The book places ownership at the centre of all relevant choices that the company makes. In particular, it addresses the issue of governance from the perspective of ownership, and in a broader and more articulated sense than most Anglo-Saxon studies do. The authors analyse 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 standard view of governance as a typical issue that refers to large, listed, and publicly held corporations. Rather, authors 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 analysed. The second part of the book analyzes, in a number of advance economies (USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan) as well in some emerging countries (China, India, Brazil, and Argentina), and two transition economies (Russia and Poland), capitalism models, different economic and business cultures, and their role in shaping the type of corporate governance that has emerged in the last thirty years.