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Abstract

Corporate governance in Germany changed rapidly in the 1990s, after several decades of institutional continuity. Indications of change are the increasing shareholder orientation of companies; the strategic reorientation of the big banks from the Hausbank paradigm to investment banking; the withdrawal of the state from infrastructural sectors via privatisation; and a break of continuity in company regulation. Impulses for change towards greater market orientation existed before the 1990s, but they remained isolated and resulted in adjustments within the logic of the German variant of organised capitalism. The article argues argues that the simultaneity of reciprocally reinforcing developments changed the situation in the 1990s, leading to an irreversible transformation of the German corporate governance regime.