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Introduction
The present paper is a reflection on our extensive literature review of corporate governance issues in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and the accumulated empirical material of our own research on corporate governance codes in Hungary within the frame of an FP6 integrated research project called Reflexive Governance in the Public Interest (with a focus on emerging institutional mechanisms aimed at better taking into account the public interest and, in particular, on how better combining private initiatives with public intervention, see Voss et al. , 2005).
Our conclusions, however, transcend the frame of the reflexive governance approach. We recognized that corporate governance practices in the CEE region demonstrate much more diversity than expected in generally similar transition economies; and that the analysis of several external (international governance and market) and internal (national legislation, institutional arrangements, social structure) factors significantly influencing the emergence and practice of corporate governance may add important insights to the understanding of the variables of corporate governance on the macro level.
There is a general acknowledgment of the fact that corporate governance structures significantly differ around the world. One of the tasks is to explain why they differ ([76] Roe, 2003); the other is to explain what is common in them. The most important methodological observation is that we need to adopt a holistic approach in order to comprehend the broad variety of variables of corporate governance and analyze their relationship in a consistent frame. The holistic approach includes a rather exhaustive coverage of different issues: geographic variety, systemic conditions (legal and economic systems, compliance and enforcement mechanisms), social and cultural (value) pluralism. We assert that a holistic approach, by integrating several components that determine corporate governance, is the precondition of a better understanding of corporate governance variables and their functions.
The importance of the holistic approach has been already recognized in the research on corporate governance either directly ([37] Filatotchev and Boyd, 2009; [90] Young and Thyil, 2008; [75] Robbins, 2006) or indirectly by a systemic perspective emphasizing the "consistent whole" ([20] Carver, 2007), by the analysis of the plurality of corporate governance logics ([48] Heugens and Otten, 2007) and a multi-level, multi-dimensional framework to discuss the diffusion, the content and practical impacts of corporate governance ([2] Aguilera and Cuervo-Cazurra, 2009),...