Our research in this area is developing rapidly to deal with questions such as:

• How do stakeholders and firms’ market and institutional environments impact governance processes and outcomes?
• How do senior management leadership characteristics influence governance processes aimed at enhancing social performance?
• How do managers establish strategies, systems and processes to enhance organisational accountability for their sustainability impacts?
• How can alternative conceptions of governance help to improve both social and financial organisational performance?
• How do internal governance processes change in response to non-shareholder pressures?
• How can recent management failures in corporate governance enable us to develop more accountable governance and leadership processes?
• How does corporate governance relate to internal capital markets and institutional investors?

The importance of addressing these questions has been widely recognised in different local and international forums and research on this is in high demand from top tier academic journals in various (sub)disciplines. It requires an interdisciplinary business approach combining insights and methods from the fields of accounting, finance, international business, strategic management and organisational behaviour. Given the existing research priority of corporate governance, the ABS already contains excellent and broad expertise here, as recognised by various external assessments (CWTS, Equis). It is evidenced in the productivity of its researchers in top quality outlets, the international subject matter addressed, and the international diversity of the researchers themselves. The senior research team demonstrates a level of excellence in the area which is difficult to match within Europe. Led by internationally outstanding professors, researchers often adopt innovative, interdisciplinary approaches: as emerging, novel topics are involved, existing approaches usually do not suffice, and new ways of conceptualising, measuring, testing, and empirically studying the phenomena (both quantitative and qualitatively) are needed – at the same time, they should build on and be relevant to existing ‘mainstream’ research.