National and transnational structuring of the British corporate elite

Corporate power in Britain is multifaceted, multilayered and geographically structured. In contrast to the classic rise of the capitalist class, the established landed aristocracy was not overthrown in Britain but became embedded in its ascendancy, an articulation that strongly marks institutional forms of power to this day (Anderson 1964). The industrial revolution that drove the accumulation of national wealth in nineteenth-century Britain had its catalyst in the wealth of international trade and plunder, and in turn was quickly followed by international corporate expansion. British capital dominated international investment through to the Second World War and today still accounts for the world’s second largest overseas direct investment stock (Dunning and Archer 1987; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2011). So the British corporate elite are intimately structured by a complex of national and transnational influences. Periodic attempts to delve into the growing documentary archive of elite relationships in Britain have barely pierced the outer layers of the structures of corporate elite cohesion, however. The availability of data and the potentially strategic importance of a director’s role have led attention primarily towards interlocking directorships (Aaronovitch 1956; Useem 1984; Windolf 2002), while the mining of biographical databases provides an entry-point into elite schools, clubs and social circles (Sampson 1962). But these are only limited components of the taxonomy of multiple layers of inter-organizational bonds proposed by Scott and Griff (1984) as constituting elite cohesion, let alone extended to national and transnational dimensions (see Table 8.1). This chapter takes a modest taxonomic step through these layers, reviewing and extending John Scott’s periodic studies (1986, 1991a, 1991b, 2003; Scott and Griff 1984) of British director interlocks, temporarily and methodologically, and then considers the pattern of interlocks in the context of transnational influences on the British economy

Getting started in social network analysis with NETDRAW

Provides detailed instructions and theoretical context for undertaking social network analysis with the software package Netdraw in organisational settings

Social network analysis

Social network analysis comprises a powerful set of techniques for quantifying, differentiating, and interpreting social interactions or relational data in general. This provides a means of interrogating assumptions of independent yet homogeneous actions and pay-offs in economic processes, a particular interest of heterodox approaches to economics. Contemporary applications include modelling opinion leadership among consumers, search and matching in labour markets, collaboration in research and development, patterns of innovation diffusion among firms, and global commodity chains. This chapter introduces the central concepts and methods of social network analysis, including data collection and interpretation considerations and a brief discussion of specialized software in the field. Each is illustrated with an economic application, either a heterodox example or with a discussion of its heterodox implications

A window on emergent European social network analysis

This paper introduces the collection of papers in this issue, providing context in the recent development of social network analysis in Europe and the catalytic contributions of the Essex University Summer School and latterly the UK Social Networks Association. While these organisations have provided important focuses for social network analysis in the UK their reach has been much broader, principally among graduate students across Europe and the emergent research agenda they are forging. Five broad themes are identified in the collection: epistemic communities, policy networks, corporate networks, organisational networks and social network methodology. A brief social network analysis of citations from the papers in the collection is presented

Director networks and UK corporate performance

The implications of the intricate pattern of relationships formed by company directors holding positions on multiple corporate boards, or 'interlocking', have long been the subject of speculation and investigation. While this web of inter-firm relationships is no longer regarded as prime facia evidence of collusive activity, a growing body of research on US firms has identified a range of performance effects on firms associated with information flows in these networks. Yet research on the role of director networks and firm performance is far from comprehensive and has largely been limited to the largest US corporates. This paper extends the existing research in this field by drawing together the principal findings to date and testing these in a different national context and with a much larger dataset than used previously. The relationship between director interlocks and corporate performance is examined among 6428 UK firms, those with annual turnover of £100 million or more. Social network and regression analysis is used to detect significant relationships between the pattern of director interlinking and corporate performance. A number of significant relationships are identified, broadly consistent with the US research but some phenomena distinctive to the UK is found, reflecting differences in the structure and sociology of capital markets in the two countries. In particular the role of executive directors is much less significant to the general financial performance of UK firms than to US firms and is more focused on reputational concerns in capital markets

Joining up the dots: Using social data to measure the effects of events on innovation

The paper studies the effects of the LeWeb tech conferences using data collected from the social media platform Twitter and the code sharing website GitHub. The extent to which attendance at the conference and other factors determined the patterns of tweeting among participants are examined. A group of attendants of the London LeWeb conference who did not attend the subsequent Paris event is used to assess the effects of LeWeb Paris. Conference attendees are matched to their corresponding profiles on GitHub to allow the effect on code collaboration to be examined. Permutation regression and Stochastic Actor Orientated Modelling (SAOM) are used to undertake a statistical evaluation of the changes in network

Isomorphic effects of managerial and directoral career paths

The extensive array of interlocking directorate research remains near-exclusively cross-sectional or comparative cross-sectional in nature. While this has been fruitful in identifying persistent structures of inter-organisational relationships evidence of the impact of these structures on organisational performance or activity has been more limited. This should not be surprising because, by their nature, relationships have strong longitudinal and dynamic qualities that are likely to be difficult to isolate through cross-sectional approaches. Clearly, managerial practice is inevitably strongly conditioned by the specific contingencies of the time and the information available through networks of colleagues and advisers (particularly at board level) at the time. But managerial and directoral capabilities and mental sets are also developed over time, particularly through previous experiences in these roles and the formation of long-lasting 'strong' and 'weak' relationships. This paper tests the influence of three longitudinal dimensions of managers and directors' relationships on a set of indicators of financial performance, drawing from a large dataset of detailing historic board membership of UK firms. It finds evidence of isomorphic processes through these channels and establishes that the longitudinal design considerably enhances the detection of performance effects from directorate interlocks. More broadly, the research has implications for the conception of collective action and the constitution of 'community'

The rise and decline of the Business Roundtable?

This chapter reviews the rise of the Business Roundtable, examines the organizational methods underpinning its success, and considers whether it is now, as some have argued, in a state of decline. An historical method is employed, drawing on a variety of accounts of the major policy battlegrounds over the last 50 years in some detail. This method is supplemented by a social network analysis of the changing position of the Roundtable in the network of congressional lobbying, employing a little-used dataset. The author finds that the persistence of the Roundtable and its effective modus operandi indicates that the forces of elite cohesion are wider than those formed by the interlocking personnel between organizations. It has been able to accommodate new powerful organizational entities that have emerged with changes to the structure of the economy, and continues to become increasingly central to the US policy advocacy network

Navigating online and offline communications in the hybrid future

Lockdown suggests working from home will remain important, but will require more sophisticated communications skills to navigate effectively

Simple tools with a complex attitude: A new way to imprint the implicit factors of organizational culture and make sense of maturity for change

In this paper we introduce a new generation of sensemaking tools that are able to imprint organizational values, qualities, and skills, assess their compatibility with the corporate vision or their adequacy for a specific change and depict organizational archetypes. The main advantage of these tools derives from their ability to deliver reliable, tangible and contextual information on intangible assets and ambiguous issues. For this, they use archetypal models to structure their content, complex emergent methods to collect data, common logic rules to assess them and geometric templates to visualize the results. This combination permits easy contextualization of the content, authentic and real life representing data, removal of biases, as well as meaningful and comparable deliverables. The experience from the development and implementation of such a relevant tool shows that a structured approach to emergence and self-organization is feasible and fruitful. This opens new perspectives for the objectivity, wider acceptance and transferability of findings in qualitative research and the creation of effective diagnostic tools to be used especially in complex and transitional contexts