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" Understanding corporate governance in Mexico : "
Aviña-Vasquez, Carlos Rafael
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1099436
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TLets572778
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| Main Entry
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Aviña-Vasquez, Carlos Rafael
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| Title & Author
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Understanding corporate governance in Mexico :\ Aviña-Vasquez, Carlos Rafael
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| College
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University of Essex
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| Date
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2012
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2012
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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This research, which is grounded on Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework deals with the explanation of corporate governance as a social space and the practices of audit committee members, internal auditors and independent board members within a public listed corporation in Mexico. The theories of field and practice of Pierre Bourdieu helps us to understand the space of struggle within the corporate governance field in Mexico. The habitus a central concept in Bourdieu's theory focuses on the way of acting, feeling, thinking and being of actors in the corporate governance field. And the field as part of the on-going context in which the actors live, structures the habitus, while at the same time the habitus is the basis for social agents' understanding of their lives, including the field. The dialectical relationship between the field and the habitus overcomes the duality of structure and agency, because following Bourdieu the habitus mediates between the individual and the social collective. The analysis shows that the field of corporate governance is structured and structuring with the practices of participants in the social space. Hence, the habitus carries history to the present circumstances of audit committee members, internal auditors, independent board members, institutional actors, professional agents and all those participants in the corporate governance field in Mexico. It is through the habitus that the corporate governance field in Mexico is produced and reproduced. Corporate governance practices also reflect the culture of corporate actors in Mexico. The analysis also looked at patterns of social organization through the structural network of board interlocks. The analysis shows that corporate governance practices adopted in Mexico reproduce existing hierarchies of power and have created new objects of social organization that perpetuate the prevailing structures. That is, the practical knowledge of audit committee members, internal auditors and independent board members purports an independent authentication of the company's financial statements and internal control. But, the analysis shows that their inclusion in the corporate governance field is sustaining a particular power structure. In other words, majority shareholders control Mexican corporations and the analysis shows that corporate governance practices in Mexico are not neither neutral nor disinterested. Instead, it was found that corporate governance practices and the corporate instrumental discourse of control, accountability and corporate transparency are consolidating a particular corporate order and power relations. The analysis also shows that the positions corporate agents and institutional actors occupied in the corporate governance field in Mexico are political in the sense that they are characterized by institutional structures and arrangements, hierarchies, instruments of control and command and power systems. In this way, corporate governance in Mexico can be seen as a contested discursive terrain, within which there is a variety of voices engaged in a political process of claims for recognition, acceptance and dominance. Despite the importance of board interlocks, the role of audit committee, internal auditors and independent board members m the operation of effective corporate governance, researchers and policy makers paid little attention especially in emerging economies such as Mexico. This research fills this gap. I used data from in-depth interviews and corporate annual reports to understand the field of corporate governance in Mexico.
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University of Essex
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