Brown Bag Lunch with Bertrand Malsch (Thursday October 1st)

September 17, 2015
Brown Bag Lunch with Bertrand Malsch (Thursday October 1st)

FUNCTIONAL STUPIDITY IN THE BOARDROOM:

A QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF COMPENSATION COMMITTEES

Featuring: Bertrand Malsch, PhD., MBA, Distinguished Research Fellow in Accounting, Associate Professor of Business, QSB

Empirical findings supporting the widespread celebration of Compensation Committee (CC) members’ cognitive abilities seem to be, at best, inconclusive. Far from the ideal of smartness and despite the increasing presence of formal experts on boards, ongoing scandals involving top executive compensation and the increasing gap between CEO compensation and that of average workers suggest that a form of erraticism and “madness” continues to operate in the boardroom. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, mostly with CC members and compensation consultants, we mobilize the concept of functional stupidity (Alvesson and Spicer 2012) to document and analyze the extent to which CC members are characterized with “inability and/or unwillingness to use cognitive and reflective capacities in anything other than narrow and circumspect ways”. 

Let’s see where the conversation takes us! 

Date: Thursday, October 1st, 2015

Time: 12:00-1:00pm

Location: Goodes Hall, Room 100

Bring your lunch

 

RSVP (appreciated but not required): csi@queensu.ca