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Online tools such as social media provide new opportunities for citizens and stakeholder groups to be informed, identify common interests, express and share opinions and demands, organize, and coordinate interventions. Therefore, the Internet could be expected to increase stakeholder engagement in corporate affairs and facilitate good governance. In order to provide an overview of current findings on the impact of online media on governance and stakeholder engagement, we conduct a systematic literature review. Our analysis reveals five topical categories of inquiry. We analyze studies from the field of business participation and find a strong bias towards consumer engagement and marketing issues. Only few studies are found to critically explore the effect of online media on power and value distribution between corporations and stakeholders. We then turn to the more established field of political and civic participation in order to further analyze antecedents, forms, and outcomes of online engagement in civic affairs, and derive a framework for future research. [Copyright John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.]

Since the 1990s, a number of women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have undertaken overseas-funded participatory gender and development projects in rural China. Through their efforts to empower women and increase their community participation, these NGOs and the projects they run are introducing new ideas and practices relating to governance, as well as to gender and development. The aim of this report is to understand the dimensions of the new approaches to rural governance, the history and politics of their introduction, the directions in which they are shaping governance in villages across China, and their impact on gender relations. The report focuses on the work of West Women, a large women's NGO based in Xi'an, the capital of the western province of Shaanxi, and on two overseas-funded participatory development projects run by West Women in Danfeng and Ningshan counties, in Shaanxi.

The concept of power in political governance has traditionally focused on domination and the preservation of the status quo. In an economic context, institutional and organizational studies have expressed growing interest in the dynamics of agency and institutional change, captured in the concept of squot;institutional entrepreneurship." In the context of global free trade, the Fair Trade movement's experience shows that ongoing institutional entrepreneurship is important for entrepreneurs to transcend absorption by corporate hegemony. In this article I examine the capacity for agency in market institutions through the lens of "defiance" to illuminate the imaginative "game players" who evade institutional capture in the evolution of market governance.