Corporate governance has increased in prominence over the past 30 years or so. It has long been an area of rapid development and, in some instances, following dramatic corporate collapses, drastic measures were required to ensure adherence to good practice in corporate governance. Since the appearance of the first edition of Principles of Contemporary Corporate Governance in 2005, developments have not only gained velocity, but the volume of materials on corporate governance has grown exponentially. This made the appearance of a second edition inevitable. In addition, the global financial crisis that emerged in 2008 and global financial uncertainties related to some worrying revelations in the first half of 2010 about the financial stability of several European Union member countries make it easy to predict that the discipline of corporate governance will retain its prominence in future.

In this second edition of Principles of Contemporary Corporate Governance, the basic approach was again to extract the fundamental and contemporary principles of corporate governance. The majority of authors have a legal background, which reflects an emphasis on legal aspects of corporate governance. However, care has been taken also to focus on managerial and accounting perspectives of corporate governance. It should be emphasised that this book deals primarily with corporate governance of large public corporations. It does not focus separately on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), non-government organisations (NGOs) or public-sector corporate governance. It goes without saying that many of the good principles in corporate governance that are generally applicable to large public corporations are transplantable to other enterprises, organisations and governmental agencies.