Corporations across the world are highly interconnected in a large global network of corporate control. This paper investigates the global board interlock network, covering 400,000 firms linked through 1,700,000 edges representing shared directors between these firms. The main focus is on the concept of centrality, which is used to investigate the embeddedness of firms from a particular country within the global network. The study results in three contributions. First, to the best of our knowledge for the first time we can investigate the topology as well as the concept of centrality in corporate networks at a global scale, allowing for the largest cross-country comparison ever done in interlocking directorates literature. We demonstrate, among other things, extremely similar network topologies, yet large differences between countries when it comes to the relation between economic prominence indicators and firm centrality. Second, we introduce two new metrics that are specifically suitable for comparing the centrality ranking of a partition to that of the full network. Using the notion of centrality persistence we propose to measure the persistence of a partition’s centrality ranking in the full network. In the board interlock network, it allows us to assess the extent to which the footprint of a national network is still present within the global network. Next, the measure of centrality ranking dominance tells us whether a partition (country) is more dominant at the top or the bottom of the centrality ranking of the full (global) network. Finally, comparing these two new measures of persistence and dominance between different countries allows us to classify these countries based the their embeddedness, measured using the relation between the centrality of a country’s firms on the national and the global scale of the board interlock network.
In this paper we address a number of these issues, as we consider the largest @math million firms across the globe, allowing us to compare results with sufficient data in each country. The causal effects remain beyond the scope of this work, as we are foremost interested in understanding centrality at and between different national and global scales of the global corporate network network. Our work differs from studies such as @cite_19 in a sense that we still want to take the connectedness of the nodes within a particular partition of the full network into account, rather than merging all of the subset's nodes into one. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first study in which the global corporate network is analyzed at such a large scale, particularly in the context of centrality, investigating the embeddedness of countries in the global network of corporate control.
@cite_19
2089370556
This paper extends the standard network centrality measures of degree, closeness and betweenness to apply to groups and classes as well as individuals. The group centrality measures will enable researchers to answer such questions as ‘how central is the engineering department in the informal influence network of this company?’ or ‘among middle managers in a given organization, which are more central, the men or the women?’ With these measures we can also solve the inverse problem: given the network of ties among organization members, how can we form a team that is maximally central? The measures are illustrated using two classic network data sets. We also formalize a measure of group centrality efficiency, which indicates the extent to which a group's centrality is principally due to a small subset of its members.