Stakeholders, Structure and the Failure of Corporate Governance Reform Initiatives in Post-Crisis Thailand

This paper brings together institutional and political perspectives in a framework for mapping the process by which strategic change initiatives are introduced into a system but result in outcomes that may not be intended, expected or desired by the original architects of change. This general framework links stakeholders, structural elements and their interactions to emergent system-level phenomena. It also enables comparison across different systems undergoing change; for example, to understand why the outcomes of the “same” initiatives may very dramatically in different contexts. To illustrate the framework, we examine the process by which an initial flurry of corporate governance reforms in post-financial crisis Thailand have been largely stymied, in spite of a seemingly clear need for such reforms and the conviction of some domestic and foreign promoters of such reforms.

[1]  C. D. Burns.  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber , 1930 .

[2]  Jens Beckert.  Agency, Entrepreneurs, and Institutional Change. The Role of Strategic Choice and Institutionalized Practices in Organizations , 1999 .

[3]  T. Jones,et al.  Stakeholder‐Agency Theory , 1992 .

[4]  A. Friedman,et al.  Developing Stakeholder Theory , 2002 .

[5]  I. Jawahar,et al.  Toward a Descriptive Stakeholder Theory: an Organizational Life Cycle Approach , 2001 .

[6]  N. Fligstein,et al.  Social Skill and Institutional Theory , 1997 .

[7]  T. Buck.  Agents, Stakeholders and Corporate Governance in Russian Firms , 1998 .

[8]  A. Giddens.  Central Problems In Social Theory , 1979 .

[9]  Mary O’Sullivan.  Contests for Corporate Control: Corporate Governance and Economic Performance in the United States and Germany , 2000 .

[10]  A. Wicks,et al.  Convergent Stakeholder Theory , 1999 .

[11]  K. Weick.  The social psychology of organizing , 1969 .

[12]  J. Stiglitz.  Whither Reform? Ten Years of the Transition , 1999 .

[13]  Paul DiMaggio.  Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory , 1988 .

[14]  Tim Rowley.  Moving Beyond Dyadic Ties: A Network Theory of Stakeholder Influences , 1997 .

[15]  W. Richard Scott.  Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems , 1981 .

[16]  Karl E. Weick,et al.  Middle range theories of social systems , 1974 .

[17]  J. Pfeffer.  Organizations and Organization Theory , 1982 .

[18]  Neil Fligstein,et al.  Markets as Politics: A Political‐Cultural Approach to Market Institutions , 1996 .

[19]  L. Preston,et al.  The Stakeholder Theory of the Corporation: Concepts, Evidence, and Implications , 1995 .

[20]  J. Sachs.  The Transition at Mid Decade , 1996 .

[21]  R. Greenwood,et al.  Understanding Radical Organizational Change: Bringing Together the Old and the New Institutionalism , 1996 .

[22]  Philip Selznick.  Leadership in administration , 1957 .

[23]  W. Ross Ashby,et al.  Principles of the Self-Organizing System , 1991 .

[24]  S. Claessens,et al.  Thailand's Corporate Financing and Governance Structures , 1998 .

[25]  R. Freeman.  Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach , 2010 .

[26]  J. Alexander,et al.  Images of Organization , 1988 .

[27]  W. Powell,et al.  The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields , 1983 .

[28]  J. Child.  Organizational Structure, Environment and Performance: The Role of Strategic Choice , 1972 .

[29]  C. Mills,et al.  The Theory of Social and Economic Organization , 1948 .

[30]  Nancy B. Kurland,et al.  A Theory of Stakeholder Enabling: Giving Voice to an Emerging Postmodern Praxis of Organizational Discourse , 1996 .

[31]  Franklin Allen,et al.  比较金融系统 = Comparing financial systems , 2000 .

[32]  Robert N. Stern,et al.  The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. , 1979 .

[33]  G. Redding.  The Conditional Relevance of Corporate Governance Advice in the Context of Asian Business Systems , 2004 .

[34]  M. Archer.  Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory , 1996 .

[35]  Ronald K. Mitchell,et al.  Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and What Really Counts , 1997 .

[36]  Ronald Dore,et al.  National diversity and global capitalism , 1996 .

[37]  E. Schein.  Organizational Culture and Leadership , 1991 .

[38]  Jonathan H. Turner,et al.  Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach.By Margaret S. Archer. Cambridge University Press, 354 pp , 1997 .

[39]  Carolyn P. Egri,et al.  The effects of culture and life stage on workplace strategies of upward influence: A comparison of Thailand and the United States , 2005 .

[40]  C. R. Hinings,et al.  Organizational Diversity and Change in Institutional Theory , 1998 .

[41]  P. Hall,et al.  Varieties of Capitalism , 2001 .