Getting Back to Basics: Challenging Complexity and Accountability in the Boardroom

This paper investigates the dynamics of complexity and expertise in the context of compensation committees (ccs). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, mostly with cc members and consultants, we bring to light two axes of subordination that impact the mindset of corporate governance participants, and may ultimately undermine directors’ degree of accountability to shareholders. The first axis involves cc members’ subordination to consultant expertise, which tends to be considered as an indispensable ally in dealing appropriately with the webs of complexity that allegedly characterize executive compensation. Nourished partially by the first axis, the second implies subservience to these webs of complexity, which are widely presumed and naturalized by cc members and the consulting experts they employ. One of our main contributory statements is to question the ascendancy of complexity in the boardroom, casting doubt on one of the key assumptions upon which practices and expertise in contemporary corporate governance institutions are built and promoted. We also question the extent of epistemic dependency in many compensation committees, where much of the knowledge necessary to properly operate the repertoire of practices (deemed necessary to address the problem of executive compensation determination) is not primarily in the hands of cc members, but rather in those of consultants.