“Agency theory, stewardship theory and residual right: logics and interpretative models”

The observation of the Governance system in use in the industrial countries underlines diametrically opposite points of view in the interpretation of the art of corporate governance. Such a difference, according to a part of the doctrine, is linked with an evident evolution that, even if it is still in an embryo stage, could characterize the enterprises in the XXI century, if compared with those of the last fifty years. Up to 1970's, in fact, management philosophy was based on the idea that enterprise is a purely economic entity where the duty of the management is the one ti sustain the capital, being an insufficient resource. The principles and information deriving from that, above all thancks to Alfred Sloan's work and his experiments to the General Motors, lead to a business philosophybased on the concept of strategy, structure and system, where the duty of the Organ of Government (OdG) is planning an organizational model, that is able to ensure dynamics of government in agreement with over - and sub-systems; that's in the awareness that the critical resource is no more exclusively the financial capital, but also the ideas, knowledge, enterprise and human capital. Such a concept, that corresponds to the value produced in the enterprise, leads to deep contradictions in corporate governance so that forms of governance, which are more opened to cooperation and mostly directed to protect the aims of the organization in itself, rather than those ones of the only ownership, have been outlined nex tothe interpretation of Governance, based on the necessity to check opportunism. Considering such contradictions, today more than ever, it would seem useful wondering how governance system influence the distribution of the value produced by the enterprise, or better what stakeholder must profit of the economic wealth as a result of the business and, in the end, what relationship can be established with the wealth in favor of development, employees and ownership. In the attempt to interpret such problem, this work proposes a reading key that integrate the perspective of the Agency Theory and the Stewardship Theory. For this aim, the work ends with a model that, starting from the comparison of the figure of the Agent with that one of the Principal, shows the actual limits in extreme methodological choices, like the two approaches that are object of the study (Agency Theory and Stewardship Theory), underlining as it is not possible to plan the corporate governance on the base of absolute paradigms that emerge from both the socio-organizational culture and the one at the base of corporate finance studies.