Corporate Governance in India: The potential for Ghandism

This chapter explores the context and institutional pressures which enable and constrain corporate governance in India (Rajagopalan and Zhang 2008). Prior corporate governance research has tended to focus on agency theory and issues in regulating conflicts between management and shareholders. However, an overarching tendency to concentrate on the principal-agent relationship and ‘shareholder centric’ perspectives in mainly Anglo-American contexts have constrained our understanding of corporate governance (see, for example, Brennan and Solomon 2008 p. 890). More recently, some have emphasised the unique, although nascent position, of corporate governance in moderating the power of ‘dominant shareholders’ and empowering minority interests in India (Gupta, Gupta and Hothi 2011; Varma 1997).