The expansion of corporate governance

International audienceThe beginning of this reasoning puts forward the problem of the nature of the company and of its institutional justification, particularly according to the balance “contribution – remuneration” addressed to its stakeholders and to the society, as well as the vocation of corporate governance to focus everything on economic value creation. The political sphere having lost its traditional function of sense making is then confronted with a dilemma: - to answer, according to its doctrinal logic, social problems by developing public services, - to limit this development to face the contesting of public utilities according to the argument of efficiency and, at the same time, favoring the development of companies according to the legitimacy of privatizations. These two aspects represent the dialectical argument of the place of the State in a liberal perspective with an oscillation between a ‘positive' State according to the legitimacy attributed to its intervention and a ‘negative' State, which has to intervene the least possible, while guaranteeing the conditions of development for companies. On front of the lack of a political answer, private initiative tends to develop, in a palliative way, with NGOs for example, NGOs which are ruled according to corporate governance, but adding this new kind of organizations with an institutional vocation to fulfill missions of public utility. Their modes of governance are inherited from corporate governance but according to a humanist and social objective. The research question of this text is to know how far the expansion of governance we experience today is related (or not) with corporate governance and what does it mean. The lines of reasoning of this text is as follows: - comments about the development of ‘intermediate' organization, - the discussion of a ‘broad' conception of governance, - comments on the White Paper on European Governance issued by the European Commission