ABSTRACT

Any inspection of accounting research conference programmes and accounting research journal literature will reveal a litany of studies designated ‘corporate governance’. What this entails is often poorly defined or only implied, and has largely become captive to predictive, positivist, quantitative studies of corporate characteristics mapped against financial disclosure strategies and patterns, often linked to an obsession with the subject of earnings management. There seems no end to the volume of incremental research produced in this particular milieu, so that any reader could be forgiven for concluding that corporate governance has been thoroughly explored by accounting researchers and that the field has been well and truly ploughed.