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But, since then, the stock market has greatly recovered, and shareholder zeal has waned accordingly. This culminated in the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. In the early 2000s, the massive bankruptcies (and criminal malfeasance) of Enron and Worldcom, as well as lesser corporate debacles, such as Adelphia Communications, AOL, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing, Tyco, and, more recently, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, led to increased shareholder and governmental interest in corporate governance.The lack of corporate governance mechanisms in these countries highlighted the weaknesses of the institutions in their economies. In 1997, the East Asian Financial Crisis saw the economies of Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and The Philippines severely affected by the exit of foreign capital after property assets collapsed. CALPERS (The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) led a wave of institutional shareholder activism (something only very rarely seen before), as a way of ensuring that corporate value would not be destroyed by the now traditionally cozy relationships between the CEO and the board of directors (e.g., by the unrestrained issuance of stock options, not infrequently back dated ). received considerable press attention due to the wave of CEO dismissals (e.g.: IBM, Kodak, Honeywell ) by their boards. In the first half of the 1990s, the issue of corporate governance in the U.S. Fifty years later, Eugene Fama and Michael Jensen 's " The Separation of Ownership and Control" (1983, Journal of Law and Economics) firmly established agency theory as a way of understanding corporate governance: the firm is seen as a series of contracts. Berle and Means' monograph " The Modern Corporation and Private Property " (1932, Macmillan) continues to have a profound influence on the conception of corporate governance in scholarly debates today.

Means pondered on the changing role of the modern corporation in society. In the 20th century in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 legal scholars such as Adolf Augustus Berle, Edwin Dodd, and Gardiner C.