ABSTRACT
The role of stakeholders in corporate governance is one of the essential axes around which have revolved the principal contributions to the literature on corporate governance. The economic literature has been characterised by an emphatic rejection of the proposition that any group of stakeholders, other than equity investors, have a role to play in corporate governance. That proposition follows from the theory of contracting, and the recognition of special difficulties of the shareholders. By contrast, a literature emerged to attack that normative claim which was inspired by communitarian theory (Mitchell 1996). That literature sought to draw attention to the need for the law's agenda to expand beyond a single constituency. The interests of employees, creditors, customers and the community were emphasised in this literature. Blurring the line between these two bodies of theory is the work on comparative corporate governance. Here, scholars working in economic paradigms emphasised the contingency of the Anglo-American model in which equity investors are paramount, by examining the greater importance of employees and other constituencies in other jurisdictions, including Japan and Germany (see, e.g., Gilson and Roe 1993; Macey and Miller 1995; Roe 1993).
