Introduction: Sustainability and Social Responsibility

One of the main issues, which has been of concern to corporate managers, is that of corporate governance (Aras, 2008). Probably since the mid-1980s, corporate governance has attracted a great deal of attention. Early impetus was provided by Anglo-American codes of good corporate governance.¹ Stimulated by institutional investors, other countries in the developed as well as in the emerging markets established an adapted version of these codes for their own companies. Supra-national authorities like the OECD and the World Bank did not remain passive and developed their own set of standard principles and recommendations. This type of self-regulation was chosen above a set of legal standards (Van den Berghe, 2001).² After big corporate scandals, corporate governance has become central to most companies. It is understandable that investors’ protection has become a much more important issue for all financial markets after the tremendous firm failures and scandals. Investors are demanding that companies implement rigorous corporate governance principles in order to achieve better returns on their investment and to reduce agency costs. Most of the times investors are ready to pay more for companies to have good governance standards. Similarly a company’s corporate governance report is one of the main tools for investor’ decisions. Because of these reasons companies cannot ignore the pressure for good governance from shareholders, potential investors and other markets actors.