ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on corporate governance and corporate boards in the public, for-profit, sector, and particularly on the role of nonexecutive or outside directors and the ideas of accountability under which they are presumed to operate. Ensuring accurate and trustworthy corporate governance, given the nature of corporate power in the global context, is a broader issue that goes beyond the concerns of individual shareholders and nation-state economic policy (Huse 2003). The world’s largest corporations have revenues in excess of the gross domestic product (GDP) of many individual states and have a global presence in the sense that their market listing is not confined to one nationally based exchange. At the domestic level an argument can be made that corporations are no longer private actors. They are public actors in terms of power and influence in areas such as environmental impact, location and relocation decisions, and corporate social responsibility.
