This book contains a selection of the papers given at a workshop on corporate control and accountability held at the University of Warwick in 1991. The hardback edition appeared in 1993. The chapters, mainly by lawyers but also with contributions from other disciplines, contain interesting discussions of many of the issues that have occupied the research agenda in company law over the past decade, ranging through such topics as the boundaries of the firm, the market for corporate control, employee share ownership, and comparative corporate governance.

A recurrent theme is an assessment of the contractual theory of the corporation, which dominates the American theoretical literature and has also been a feature of the much smaller body of theoretical writing in company law in this country. The contractual theory is multi-faceted and it is not surprising in a disparate collection of essays by different writers that the appraisal should be