Corporate governance as a movement

If we are to believe some business scholars, corporate governance is a very old thing - as old as the seventeenth century and the first joint-stock companies. 1 Others point to Adam Smith's recognition of the 'other people's money' problem or cite Berle and Means's classic analysis of the US securities industry in the roaring 20s as foundational contributions to the idea. 2 Yet the expression 'corporate governance' was not widely used before the 1980s; as corporate governance pioneer Bob Tricker has recently stressed "back in the 1970s the world wasn't using the phrase 'corporate governance' at all - the work of the board was hardly thought of at all". 3 Tracing the history of corporate governance back into prior decades or even centuries would seem to represent a failure to heed the axiom regarding anachronistic vocabulary which is usually attributed to Lord Acton: ie it is wrong to describe historical phenomena with terms that did not exist at that time