The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism

Abstract

A key debate on the merits and consequences of globalisation asks to what extent we have moved to a multipolar global political economy. Here we investigate this issue through the properties and topologies of corporate elite networks and ask: what is the community structure of the global corporate elite? In order to answer this question, we analyse how the largest one million firms in the world are interconnected at the level of corporate governance through interlocking directorates. Community detection through modularity maximisation reveals that regional clusters play a fundamental role in the network architecture of the global political economy. Transatlantic connections remain particularly strong: Europe and North America remain interconnected in a dense network of shared directors. A distinct Asian cluster stands apart as separate and oriented more towards itself. While it develops and gains economic and political power, Asia remains by and large outside the scope of the networks of the incumbent global (that is, North Atlantic) corporate elite. We see this as a sign of the rise of competing corporate elites. But the corporate elites from the traditional core countries still form a powerful opponent for any competing faction in the global corporate elite.

Keywords:

• globalisation
• corporate elites
• global order
• interlocking directorates
• multipolar
• regionalism
• community detection

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers and the editorial board for their constructive remarks. This paper benefited from comments of Naná de Graaff and Luc Fransen, as well as from conversations with Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Bill Carroll and Meindert Fennema. Earlier versions have been presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Toronto, Canada, 2014; at the XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Yokohama, Japan, 2014 and at the XXXIV Sunbelt Conference, St Pete, USA, 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2015.1041483

Notes on contributors

Eelke M. Heemskerk is assistant professor in political science at the University of Amsterdam. He publishes on corporate governance, corporate elites, social networks and decision-making, including Decline of the Corporate Community (AUP 2007), ‘Women on board: Female Board Membership as a form of Elite Democratization’ (Enterprise and Society 2014), ‘The Rise of the European Corporate Elite’ (Economy and Society 2013) and ‘The Fading of the State’ (International Journal of Comparative Sociology 2012).

Frank W. Takes is a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at Leiden University. He specialises in the analysis of large real-world networks, focusing on both computational and knowledge discovery-related aspects. His Ph.D. thesis was titled Algorithms for Analyzing and Mining Real-World Graphs (2014), and he has made contributions to the field of distance computation, amongst others in ‘Determining the Diameter of Small World Networks’ (ACM CIKM 2011) and ‘Adaptive Landmark Selection Strategies for Fast Shortest Path Computation in Large Real-World Graphs’ (IEEE/ACM WI 2014).

Additional information

Funding

Heemskerk received financial support of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).