"Canada, like other industrial nations, is undergoing widespread social change at a faster pace than ever before. Many features of our basic institutions are being transformed and some of the values on which they were based are being weakened or swept away to be replaced by others. As this Royal Commission indicated in its first report, Challenges and Choices, the scope and implications of these changes call "into question basic assumptions, values, and institutions at every level of society, from the (...) shop floor to the cabinet room, to the international economic system," but while many values change, others endure."--. (shrink)

This paper explores the effect of structurally enacted governance, such as board membership rules, versus process enacted governance, such as disclosure practices, on investor trust. Certain organizational factors are proposed due to their ability to inform trust propensity and transparency enactment. Regulatory oversight, organizational structure and investor salience are considered in light of their effect on relational and transactional approaches to a company’s investors.

This paper provides a framework for beginning the discussion of how and why corporate disclosure programs vary in their scope. It posits that managerial agency along with certain external forces, such as disclosure regulations, will affect the scope and managerial commitment to a broad or narrow disclosure program scope. Preliminary findings are presented in brief form.

Much of the legal literature discusses regulation and regulatory forms with a seemingly implicit assumption that "those to be influenced" are inherently self-interested and thus motivated to comply with legal structures only when there are sufficient external incentives to do so. This view of the person is inconsistent with recent perspectives in the field of psychology. A law and morality perspective, coupled with insights from the field of psychology, asserts that influence, compliance, and motivation are far more complex than this (...) legal literature would suggest. In this Article, we map the varying influence structures, motives, psychological needs, emotional mechanisms, and levels of moral reasoning that various forms of regulation, from hard law to soft law, might appeal to. We provide examples from global banking and one soft law initiative, the Equator Principles, to illustrate reasons psychology would suggest why soft law may be more effective in some circumstances in influencing behavior within the firm than hard law, while recognizing important limits to such influence. (shrink)