Corporate Corruption and Patriarchal Power: A Feminist Critique of Governance and Accountability

This article develops a critical feminist account of corporate corruption, challenging conventional approaches that treat corruption as individual misconduct within otherwise legitimate governance systems. It argues instead that corruption is structurally enabled by Western corporate governance itself: particularly contractarian ideology, shareholder primacy, and legal frameworks that privilege capital while externalising social and environmental harms. Through comparative analysis of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the article demonstrates how formally permissive approaches to stakeholder interests leave shareholder-oriented norms largely intact and obscure the gendered, racialised, colonial, and ecological consequences of corporate power. Adopting an intersectional feminist lens, it reconceptualises corruption beyond bribery and financial exchange to encompass abuses of entrusted power and systemic forms of extraction, including sextortion and legally sanctioned practices that disproportionately harm Indigenous communities, racialised women, workers, and women in the Global South. The article rejects representational and voluntary reforms to corporate social responsibility and environmental, social and governance frameworks as insufficient, arguing instead for structural governance redesign. It advances binding fiduciary obligations, participatory and Indigenous-informed governance, stronger enforcement institutions, and intersectional accountability as necessary to redistribute corporate power and reorient corporate governance toward substantive equality, democratic accountability, and equitable and sustainable stewardship.