Research methodology of governance studies: Challenges and opportunities

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12225
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Author: Renee Adams,Brian K. Boyd,Steve Gove
• Date: 01 November 2017

EDITORIAL

Research methodology of governance studies: Challenges and

opportunities

1|INTRODUCTION

International governance research is a relatively recent research area.

CGIR has worked to advance both theory and practice on this topic

through a series of review special issues (e.g., Aguilera, Florackis, &

Kim, 2016; Filatotchev & Boyd, 2009). This special issue is intended

to serve as a complement to these theory‐based contributions by

focusing on research methodology.

The term “research methodology”in corporate governance encom-

passes a vastarray of techniques and approaches. The manuscriptssub-

mitted in response to the call for papers for this special issue were

equally diverse. Unfortunately, only a handful of the papers submitted

could be selectedfor inclusion. Whileeach is focused on a specific meth-

odologicaltopic, they collectivelycover a broad spectrum.Yet, no special

issue can be exhaustive; many important aspects remain unaddressed.

The papers in this issueaddress ongoing issues—such as construct mea-

surement—benchmarking methodological norms,introducing new tools,

and providing a number of normative guidelines to improve the rigor

and practicalrelevance of future international governanceresearch. We

present them organized roughly by focus: a review and assessment of

past and current work, addressing current validity issues, introducing

new methods,and providing advice for future research.

2|METHODOLOGY AND MEASUREMENT—

PAST AND PRESENT

The special issue opens with Boyd, Gove, and Solarino's

“Methodological rigor of corporate governance studies: A review and

recommendations for future studies.”The authors present a content

analysis of over 150 empirical articlespublished in CGIR and other lead-

ing outlets between1995 and 2015. They identify a number of temporal

trends as well as differences in research design norms across journals.

Based on these analyses,they identify a number of strengths and weak-

nesses of extant international governance studies. These findings are

used to develop a roadmapfor more effective design of future work.

3|CURRENT CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

ISSUES

Two manuscripts in the special issue seek to address validity

aspects within current methodological approaches. As Black,

Gledson de Carvalho, Khanna, Kim, and Yurtoglu highlight in their article

“Corporate governance indices and construct validity,”there has been a

proliferation in the use of governance indexes in recentyears. But, little

attention has been devoted to the question of understanding whether

governance indexes measure what they are supposed to measure, i.e.

their construct validity. Black et al. draw on research in education and

psychology to propose the use of Cronbach's alpha and principal com-

ponent analysis as exploratory tools for assessing construct validity.

They illustrate how these tools can be used by reexamining some of

their own work.

The next article is “Reexamining CEO duality: The surprisingly

problematic issues of conceptualization and measurement”by Gove

and colleagues. This article focuses on the measurement of CEO

duality across a panel of 14 countries, finding unexpectedly high

levels of longitudinal instability in CEO duality. Their conclusion:

the common single year, dummy variable (0/1) approach to measur-

ing CEO duality used in most studies may result in considerable

underestimation of the effect of duality. Managers likely never con-

sider the research consequences of corporate disclosures, yet aca-

demic researchers are downstream stakeholders to disclosure

decisions as much corporate governance research relies on them,

particularly regulatory filings. The work by Gove and colleagues

urges caution on the use of dichotomized variables while highlighting

the opportunities that exist to utilize secondary data from legally

mandated disclosures in alternative ways to advance the study of

corporate governance phenomena.

4|INTRODUCING NEW

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Three articles introduce and apply new methodological approaches to

corporate governance research topics. Adrian, Wright, and Kilgore

contribute “Adaptive conjoint analysis: A new approach to defining

corporate governance.”Conjoint analysis is used in marketing research

to assess how consumers weigh different product attributes when

forming preferences for goods and services. Using a sample of

Australian directors and shareholders, the authors apply this tool to

identify which governance attributes are perceived to be most critical.

Their findings have important implications for “good governance”

guidelines: Some current guideline elements are perceived as being

minimally important (e.g., restrictions on external board seats), while

DOI: 10.1111/corg.12225

382 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Corp Govern Int Rev. 2017;25:382–383.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/corg