ABSTRACT
The genesis of the research reported in the book lies in developments in Anglo-American human resource management and corporate governance across the last decades of the twentieth century. In the realm of human resource management, there was an increasing emphasis on 'high trust', 'high commitment' and 'co-operative' workplace management strategies. In corporate governance, the triumph of agency theory elevated the delivery of 'shareholder value' to an overarching corporate goal. As legal academics, people were particularly interested in the extent to which law and regulation had contributed to these developments. By the beginning of the twenty-first century a range of scholars explored the relationship between corporate governance and labour management. Recent published work on legal origins theory and labour and corporate law in Australia suggests that the theory is at best a weak indicator of legal development over a 40-year period.
