Enterprise Governance in Transition: A Stakeholder Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to use the stakeholder approach to identify how the specific conditions in countries in transition determine the development of specific governance structures. First enterprise governance will be defined and some general determinants behind the governance structure in a market economy will be described. The focus is on the distribution of rights on different stakeholders.
The governance structure in Western countries are used as a reference, but it is stressed that there are very specific conditions for developing governance structures in economies in transition concerning. An important determining factor for developing the new governance system is the privatization process. Different privatization models favor specific stakeholders. The conditions for governance structures change over different stages in the transition process. These different elements are taken together to see how they facilitate different types of governance structures with focus on the distribution of ownership on different stakeholders. The paper is concluded by proposing some preliminary theses about the trends in the development of governance systems in transitional
economies.