Corporate Governance: Impulses from the Middle East

The sheer fact that the concept of Corporate Governance is not yet as widely spread in the countries of the Middle-East as in Western economies, may lead to our labelling, once again, this region as underdeveloped. The purpose of this article, however, is to lead the reader to let go of this Western perspective and to discover the distinctive impulses that the Arab-Muslim region has to offer for the further development of the human-social dimension of corporate governance, if not to ultimately transform it in such a “Middle-Eastern” light. We start then, in this article, by revealing some of the general limitations to corporate governance, before moving onto the specific impulses provided by the Muslim-Arab context. Islamic management is a new domain of knowledge that will be addressed in this paper to shed some light on how Islam can inform reform and transform the notion of corporate governance.