Corporate governance e società della conoscenza. Tra teoria e prassi

In this work we redefine governance in a way that goes beyond the traditional separation between power and control in a multi-stakeholders model setting. Governance is defined as a sustainable/ecological process of power sharing and legitimacy acquisition both within and outside the company. Our major focus in this paper is on the sustainability of such a process. We argue that there are two major neg-entropic and self-organizing forces, which have found only little room in the current debate, and that, according to our perspective, change profoundly the way the problem of governance has been traditionally faced: knowledge and ethics. Considering these two main forces leads us to two major conclusions about reflexive firms as process-engine to consolidate cooperation and altruism between agents not always self-interested also if often interested to make huge quantity of money and high profits. A new meta-Corporation where management can’t be a simple neutral technical function but an emotional intelligence, a motivational resource of organization to rebuilding an evolutionary sharing identity. The first is that the sustainability of this ecological process of governance requires stakeholder sharing a common set of goals and values ex-ante rather than ex-post, when this value has been already defined. The second is to draft the elements of meta-corporation that is capable to do both as sense making like sharing interests of stakeholders and management, or facing and manage multidimensional complexity of “personal capitalism”, peer production, emergent systems, extreme events, hyper extended networks. In a simple word a great or small network company able to building sustainable ecologies of value.