX century, marked the switch from the interest in Corporate Governance to the rising need of the introduction of new regulations and solutions. All the pictured setting took place in part, increasingly, also in Europe.
Briefly, the need to identify principles and rules to regulate these themes created, as time went by, a swarm of ideas, opinions and proposals all around the world and not only in The West. In G.B.S. Social Reporting Standards, precisely in the “Identification” principle, there are specific hints at the so called business “Corporate Governance”.
Actually, also other principles as Responsibility and Transparency give implicit importance to the business Governance issue. Given this, the G.B.S. Scientific Committee regarded as appropriate the constitution of a working group for analyzing the state of the art of Governance systems and for introducing a few recommendations about the kind of information that should be disclosed in a social report concerning the governance structure of a business that, being drafting its social report, sets itself up as socially responsible.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
I The Working Group
II The Document Objectives
III The Document Structure and Methodological Approach
PART ONE
Towards a wider Corporate Governance view
1.1. The Corporate Law Reform: some considerations
1.2. International Self-discipline Codes
1.3. The Self-discipline Codes and the Shareholder Protection
1.4. The Company Institutional Structure and the Stakeholder Relations Quality
1.5. The Corporate Governance Extension with regards to the Stakeholder Relations
PART TWO
The G.B.S. Standards and their Impact on Corporate Governance
2.1. Governance and Stakeholders – GRI Guidance
2.2. The G.B.S. Model Features and The Social Reporting Standards
2.3. Governance and G.B.S. Standards
2.4. Some considerations on Corporate Governance given the G.B.S. Standards
2.5. Recommendations on Governance Information to be displayed in the “Identity” section of Social Report drafted according to G.B.S. Basic Standard
