The book places ownership at the center of all relevant choices that the company makes: in particular, it addresses the “problem” of governance from the perspective of ownership, and in a broader and more articulated sense than most Anglo-Saxon studies. The authors analyze the relationship between ownership, governance, and corporate strategy, with a dual objective. On the one hand, the aim is to identify the consistency relationships between the governance structure of the company and its results, because of the centrality that it assumes with respect to many of the strategic choices that companies make. On the other hand, the objective is to consider possible variants to the “basic scheme,” going to investigate the role of ownership, governance and management from a contingency perspective, i.e. in different types of enterprise: public companies, multinational enterprises, state-owned enterprises, and especially family-owned enterprises are analyzed. The second part of the book analyzes, in a number of countries, different economic and business systems and their role in defining the type of corporate governance that has emerged. The assumption is that national business and economic cultures as well as historical, economic, juridical, and institutional dimensions play a crucial role in shaping the debate triggered by the corporate scandals and the implementation of corporate governance.