In the decade following the collapse of communism no ideological or practical obstacles stood in the way of the global spread of capitalism. Popular enthusiasm for electoral democracy and a market-based economy was so widespread as to permit large corporations to write their own rules of relationship to society. The category Corporate Governance emerged as the rubric under which various theories of the accountability of private power to public interest were developed.

Of a corporation's constituencies, only shareowners have the legitimate power to control their destiny. They profit to the extent of the surplus remaining after all commitments have been satisfied. Shareowners lose when some obligations to other constituencies cannot be discharged in full. Any class so situated should have both the responsibility for creating the “language of accountability” within which the enterprise functions and the authority to do so.

Shareholder activism developed rapidly during the 1990s. At the same time that shareholder involvement became more effective as a discipline to management, forces outside of the corporation loosely coupled under the nomenclature of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began strident public protest over the exercise of corporate power. This pattern of protest was manifested in the withdrawal of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) draft Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the spring of 1998, the demonstrations in Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting in the fall of 1999, at Davos in the winter of 2000, and in Washington, DC in the spring of 2000.