Regulating Corporate Governance in the EU Towards a Marketization of Corporate Control

In the context of the financial and economic crisis, corporate governance and regulatory supervision failures are at the center of public debates. Who controls the modern corporation, and why, has become one of the defining social power relations in contemporary capitalism. Regulation Corporate Governance in the EU fills a gap in the extensive literature on corporate governance and highlights the political nature of EU corporate governance regulation. Laura Horn advances a critical politicaleconomy perspective focusing in particular on political struggles and processes of the neoliberal transformation of company law and corporate governance regulation. Her findings about the marketization of corporate control are at the core to a better understanding of the broader context of capitalist restructuring in the European Union.

LAURA HORN Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science of VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her publications include Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal European Governance: From Lisbon to Lisbon (co-edited with Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Jan Drahokoupil).

"In this impressive and rigorous book, Horn examines the politics, power and paradoxes that are central to the construction and transformation of company law and corporate governance at the European Union level. Horn's lucid analysis makes an important and timely contribution. She not only denaturalises the regulatory developments linked to corporate governance but also maintains focus on the social implications of marketised corporate governance." — Susanne Soederberg, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of Global Development Studies & Political Studies, Queen's University, Canada

"This is an important book, not only for those interested in corporate governance issues but also for those concerned with the power of corporations in modern society. It explains how the state actively constructed the framework that supported the rise of shareholder value in the European Union. Given the dominance of the corporate governance field by micro-level econometric studies, the book provides a much-needed historical perspective on one of the most important projects in post-world war II capitalism." — Sigurt Vitols, Senior Research Fellow WZB and Senior Researcher, ETUI, Brussels

"In this superb book, Laura Horn has given us an incisive, carefully researched, and powerfully argued analysis of European corporate governance reform. Linking national and EU regulatory politics within the broader historical context of financial globalization, her integration of comparative and international political economy strips away the rhetoric of efficiency and 'free' markets to focus on power as the driver and the objective of corporate governance reform." — John W. Cioffi, Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside