Understanding Multiple Accountability Logics Within Corporate Governance Policy Discourse: Resistance, Compromise, or Selective Coupling?

Abstract

Conducting comparative country-based case studies of the US, the UK, and Australia over a twenty-four-year period and employing discursive and linguistic lenses, this paper scrutinizes the historical development of the founding principles of corporate governance. We aim to interpret and study the underlying meanings of public accountability within the policy discourses and hybridization patterns to explain the manifold ‘doomed to fail’ attempts in the integration of the essence of integrated thinking and reporting into the core of the business and corporate governance. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study reveals how the continued privileging of the isolated economic-based accountability agenda, coupled with the marginalization (or absence) of other logics of accountability, is distortedly normalized over time. The findings uncover traces of resistance to recognition, ineffective attempts to compromise, and selective coupling strategies at the macro level of corporate governance policy-setting as responses to the competing accountability logics. This study contributes toward disentangling the complex relationship between multiple and competing (dominant) logics of accountability, and classical liberalism (and neoliberalism). The study contributes to contemporary social dialogues regarding structural reforms in search of a corporate governance manifesto that enables an effective operationalization of the intended goals of integrated thinking and reporting.