Trust and control in Anglo-American systems of corporate governance: The individualizing and socializing effects of processes of accountability

A B S T R AC T This article reformulates the problem of corporate governance through a shift of analytic focus, away from the problems of securing the interests of remote owners, to an understanding of processes of accountability and their effects, both objective and subjective, within Anglo-American systems of corporate governance. In place of the essentialist assumptions about human nature upon which both agency theorists and their organizational critics build, processes of accountability are instead held to be themselves constitutive of subjectivity. A distinction is drawn between different processes and practices of accountability in terms of either their ‘individualizing’ or ‘socializing’ effects. Individualizing effects, which are associated with the operation of market mechanisms and formal hierarchical accountability, involve the production and reproduction of a sense of self as singular and solitary within only an external and instrumental relationship to others. In contrast, socializing forms of accountability, associated with face-to-face accountability between people of relatively equal power, constitute a sense of the interdependence of self and other, both instrumental and moral. The article explores the complex interaction of these effects in the context of AngloAmerican systems of corporate governance. The article concludes by offering a fourfold typology of the combinatory potentials of individualizing and socializing effects.