Small to Medium Enterprise Governance

Corporate governance regimes such as the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX 2003) Corporate Governance Council's Guidelines, the Combined Code (2003) in the UK, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) in the US reflect pervading beliefs that the majority of business is undertaken by large listed public companies, the characteristics of big business and the endemic threats to their owners' financial welfare they entail are universal, and that as a consequence governance regimes necessary and appropriate for big business are necessarily appropriate for small business. Those regimes are underpinned by a specific variety of shareholder primacy, with considerably less of a focus on the interests of the other, but softer, stakeholders. A substantial part of commercial activity is undertaken by Small and Medium Enterprises contributing to GDP and employment and as such are an important element of the economy. This book examines the notion of SME Governance, that is the hypothesized irrelevance (for most purposes), to the commercial affairs of SMEs of the dominant themes underpinning the corporate governance regimes currently in vogue.