Corporate Governance was a new term a decade ago. Today it is used in common parlance but its meaning is not necessarily understood. In fact, the term is in the danger of passing from an unknown to a cliche without any stages in-between. Company executives have a very narrow idea of corporate governance.

Much of the existing literature on the subject suffers from the same drawback. It has largely taken a narrow, rule book-based approach. Consequently, while a few aspects are flogged repeatedly, there is hardly any attempt to systematically fit various happenings in the theoretical framework. What I have hoped to do in this book is to bring a critical social science perspective to this subject and to relate practice to theory on one hand and Indian developments to those elsewhere, on the other.

The scope of the subject has become wide today. Apart from firm-specific factors, a number of macro-level and institutional variables such as capital market legal system, investors rights and historical evolution of corporate governance system etc. are included in the discourse. Putting all these variables together, coherently, is difficult. I leave it to the readers to judge how far I have succeeded in facing this challenge. The area of corporate ethics has been omitted for its ‘behind the doors’ nature and lack of hard data.

This work was made possible by a generous research associateship scheme of the UGC. The scheme halved my teaching work and authorities of Ness Wadia College of Commerce, Pune where I teach, put up with a lot of inconvenience to enable me to concentrate on this research. I am grateful to them.