From its inception, big business in the western industrialised world has been organised in national business communities. Central elements of these business communities are corporate board interlocks that constitute the notorious 'Old Boys Network'. This corporate elite connects the centres of...

From its inception, big business in the western industrialised world has been organised in national business communities. Central elements of these business communities are corporate board interlocks that constitute the notorious 'Old Boys Network'. This corporate elite connects the centres of...

Fundamental change is happening in asset management – the shift from actively managed funds to index funds. This money mass migration into index funds has far-reaching consequences, because it leads to a concentration of corporate ownership in the hands of the ‘Big Three' asset managers. We...

Network data on connections among corporate actors and entities – for instance through co-ownership ties or elite social networks – is increasingly available to researchers interested in probing many important questions related to the study of modern capitalism. We discuss the promise and...

This paper studies the emergence of computer aided network analysis as an example of ‘Mertonian' multiple discovery. Computer assisted quantitative network analysis emerged around 1970 and was first applied on corporate interlock networks by small groups of researchers in different...

Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active towards passive investment strategies. The passive index fund industry is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which we call the ‘Big Three'. We comprehensively map the ownership of the Big Three in the United States and find...

In this paper we analyse the networks of interlocking directorates among the 250 largest Dutch corporations in 1976 and 1996. In 1976 there was a relatively dense and centralised network in which the banks were the central hubs. Twenty years later the network had become much thinner and...