Corporate Control: Stakeholder Approach

Modern conditions for the development of Russian corporations, the formation of dominant models of ownership structures, sanctions conditions leading to the departure of both foreign shareholders and their representatives from the control bodies of domestic corporations require a revision of the requirements for the emerging systems of corporate governance and control. In the literature, the terms “corporate control” and “internal control system” continue to remain controversial; along with them, the meanings of the terms “shareholder control”, “owner control”, “managerial control”, “actual control” are ambiguous; their legal interpretation prevails, which makes the actual relationship of these concepts from a management point of view. The aim of the article is to analyze the possibility of expanding the applied application of the stakeholder theory of corporate governance to the concept of corporate control. The objectives set in the article: 1) to expand the existing legal interpretations of corporate control through the stakeholder approach, both from a management position — in terms of power relations, and from the position of internal control — in terms of tracking, monitoring and optimizing stakeholder risks; 2) based on the analysis of statistical data, to provide evidence of the right to the existence of a stakeholder approach to corporate control. The article analyzes the possibility of applying the stakeholder theory of corporate governance to the concept of corporate control. The stakeholder approach allows corporate control to be considered, in contrast to the legal approach, more broadly in two aspects: from the point of view of power relations from a management perspective and from the perspective of tracking, monitoring and optimizing stakeholder risks. Based on statistical data, the work provides examples of corporate control from the point of view of various company stakeholders, draws a conclusion about their diversity, and proves the right to exist of this concept in the category under study. The scientific value and practical significance of the study lies in expanding the content of corporate control from the point of view of stakeholder theory, allowing it to be implemented both from the point of view of corporate procedures and of internal control procedures of the corporation. The authors prove the need to design an internal control system in a corporation with an unambiguous structure of its elements, the functionality of which remains debatable today. In the process of the research, it is concluded that corporate control in its managerial form represents a classical dialectical unity, manifested both in the sense of power relations and in the sense of relations of tracking and verification, which involves the design of internal control systems in corporations with the exact determination of the functions of its elements. Due to the debatability of the latter and the complexity of the external environment, this design is a relevant topic for a further research.

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