Exploring corporate governance: the behavior of characters from the viewpoint of academic author's discourses

Abstract

The aim of this work is to understand how the dominant discourse in academia conceives the characters' behavior with respect to corporate governance. To do this, we examined all Brazilian journals in the fields of management and accounting classified by the Agency of Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Agência de Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES) as A1, A2, B1, B2, or B3. We also studied minutes of meetings of the National Association of Graduate Programs in Management (Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Administração - ENANPAD) and the theses and dissertations of graduate programs in management and accounting classified by CAPES as 4, 5, 6, or 7. We used discourse analysis to analyze the data obtained. The results show the separation of roles, agency conflict and opportunistic behavior as major themes of corporate governance discourse. This discourse has investment safety in productive capitalist organizations and control over opportunistic behavior as dominant ideologies. Discourses on capitalism and economic sciences are inter-discourses. Themes of control, separation, and dispossession have sustained the capitalist ideology of property rights. The behavioral perspective of owners' and managers' characters has been structured by structural-functionalist ideology. This implies property rights as a value to be respected and understands action under the rationale of maximizing its own utility function. Claims and discussions on corporate governance become claims and discussions on capital financiers' safety and trust, resulting in corporate governance being implicitly seen as a behavior-clamping mechanism that symbolizes the determination of relationships to represent safety and confidence. We therefore believe that the present work, by focusing analysis on the field of governance, can bring new perspectives of understanding to the fields of accounting and finance that will help to fill in the dominant conceptual perspectives.