The term Corporate Governance entered both of the German and Japanese language as at the almost same time as the term shareholder Value in the 1990s. In both countries, this led to people focusing in their discussion on a tension that was already debated in the US since the 1930s: the widening gap between the interests of owners and management.
In Germany, with the 2001 established initiative of the German government to create a Corporate Governance Codex the term became a synonym for „good“ leadership/management. Now the so long dominant legal rules on supervision and normative meanings were supplemented with self-obligation.
Similarly, corporate governance reform has been one of the most critical policy issue in Japan since the early 2000s, and finally resulted in introducing Stewardship Code in 2014 and Corporate Governance Code in 2016.
In general, Corporate Governance describes the external and internal structural frame for the management and supervision of enterprises. The term has a comprehensive outreach and in-cludes - besides legal regulations with pre-defined legal forms such as Aktiengesellschaft or Kabushiki-gaisha - also basics of statutes of the firms themselves, on their ownership and capital relations, the decision-making processes of their management, the organizational structures, questions of information management and the capitalization of firms and aspects of corporate cultures.
This wide range of research questions enables this approach to connect with current research questions of business history as well as economic history and corporate law history and should be combined in respect to the development of the end of the 19th and throughout 20th century in a comparative way between Japan and Germany.
The program committee consists on behalf of the BHSJ of Hideaki Miyajima and Takashi Shimizu and on behalf of the GUG of Louis Pahlow and Christian Kleinschmidt. The organization of the conference lays with Andrea Schneider.
The organizers have the intention to follow the first joint conference with a second one, that should be held in Japan in 2021.
Deadline for paper submission is February 28, 2018.
Abstracts with a maximum of 500 words including also a short CV should be sent to ahschnei-der@unternehmensgeschichte.de (on GuG side) or to tshimizu@waka.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp (on BHSJ side).
Please do not hesitate to contact the program committee or the organizer for any questions.