The emergence of the knowledge society has been prompting a reconceptualization of public and private forms of governance. Both political and private' actors such as non-governmental organizations, corporations, collectives and individuals operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty. On the one hand, governments and governmental actors have become increasingly dependent on fragmented, societal knowledge, which leads to an important reconfiguration of the relations between political and civil society actors. The state, in its dependence on constantly updated information, is at the same time implicated in the production of that very information by creating rules and facilitating institutional growth for knowledge production and dissemination. On the other, corporations and other societal actors face pressing governance challenges that in many ways mirror those of contemporary political governing bodies. The dependence of management on expert knowledge, which is generated and communicated both in- and outside of the firm, has grown in correlation with the expanding reach of business activities and their impact. With governments and corporations as knowledge actors, producers and consumers, the pressure on law to facilitate and to enable these processes has exponentially grown. No longer clearly situated in an either exclusively public or private sphere, political', private', corporate actors are both authors and receivers of the rules that govern their behavior. While this new embeddedness of societal activity in a decentralized, deterritorialized and dehierarchized knowledge society suggests a paradigmatic move beyond distinctions based on institutional manifestation (state/market) or political, normative demarcation (public/private), many of the formerly posed formal and substantive questions remain unanswered. The present paper traces the parallel governance challenges that present themselves to both present-day political governments and corporate management by placing particular emphasis on the knowledge-driven and knowledge-driving nature of all decision-making. The paper suggests that former distinctions are helpful in identifying the different normative starting points in a debate, they must today be detached from the institutional framework within which they were continuously developed. As governments and corporations are today faced with the need to navigate a knowledge society marked by extreme forms of functional differentiation, the role of law must be reconceived with regard to this structural transformation.

Keywords: Corporate Governance, Public Administration, Knowledge Society, Human Resources, Convergence/Divergence of Corporate Governance Systems

Licence en droit (Paris 1991), LLM (Harvard 1998), LLB (Frankfurt 1995), PhD (Frankfurt 1998), Habilitation (Frankfurt 2004).

Since July 2004, Professor Peer Zumbansen holds the Canada Research Chair for the Transnational and Comparative Law of Corporate Governance at Osgoode Hall Law School. He is Founder and Director of the CLPE (Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy) Network (www.comparativeresearch.net) at Osgoode Hall Law School and of the collaborative urban research laboratory (curl). The two programs have been brought together in 2008 under the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society (www.criticalresearchlab.org).

Since July 2007, Professor Zumbansen has been the Associate Dean for Research, Graduate Studies and Institutional Relations. In 2005-2006, Professor Zumbansen was member of Osgoode's Curriculum Reform Group for the First-Year Program, in 2008-2009 he will serve as one of three faculty members on the Reform Group for the Upper-Year Curriculum Program.

Professor Zumbansen teaches the upper-year course in Business Associations, a first year perspective options course in Globalization and the Law and the new first-year Legal Theory Seminar, his own seminar in Comparative Corporate Governance and Political Economy and two Graduate Research Seminars, Law and Economic Relations and Legal Theory: Transnational Governance. He was the co-convenor [(2007-2008) with 2nd year law student, Danielle Allen] of the Cities Research Methodology Reading Seminar [The Reading Lab], an interdisciplinary research seminar for the curl program, offered to students and faculty from seven faculties at York and to various experts in Toronto. He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Idaho College of Law, at Osgoode Hall and is a regular visiting professor at the University of Bremen's Collaborative Research Centre Transformations of the State. He has authored books and articles in Private and Corporate Law, International Law, and Legal Theory.
He is co-founder and co-editor in chief of German Law Journal (http://www.germanlawjournal.com). His current research focuses on comparative corporate governance, comparative law and legal education reform.

Monographs (since 2004):

Innovation und Pfadabhängigkeit. Das Recht der Unternehmensverfassung in der Wissensgesellschaft. Habilitation Thesis, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt, in preparation for publication 2008. 440 pages

Rough Consensus and Running Code: A Theory of Transnational Private Law (co-authored with Gralf-Peter Calliess), manuscript, submitted to Oxford University Press. 250 pages

Editorships (since 2005):

Since 2005: Editor in Chief, Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Research Paper Series, www.comparativeresearch.net/papers

Special Symposium Editor (together with Gralf-Peter Calliess), Law, the State and Evolutionary Theory, Vol. 09, No. 04 (2008) German Law Journal, in preparation for book publication with further contributions by Amitai Aviram, Bruce Benson, Simon Deakin, Gillian Hadfield and Erich Schanze.

Guest-Editor, Special Symposium Issue: Governing Contracts, 14:2 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Summer 2007, 181-483.

Articles & Chapters (since 2006):

Transnational Law, in: Encyclopedia of Comparative Law , 738-754 (Jan Smits, ed., Kluwer Law International 2006) Preprint available here.

The Conundrum of Corporate Social Responsibility: Reflections on the Changing Nature of Firms and States, in: Transboundary Harm in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Trail Smelter Arbitration (R.Bratspies & R.Miller eds., Cambridge University Press 2006). Preprint avaiable here.

The Parallel Worlds of Corporate Governance and Labor Codes, for 13 Indiana Journal Global Legal Studies 261-312 (2006), preprint available here.

Comparative Law's Coming of Age? Twenty Years After Critical Comparisons', in: Alexander Hanebeck/Felix Hanschmann/Nina Malaviya/Timo Tohidipur (eds.), Liber Amicorum Günter Frankenberg. Frankfurt: 2005, and in 6 German Law Journal 1073-1084 (2005).

Spaces and Places: A Systems Theory Approach to Regulatory Competition in European Company Law, 12:4 European Law Journal 535-557 (2006), preprint available here. [Refereed]

Varieties of Capitalism and the Learning Firm: Corporate Governance and Labor in the Context of  Contemporary Developments in European and German Company, in 8 European Business Organization Law Review [EBOR] 467-496 (2007), available as CLPE Research Paper 3/2007, http://ssrn.com/abstract=993910 ; Cambridge Centre for Business Research [CBR] Working Paper 347, available at:
 http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/cbr_wpfull3.pl?series=cbrwps&filename=cbr2007&paperid=WP347 [Refereed]

Law after the Welfare State: Formalism, Functionalism and the Ironic Turn of Reflexive Law, 56 American Journal of Comparative Law (2008), in print

Introduction: Private Ordering in a Globalizing World: Still Searching for the Basis of Contract, 14 Indiana Journal Global Legal Studies 181-190 (2007)

The Law of Society: Governance Through Contract, 14 Indiana Journal Global Legal Studies 191-233 (2007), available as CLPE Research Paper 2/2007, available at:
http://www.comparativeresearch.net/papers/CLPE_Vol_03_No_03_RPS_02_Zumbansen.pdf and http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=988610

Global Forces of Corporate Change and European Path-Dependencies. Review Essay on After Enron. Improving Corporate Law and Modernising Securities Regulation in Europe and the US. Oxford, UK/Portland, OR, U.S.A.: Hart Publishing 2006, in 22 Banking & Finance Law Review (2007) / 56 American Journal of Comparative Law 101-108 (2008).

The ECJ, Volkswagen and European Corporate Law: Reshaping the European Varieties of Capitalism, 8 German Law Journal 1026-1051 (2007) [together with Daniel Saam], available here.

Law, the State, and Evolutionary Theory: Introduction (with Gralf-Peter Calliess), 9 German Law Journal 389-396 (2008), available here.

New Governance' in European Corporate Law Regulation as Transnational Legal Pluralism, in: 14 European Law Journal (2008), forthcoming