Understanding corporate governance from an academic, practical, legislative, and social perspective has never been more important given the increasingly internationalized and financialized global economy. The global financial crisis of 2008 and resultant recession painfully evidence what many scholars have argued throughout the last century: in market-based economies, the economic and the social spheres remain inseparable. Today, such economies rest on the backs of publicly-traded corporations and understanding how such corporations are governed is the goal of this research effort. I argue that corporate governance is not a set of characteristics to be measured, modelled, and packaged as prescriptive principles but rather it is a series of exercises in decision-making across space and time rife with idiosyncrasies. As such, I present a novel corporate governance research agenda which focuses on the two pillars of decision-making, namely the environmental contexts within which the decision-making processes are embedded and the networks of agents involved in such processes. In a globalized economic setting, both the environmental contexts and the networks of agents readily transcend multiple social, cultural, and geo-political boundaries—resultantly, the research agenda I present is one predicated on the geography of governance. I apply my research agenda to the Canadian setting in efforts to demonstrate the utility of this research agenda while providing a better understanding of the Canadian model of corporate governance. This research is the first to systematically investigate the Canadian model of corporate governance and concludes that, contrary to predominant assumptions, there is no single harmonious national model but rather a mosaic of thirteen distinct provincial and territorial models which are asymmetrically linked by means of market actors and interactions and which exists in a temporary balance of parochial and cosmopolitan forces.

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