Long before the present investigations into the role of corporate governance regulation in the coming of the financial crisis (Cheffins, 2009), corporate law had long become a highly dynamic regulatory laboratory for the study of a fast-transforming body of norms governing corporate activities worldwide. The immense attention that the field has been attracting over the past thirty years from legal scholars, economists, political scientists, sociologists and even psychologists (Aguilera et al., 2004) amply testifies to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of corporate governance. Partly, this development is owed to the dramatic transformation of corporate law over the recent past, mostly influenced by the rapid expansion of global capital markets, which have placed enormous pressure on the different existing national legal cultures pertaining to company law, labour law and industrial relations regulation. The international competition over investment and the innovation of ever-new and more flexible financial instruments have over time induced a fundamental transformation of corporate governance that is frequently referred to as a rise of ‘financialism’ (Mitchell, 2011; Zumbansen, 2011) and which has led to a far-reaching change in the understanding of the business corporation from an organizational entity geared towards economic growth to an investment vehicle with a very particular set of expectations attached to it (Lazonick, 1991).