Despite the prevalence of corporate governance best practice prescriptions and institutional pressures to follow them, many firms do not adhere to corporate governance norms within their institutional domains. This paper draw on the literature on deviations from social norms and the international corporate governance literature to explore the drivers of such deviations. Using a three-year sample of all listed banks in Germany, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, our fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) identifies multiple configurations of causal conditions leading to deviations in levels of board independence, single but asymmetrical configurations for deviating from norms of board diversity in either direction, and no explanations of deviations in board size, and no explanations of deviations in board size. Our findings may have implications for the corporate governance literature as well as for our understanding of the boundary conditions of the drivers of deviating behavior in general.
