Corporate governance sits at the intersection of many disciplines, among them law, business, management, finance, and accounting. The point of departure for large portions of this literature concerns the ugliness of greed, ambition, misdemeanors, and malfeasance of corporations, their directors, and those actors who hold shares in them. This essay takes a rather different starting point. Drawing upon insights from a distant field, it uses the discussion of aesthetics in Dewey’s treatise on art to ask what motivates directors to act in ways that constitute the attention and engagement that we associate with the effectiveness of boards. Using Dewey’s thinking about aesthetic experience, this paper examines the experience of organization boards, both in the literature and in the personal experience of the author. These observations point to need to reflect on motivation when considering both the practice of corporate governance and the policy frameworks in which it operates.

公司治理处于许多学科的交叉点，其中包括法律、商业、管理、金融和会计。大部分文献的出发点是关于公司、公司董事和持有公司股份的演员的贪婪、野心、轻罪和渎职的丑陋。这篇文章采取了一个相当不同的起点。它借鉴了来自遥远领域的见解，利用杜威关于艺术的论文中对美学的讨论来询问是什么促使董事以构成我们与董事会有效性相关的注意力和参与的方式行事。本文运用杜威的审美经验思想，考察了组织委员会的经验，无论是在文献中还是在作者的个人经历中。