Samenvatting

The number of boards in the public domain has risen sharply in recent decades and so has the number of reports containing guidelines for effective and good governance. The question, however, is what this flow of advice is based on and what we actually know about board capacity. In this paper, we discuss theoretical expectations on boards, recent developments in governance based inspection, and empirical research on this topic. All in all, it appears that relatively little empirical research is conducted into boards in the public domain. And the research that is available is as yet not very optimistic. Based on these observations, we conclude that it is necessary to re-examine the policy assumptions with regard to board capacity in the public domain.