Russia has been lagging behind most of the developed countries and some of the transition economies in terms of the corporate governance infrastructure (Woodruff, 2004). However, the challenge to develop strategic assets, particularly in the form of oil and gas reserves, produced the need to attract foreign capital and expertise. This in turn has led to a mounting pressure to improve fundamental characteristics of corporate governance such as the regulatory environment, enforcement mechanisms, corporate structure and transparency (Preobragenskaya, 2004). Since strategic assets are at the very heart of the still undiversified Russian economy, it is easy to see how corporate governance has become one of the top priorities on the agenda of national reforms (EU-Russia Roundtable on Corporate Governance, 2006). This study attempts to register the perceived change in the institutional context in Russia through analysing reported corporate disputes. Thematic template analysis is applied to the data on corporate conflicts taken from the English language Russian press. The results of the study suggest a positive change in perception about the role of formal institutions with reference to private entities and a negative change in terms of perception in relation to state entities. This conclusion is based on the comparison of corporate disputes and enforcement practices employed by the parties to corporate disputes reported in 1998 and 2006. On an academic level this study addresses a call in the literature to give more consideration to the particularities of the management environment and the fragility of its social systems in Russia (Kuznetsov & Kuznetsova, 2001) as well as complement understanding of Russian corporate governance by concentrating on the in-depth analysis of company behaviour (Iwasaki, 2007)
