The RBC Professorship in Responsible Organizations at the John Molson School of Business, in collaboration with the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Corporate Governance and the Department of Accountancy, is pleased to welcome Bertrand Malsch, Assistant Professor & Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Accounting at Queen's School of Business.
A light lunch, coffee and refreshments will be served starting at noon.
This paper investigates the dynamics of complexity and expertise in the context of compensation committees (CCs). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, mostly with CC members and consultants, we bring in the domain of visibility two axes of subordination that impact the mindset of corporate governance participants and, ultimately, may undermine directors’ degree of accountability to shareholders. The first axis involves CC members’ subordination to consultant expertise, which tends to be considered as an important and even indispensable ally in dealing appropriately with the webs of complexity that allegedly characterize executive compensation. Nourished partially by the first axis, the second one implies subservience to these webs of complexity, which are widely presumed and naturalized by CC members and the consulting experts they employ. One of our main contributions is to question the ascendancy of the notion of complexity in the boardroom in the hope that it will help a number of actors engage in deeper forms of reflexivity when addressing matters of corporate governance. Complex protocols and intricate disclosures are not inescapable means of dealing with the realities of corporate governance; the appeal of understandability and simplicity should not be discarded when pondering over the substance and relative merits of different corporate governance regimes.
Bertrand Malsch
Bertrand Malsch is an assistant professor of accounting at Queen’s School of Business. His research is informed by sociological and organizational perspectives and aims to develop a better understanding of regulation and control, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, financial auditing and professional expertise. Bertrand’s work is published in top accounting and business journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies.