Eelke M Heemskerk
Biographic Data
| ID | 168969 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eelke M Heemskerk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eelke M |
| FAMILY NAME | Heemskerk |
| SIGNATURE | HEEMSKERK E M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7356-5318 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 331 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Socio-economic segregation in a population-scale social network
Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technology
Beaten paths towards the transnational corporate elite
The transnationalization of economic activities has fundamentally altered the world. One of the consequences that has intrigued scholars is the formation of a transnational corporate elite. While the literature tends to focus on the topology of the transnational board interlock network, little is known about its driving mechanisms. This article asks the question: what are the trajectories that corporate elites follow in driving the expansion of t…
Delineating the corporate elite
Corporate elite studies have for long investigated networks of interlocking directorates to test and corroborate key theoretical expectations regarding the cohesive organization of such an elite and their ability and willingness to act on behalf of general business interests. These studies typically collect data on a list of 50, 100, 200 or 500 corporations ranked by economic size, sometimes stratified in sectors. The sampling approach often foll…
The duality of firms and directors in board interlock networks
The long tradition of scholarly work on corporate interlocks has left us with competing theoretical frameworks on the causes of interlock networks. Board interlocks are studied either as means to overcome the resource dependence of corporations or as a group cohesion mechanism of business elites. This contrast is due to an empirical divide of the literature where either the firms or the individuals are considered as decision-making bodies. In sys…
The New Permanent Universal Owners
Fundamental change is happening in global finance – the shift from active management to index funds. This money mass-migration into index funds has far-reaching socio-economic consequences, as it has the potential to transform the nature of shareholder capitalism. We call BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street the ‘New Permanent Universal Owners’ that are invested indefinitely in thousands of firms. We provide novel findings on the combined ownersh…
Steering capital
Since the global financial crisis, there is a massive shift of assets towards index funds. Rather than picking stocks, index funds replicate stock indices such as the S&P 500. But where do these indices actually come from? This paper analyzes the politico-economic role of index providers, a small group of highly profitable firms including MSCI, S&P DJI, and FTSE Russell, and develops a research agenda from an IPE perspective. We argue that these …
The rise of transnational state capital
Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contribut…
When theory meets methods
In this article, we study the emergence of computer aided network analysis as an example of 'Mertonian' multiple discovery. Computer assisted quantitative network analysis emerged around 1970 and small groups of researchers in different universities, who were independent of each other and looking for the right concepts and computer programs to implement graph theory in social analysis, first applied it to corporate interlock networks. We show how…
The promise and perils of using big data in the study of corporate networks
Network data on connections between corporate actors and entities - for instance through co-ownership ties or elite social networks - are increasingly available to researchers interested in probing the many important questions related to the study of modern capitalism. Given the analytical challenges associated with the nature of the subject matter, variable data quality and other problems associated with currently available data on this scale, w…
Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers
Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax avoidance. Therefore, the identification of OFC jurisdictions has become a politicized and contested issue. We introduce a novel data-driven approa…
States versus Corporations
Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to t…
Close communication and 2-clubs in corporate networks
Corporate networks, as induced by interlocking directorates between corporations, provide structures of personal communication between their boards. This paper studies such networks using the framework of a previous paper by Laan et al. (Soc Netw Anal Min, 2016. doi: 10.1007/s13278-016-0326-0 ) where close communication is defined by sub-networks, so that each pair of nodes (boards of a corporation) are either neighbours or have at least one comm…
Centrality in the global network of corporate control
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 th…
The global corporate elite after the financial crisis
What impact did the recent financial crisis have on the corporate elite's international network? Has corporate governance taken on an essentially national structure or have transnational networks remained robust? We investigate this issue by comparing the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy in 1976, 1996, 2006 and 2013. We find that corporate elites have not retrenched into their national …
The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism
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 governa…
Interlocking Directorate Networks
Wat maakt goed onderwijsbestuur? - De gedragsmatige determinanten van taakuitvoering door raden van toezicht in het voortgezet onderwijs
What determines good educational governance? Behavioral determinants of supervisory boards’ task performance in secondary education. We investigate how task performance by supervisory boards in secondary education is determined by the social dynamics that play within a board. We show how the controlling task plays out different from the advising task. The internal, behavioral dynamics about task conflict, the use of expertise, effort norms and so…
Women on Board
Corporate elites have been all-male bastions until the twenty-first century. The recent inclusion of women in the corporate elite needs explanation because it is an abrupt change in recruitment practices. We consider female presence in corporate boards as a sign of the democratization of elite social networks. Building on a case study of the Netherlands that covers the last four decades, we show that the corporate elite has become more open to no…
The rise of the European corporate elite
The emerging European corporate network is becoming increasingly established. Here I compare the network of board interlocks among the largest stock listed European firms in 2005 and 2010. The findings show that, by 2010, the European network of corporate board interlocks was stronger than five years earlier. Whereas the European political elite was unable to counter the financial crisis through a common European approach, Europe is a fait accomp…
The fading of the state
This article contributes to an understanding of how business–state relations have evolved over past decades by analyzing elite interlocks between the corporate sector and the state over the period 1969–2006 in the Netherlands. These interlocks create links between the top decision centers of the largest corporations and public administration. A comparative analysis over time of the network of corporate–state interlocks for the years 1969, 1996 an…
The social field of the European corporate elite
In this article I investigate the emerging patterns of the European corporate elite network as an example of a European social field, as described by Fligstein. The findings confirm that interlocking directorates form a European corporate network. However, the intercorporate network rests on a very small group of European corporate elite members: it remains the playground of a select few pan‐European ‘big linkers’. Although financial institutions…
The making of a transnational capitalist class
Throughout the world, there has been a growing wave of interest in global corporate power and the rise of a transnational capitalist class, triggered by economic and political transformations that have blurred national borders and disembedded corporate business from national domiciles. Using social network analysis, William Carroll maps the changing field of power generated by elite relations among the world’s largest corporations and related pol…
Constituting Corporate Europe
This article explores the emerging shape and form of the European corporate community since 1996. We examine the cohesion of corporate Europe through the network of interlocking corporate directorates and memberships in the European Round Table of Industrialists. We focus on the unequal structure of representation; the interplay of national and transnational aspects of the network; the role of finance capitalists as a signpost of a regime of inte…
Network Dynamics of the Dutch Business Elite
This article investigates the cohesion of the Dutch business elite during the 20th century. First it considers the old boys' network, where social cohesion builds on shared family and educational background. Second, the board-meeting network of corporate directors in the Netherlands is analysed as an expression of the cohesion of the corporate elite. Unlike most studies on interlocking directorates, this article focuses on the interpersonal persp…
Brokerage & Closure. An Introduction To Social Capital
The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism
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 governa…
The rise of transnational state capital
Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contribut…
The global corporate elite after the financial crisis
What impact did the recent financial crisis have on the corporate elite's international network? Has corporate governance taken on an essentially national structure or have transnational networks remained robust? We investigate this issue by comparing the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy in 1976, 1996, 2006 and 2013. We find that corporate elites have not retrenched into their national …
Steering capital
Since the global financial crisis, there is a massive shift of assets towards index funds. Rather than picking stocks, index funds replicate stock indices such as the S&P 500. But where do these indices actually come from? This paper analyzes the politico-economic role of index providers, a small group of highly profitable firms including MSCI, S&P DJI, and FTSE Russell, and develops a research agenda from an IPE perspective. We argue that these …
The rise of the European corporate elite
The emerging European corporate network is becoming increasingly established. Here I compare the network of board interlocks among the largest stock listed European firms in 2005 and 2010. The findings show that, by 2010, the European network of corporate board interlocks was stronger than five years earlier. Whereas the European political elite was unable to counter the financial crisis through a common European approach, Europe is a fait accomp…
The New Permanent Universal Owners
Fundamental change is happening in global finance – the shift from active management to index funds. This money mass-migration into index funds has far-reaching socio-economic consequences, as it has the potential to transform the nature of shareholder capitalism. We call BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street the ‘New Permanent Universal Owners’ that are invested indefinitely in thousands of firms. We provide novel findings on the combined ownersh…
Women on Board
Corporate elites have been all-male bastions until the twenty-first century. The recent inclusion of women in the corporate elite needs explanation because it is an abrupt change in recruitment practices. We consider female presence in corporate boards as a sign of the democratization of elite social networks. Building on a case study of the Netherlands that covers the last four decades, we show that the corporate elite has become more open to no…
Constituting Corporate Europe
This article explores the emerging shape and form of the European corporate community since 1996. We examine the cohesion of corporate Europe through the network of interlocking corporate directorates and memberships in the European Round Table of Industrialists. We focus on the unequal structure of representation; the interplay of national and transnational aspects of the network; the role of finance capitalists as a signpost of a regime of inte…
Network Dynamics of the Dutch Business Elite
This article investigates the cohesion of the Dutch business elite during the 20th century. First it considers the old boys' network, where social cohesion builds on shared family and educational background. Second, the board-meeting network of corporate directors in the Netherlands is analysed as an expression of the cohesion of the corporate elite. Unlike most studies on interlocking directorates, this article focuses on the interpersonal persp…
The promise and perils of using big data in the study of corporate networks
Network data on connections between corporate actors and entities - for instance through co-ownership ties or elite social networks - are increasingly available to researchers interested in probing the many important questions related to the study of modern capitalism. Given the analytical challenges associated with the nature of the subject matter, variable data quality and other problems associated with currently available data on this scale, w…
The social field of the European corporate elite
In this article I investigate the emerging patterns of the European corporate elite network as an example of a European social field, as described by Fligstein. The findings confirm that interlocking directorates form a European corporate network. However, the intercorporate network rests on a very small group of European corporate elite members: it remains the playground of a select few pan‐European ‘big linkers’. Although financial institutions…
When theory meets methods
In this article, we study the emergence of computer aided network analysis as an example of 'Mertonian' multiple discovery. Computer assisted quantitative network analysis emerged around 1970 and small groups of researchers in different universities, who were independent of each other and looking for the right concepts and computer programs to implement graph theory in social analysis, first applied it to corporate interlock networks. We show how…
Delineating the corporate elite
Corporate elite studies have for long investigated networks of interlocking directorates to test and corroborate key theoretical expectations regarding the cohesive organization of such an elite and their ability and willingness to act on behalf of general business interests. These studies typically collect data on a list of 50, 100, 200 or 500 corporations ranked by economic size, sometimes stratified in sectors. The sampling approach often foll…
The fading of the state
This article contributes to an understanding of how business–state relations have evolved over past decades by analyzing elite interlocks between the corporate sector and the state over the period 1969–2006 in the Netherlands. These interlocks create links between the top decision centers of the largest corporations and public administration. A comparative analysis over time of the network of corporate–state interlocks for the years 1969, 1996 an…
Brokerage & Closure. An Introduction To Social Capital
Socio-economic segregation in a population-scale social network
Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technology
Beaten paths towards the transnational corporate elite
The transnationalization of economic activities has fundamentally altered the world. One of the consequences that has intrigued scholars is the formation of a transnational corporate elite. While the literature tends to focus on the topology of the transnational board interlock network, little is known about its driving mechanisms. This article asks the question: what are the trajectories that corporate elites follow in driving the expansion of t…
Centrality in the global network of corporate control
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 th…
Brokerage & Closure. An Introduction To Social Capital
Network Dynamics of the Dutch Business Elite
This article investigates the cohesion of the Dutch business elite during the 20th century. First it considers the old boys' network, where social cohesion builds on shared family and educational background. Second, the board-meeting network of corporate directors in the Netherlands is analysed as an expression of the cohesion of the corporate elite. Unlike most studies on interlocking directorates, this article focuses on the interpersonal persp…
The making of a transnational capitalist class
Throughout the world, there has been a growing wave of interest in global corporate power and the rise of a transnational capitalist class, triggered by economic and political transformations that have blurred national borders and disembedded corporate business from national domiciles. Using social network analysis, William Carroll maps the changing field of power generated by elite relations among the world’s largest corporations and related pol…
Constituting Corporate Europe
This article explores the emerging shape and form of the European corporate community since 1996. We examine the cohesion of corporate Europe through the network of interlocking corporate directorates and memberships in the European Round Table of Industrialists. We focus on the unequal structure of representation; the interplay of national and transnational aspects of the network; the role of finance capitalists as a signpost of a regime of inte…
The social field of the European corporate elite
In this article I investigate the emerging patterns of the European corporate elite network as an example of a European social field, as described by Fligstein. The findings confirm that interlocking directorates form a European corporate network. However, the intercorporate network rests on a very small group of European corporate elite members: it remains the playground of a select few pan‐European ‘big linkers’. Although financial institutions…
The fading of the state
This article contributes to an understanding of how business–state relations have evolved over past decades by analyzing elite interlocks between the corporate sector and the state over the period 1969–2006 in the Netherlands. These interlocks create links between the top decision centers of the largest corporations and public administration. A comparative analysis over time of the network of corporate–state interlocks for the years 1969, 1996 an…
The rise of the European corporate elite
The emerging European corporate network is becoming increasingly established. Here I compare the network of board interlocks among the largest stock listed European firms in 2005 and 2010. The findings show that, by 2010, the European network of corporate board interlocks was stronger than five years earlier. Whereas the European political elite was unable to counter the financial crisis through a common European approach, Europe is a fait accomp…
Interlocking Directorate Networks
Wat maakt goed onderwijsbestuur? - De gedragsmatige determinanten van taakuitvoering door raden van toezicht in het voortgezet onderwijs
What determines good educational governance? Behavioral determinants of supervisory boards’ task performance in secondary education. We investigate how task performance by supervisory boards in secondary education is determined by the social dynamics that play within a board. We show how the controlling task plays out different from the advising task. The internal, behavioral dynamics about task conflict, the use of expertise, effort norms and so…
Women on Board
Corporate elites have been all-male bastions until the twenty-first century. The recent inclusion of women in the corporate elite needs explanation because it is an abrupt change in recruitment practices. We consider female presence in corporate boards as a sign of the democratization of elite social networks. Building on a case study of the Netherlands that covers the last four decades, we show that the corporate elite has become more open to no…
The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism
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 governa…
Close communication and 2-clubs in corporate networks
Corporate networks, as induced by interlocking directorates between corporations, provide structures of personal communication between their boards. This paper studies such networks using the framework of a previous paper by Laan et al. (Soc Netw Anal Min, 2016. doi: 10.1007/s13278-016-0326-0 ) where close communication is defined by sub-networks, so that each pair of nodes (boards of a corporation) are either neighbours or have at least one comm…
Centrality in the global network of corporate control
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 th…
The global corporate elite after the financial crisis
What impact did the recent financial crisis have on the corporate elite's international network? Has corporate governance taken on an essentially national structure or have transnational networks remained robust? We investigate this issue by comparing the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy in 1976, 1996, 2006 and 2013. We find that corporate elites have not retrenched into their national …
Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers
Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax avoidance. Therefore, the identification of OFC jurisdictions has become a politicized and contested issue. We introduce a novel data-driven approa…
States versus Corporations
Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to t…
When theory meets methods
In this article, we study the emergence of computer aided network analysis as an example of 'Mertonian' multiple discovery. Computer assisted quantitative network analysis emerged around 1970 and small groups of researchers in different universities, who were independent of each other and looking for the right concepts and computer programs to implement graph theory in social analysis, first applied it to corporate interlock networks. We show how…
The promise and perils of using big data in the study of corporate networks
Network data on connections between corporate actors and entities - for instance through co-ownership ties or elite social networks - are increasingly available to researchers interested in probing the many important questions related to the study of modern capitalism. Given the analytical challenges associated with the nature of the subject matter, variable data quality and other problems associated with currently available data on this scale, w…
Steering capital
Since the global financial crisis, there is a massive shift of assets towards index funds. Rather than picking stocks, index funds replicate stock indices such as the S&P 500. But where do these indices actually come from? This paper analyzes the politico-economic role of index providers, a small group of highly profitable firms including MSCI, S&P DJI, and FTSE Russell, and develops a research agenda from an IPE perspective. We argue that these …
The rise of transnational state capital
Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contribut…
The duality of firms and directors in board interlock networks
The long tradition of scholarly work on corporate interlocks has left us with competing theoretical frameworks on the causes of interlock networks. Board interlocks are studied either as means to overcome the resource dependence of corporations or as a group cohesion mechanism of business elites. This contrast is due to an empirical divide of the literature where either the firms or the individuals are considered as decision-making bodies. In sys…
The New Permanent Universal Owners
Fundamental change is happening in global finance – the shift from active management to index funds. This money mass-migration into index funds has far-reaching socio-economic consequences, as it has the potential to transform the nature of shareholder capitalism. We call BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street the ‘New Permanent Universal Owners’ that are invested indefinitely in thousands of firms. We provide novel findings on the combined ownersh…
Delineating the corporate elite
Corporate elite studies have for long investigated networks of interlocking directorates to test and corroborate key theoretical expectations regarding the cohesive organization of such an elite and their ability and willingness to act on behalf of general business interests. These studies typically collect data on a list of 50, 100, 200 or 500 corporations ranked by economic size, sometimes stratified in sectors. The sampling approach often foll…
Beaten paths towards the transnational corporate elite
The transnationalization of economic activities has fundamentally altered the world. One of the consequences that has intrigued scholars is the formation of a transnational corporate elite. While the literature tends to focus on the topology of the transnational board interlock network, little is known about its driving mechanisms. This article asks the question: what are the trajectories that corporate elites follow in driving the expansion of t…
Socio-economic segregation in a population-scale social network
Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technology
Economics (18 works) · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Business (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Elite (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Sociology (9 works)