Lost in Space: The Geography of Corporate Interlocking Directorates

Interlocking Directorates and Political Cohesion among Corporate Elites

“…The decision to invite an executive of one firm to join the board of another typically presupposes some prior contact or association through which the board candidate became recognized as a person worthy of trust and able to provide useful advice and information. Previous research suggests that informal social interaction within exclusive metropolitan upper-class clubs plays an important role in the selection of outside corporate directors (Johnsen and Mintz 1989;Kono et al 1998;Useem 1984;Bonacich and Domhoff 1981;Soref 1976Soref , 1980Soref and Zeitlin 1987). Interpersonal ties created through membership on noncorporate boards of directors, kinship relations, or attendance at elite boarding schools and universities may also be important (Domhoff 1970(Domhoff , 1974Useem 1984).…”

“…However, such variables could also be construed as weak proxies for social network ties, since corporate elites within the same state or industry are more likely to have social ties to one another than they are to corporate elites in other states or industries (Palmer et al 1986;Palmer and Friedland 1987). Past research shows that interlocking corporate directorates are, themselves, partly organized on a regional basis (Allen 1974(Allen , 1978Koenig and Sonquist 1977;Mizruchi 1982;Mintz and Schwartz 1985;Bearden andMintz 1985, 1987;Johnsen and Mintz 1989;Kono et al 1998). Consistent with this research, using the method of QAP correlation (explained below), I found that corporate directorship ties among individual corporate elites are modestly, but significantly, associated with geographic proximity ( ; ).…”

“…However, systematic research using modern methods of network analysis to study the structure and/or behavioral consequences of interlock networks for individual directors is almost entirely lacking (see Bearden and Mintz [1987] and Johnsen and Mintz [1989] for notable exceptions). Overwhelmingly, the empirical research on interlocking directorates has taken the links among firms as the focus of analysis, ignoring the complementary network of links among 4 The distinction between interorganizational and intraclass perspectives on interlocking directorates is fruitfully employed in a number of later studies (Palmer, Friedland, and Singh 1986;Palmer and Friedland 1987;Johnsen and Mintz 1989;Kono et al 1998;Palmer and Barber 2001). See Mintz (2002) for a comprehensive discussion of the theoretical and empirical questions raised by this distinction.…”

Golfing Alone? Corporations, Elites, and Nonprofit Growth in 100 American Communities

“…We highlight the role of an important local institution for elite cohesion, the upper-class social club (Domhoff 1967). Extensive research has suggested the importance of local upperclass clubs for the social cohesion of communities, particularly among elite members (Domhoff 1967, Kono et al 1998, Marquis 2003. As Kono et al (1998, pp.…”

“…Examining variation across local organizational populations across a large number of communities over time enables us to identify those institutional features of a community that make it more or less fertile for the maintenance and growth of nonprofits . Building on Warren's (1967) foundational research on interorganizational communities as well as work on community elites (e.g., Hunter 1953, Kono et al 1998) and the community ecology of organizations (e.g., Freeman and Audia 2006), we conceptualize the geographic community as an institutional field-that is, a more or less integrated set of corporate, nonprofit, and governmental actors that "partake of a common meaning system and interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field" (Scott 2001, p. 84). In so doing, we overcome a weakness of prior work on institutional fields in focusing on specific industries with limited generalizability (Davis 2010) and return attention to the comparative institutional perspective envisioned in early work on neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983).…”