• Understand what it means to own a business and be able to identify and explain the different ownership types.
• Explain what ownership means for leaders and managers of companies.
• Understand the roles of the Board and the Management team, discuss their internal roles and reflect on the different incentives each agent may have.
• Be able to apply theoretical and empirical knowledge to design corporate governance systems

Course context

In modern society, companies and their value creation play role in societal prosperity. Companies have a big responsibility today to manage great values and derive from it a great responsibility to organize the activities of many people. Thus, it is highly relevant to be interested in corporate governance.  This course is an introduction to corporate governance, and on how governance mechanisms work in praxis in companies with different ownership structures. There is great variation in business owners´ preferences, depending on forms of ownership and other institutional conditions, which has important consequences for how companies are organized and managed. There are many stakeholders in a company (owners, employees, customers etc.) and one of the central element in corporate governance is the evaluation of and balancing the different interests. In this course there will be a strong focus on the role of ownership and the implications for businesses from various governance structures will be examined, along with the different relationships between owners and leaders and management and employees. With this, the course aims to prepare the student to be engaged and reflective while using corporate governance to understand and analyse a case, based on solid practical and scientific foundation.

Hands on

In the course we will work with an ongoing case, where students will gradually build their own business with a board, management, and employees, so if and when they decide to start their own business one day or consult others, they have considered the whole process , from ownership structure to employees. Furthermore, students have got a hands on understanding for the problems coporate governance tries to solve. The course take departure in a book and will be taught by researchers, who can contribute with their own research in Corporate Governance. Therefore, the topics of the book will have varying weight depending on the research that takes place at the Center for Corporate Governance.

The literature list is devided into two parts: the main course book and selective research articles and book chapters. .
 

Course book: Thomsen, S., & Conyon, M. (2019). Corporate Governance and Board Decisions. København: Djøf Forlag.
 

Selective chapters in Westergård-Nielsen, N (2020). Danish Boards and their members. Forlaget Handelsvidenskab/​​Samfunds litteratur.

Research articles: TBA