Volume 13, Number 2, December 2018
| Is Corporate Governance Accountability Branch of Social Responsibility? An Empirical Intuition from Ghana |
Alphonse Kumaza¹*, Yuanqiong He²
Abstract
An examination is made of a claim corporate governance promotes social responsibility. This so-called symbiosis has provoked scholarly debate among pro-business, stakeholder proponents and other scholarships about the validity of the assertion. Indeed, the enterprise governance succeeds in making ethics and accountability core corporate governance issues and, therefore, the primacy of stakeholders at the private authority and governmental power convergence is vividly upheld. Meanwhile, social responsibility’s reliant on corporate governance for social commitments and environmental interventions’ attainment cannot, however, be over-emphasised. Therefore, through an empirical prism, a discussion is advanced in favour of the proposition, while acknowledging the disagreement in and contentiousness of this field. A two-way approach is deployed to justify the paper’s support for the proposition, and these are the determination of the appropriate relationship between business governance and social responsibilities, and presentation of reasonable evidence that governance structures provide incentives for social obligations. In the main, interviews and survey data are triangulated through Spearman’s correlation statistical analysis. The result shows a high degree of comparability between business governance and social responsibility, indicating a substantial evidence that corporate governance represents facilitative and promotional phase for the fast mutating and bourgeoning character of social responsibilities. The validation incites and intensifies dialogue between corporate power and public authority not only to champion and promote the agenda but also limit the compounding complicated markets inadequate measurements of business externalities. Unlike previous studies which merely discussed corporate power and social necessities relationships and effects of the latter on the former and vice versa, this study establishes corporate governance role in social discourse via an empirical perspective, while de-emphasising hard borderline between business governance and social objectives. The synthesis, therefore, is a novel standpoint for further investigation to unearth better and enforceable policy for strengthening the commonalities between business control and corporate citizenship.
Keywords: Corporate governance, Corporate citizenship, Externalities, Shareholders, Stakeholders.
JEL Classification: G34, M14, O16
¹ Ph.D. student, School of Management, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, People’s Republic of China (*Corresponding Author, E-mail: getalphonse@gmail.com; kumaza1@yahoo.com; I201522074@hust.edu.cn )
² Professor, School of Management, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, People’s Republic of China