Mob Rule Corporate Governance

This next online public lecture will be delivered by Matt Caulfield, Assistant Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University titled: “Mob Rule Corporate Governance".

How should corporations be controlled? This has been a central question since at least Berle and Means, but we have made very little progress. In this talk, I begin by arguing that many frameworks for corporate governance implicitly favor maximal, unmediated stakeholder influence: that is, they imagine firms are best controlled if stakeholders are most empowered and if they are able bring to this power to bear to control the firm (punishing the firm when it does something undesired, and rewarding it when it does something that is desired). While this sounds like a fine mode of governance at first blush, I argue that in its ideal-type it is indeed what I call Mob Rule Corporate Governance (MRCG)—analogous to conceptions of mob rule of the state, where direct and unmediated powers of the citizenry are brought to bear directly on state actors. Exploiting this analogy, I examine some pathologies of MRCG, which are predictive of many of the great fumbles of executives facing stakeholder contestation. Whereas MRCG suggests that firms should shift and turn with stakeholder sentiment when presented with choppy waters, I suggest some mechanisms of mediated stakeholder influence, where the firm can have its own compass and values to stay its own course while taking stakeholder interests into account. 

This lecture will be moderated by Suneal Bedi, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.

Lecture date and time: Thursday, 5 November 2026 | 13:00 – 14:00 EST (19:00 – 20:00 CET)

The public lecture series is organised by the Kelley School of Business Institute for Corporate Governance (ICG+E), in partnership with Ethical Systems and ECGI.