International corporate governance: Research in 2017 and beyond

Mays Business School’s Department of Management hosted an extension conference Oct. 26-27 that explored new directions in international corporate governance research. The event, which was an extension of the main Strategic Management Society’s (SMS) annual conference in Houston, took place at the Mays CityCentre facility. The extension conference built on the SMS Annual Conference theme of “Convergence and Intensity of Global Competition.” It focused on the continued importance of new directions in research on international corporate governance.

Professors Laszlo Tihanyi and Mike Withers served as co-organizers of the event. During the conference, a number of panel discussions, featuring leading scholars whose research has helped move the international corporate governance literature to its current prominent position in the strategic management discipline, were available to conference attendees.

Executive Associate Dean Duane Ireland welcomed the attendees and spoke about Mays Business School and its strategic plan. In response to the conference, Ireland noted that, “hosting a conference in which scholars from across the world participate yields an outstanding opportunity to showcase the quality of the scholarship our faculty is producing as well as our unique and excellent CityCentre facility.” He said Tihanyi and Withers “are to be congratulated for very successfully organizing and leading a conference that created an opportunity for scholars to come together for the purpose of advancing the research associated with an increasingly important topic that affects organizations on a global basis.”

Withers said he considered the extension conference a great success. There were 56 total participants from 36 universities across 12 countries, with one-third of the participants coming from outside the U.S. Current and former Ph.D. students from the Mays Department of Management participated in the conference as well.

“We had a number of participants tell us how much they enjoyed the research discussion from the day’s events,” Withers said. The panels included conversations about the need to examine corporate governance in a global environment, the use of comparative analysis, and the challenges of conducting international research. “The highlight of the extension was the lively dialogue between the panelists and participants regarding each of these topics,” he said.

Panelists from Mays were Professors Steve Boivie, Bert Cannella, Cindy Devers, and Mike Howard. Other panelists included Guoli Chen (INSEAD), Craig Crossland (University of Notre Dame), Bob Hoskisson (Rice University), Ryan Krause (Texas Christian University), Wei Shen (Arizona State University), and Gurneeta Vasudeva (University of Minnesota).