Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Reward Management provides a prestige reference work and a state-of-the-art compilation, mapping out contemporary developments and debates on rewarding people in employment, and how they relate to business, corporate governance and management. Reward management stands at the interdisciplinary interface between economics, industrial relations and HRM, industrial psychology and organisational sociology, and increasingly corporate governance incorporating debates around equity and fairness in and around the employment relationship and wider capital-labour relations. In recent years, trade union decline and widening differentials between those employed at the top of organisations have generated critical commentary in the popular media which can negatively impact on social cohesion. Theoretically underpinned but practically oriented, this Companion will synthesise these trends and controversies around issues while tracing conceptual and empirical provenance, currency and future prospects. It will be an invaluable resource for student and researchers in reward management, corporate governance, management and HRM seeking convenient access to an area which is highly complex and controversial in application.