Corporate Elites and Intercorporate Networks (original) (raw)

Although systematic network analyses mapping the social organization of business power date only from the 1970s, scholars have explored the relations that link corporations and their directors into corporate elites and intercorporate networks for over a century. Otto Jeidels's (1905) study of the relationship of German banks to industry, the first noteworthy investigation of this kind, discovered 1,350 interlocking directorates between the six biggest banks and industry. He related the interlock network to "a new phase in German industrial development caused by concentration and launched by the economic crisis of 1900" (Fennema and Schijf, 1978: 298). This chapter reviews the empirical work that followed from Jeidels, with an emphasis upon the period since the 1970s, when social scientists turned to network analysis as the primary means of representing the structure of elite and intercorporate relations.