How career hubs shape the global corporate elite

In this contribution, we introduce ‘career hubs’ as an alternative to interlocking directorates and propose to study transnational corporate elite networks with this new concept. Career hubs, the most frequent common career organizations, put emphasis on knowledge brokering and allow us to study a l...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGlobal networks (Oxford) Vol. 24; no. 1
Main Authors Bühlmann, Felix, Ellersgaard, Christoph Houman, Larsen, Anton Grau, Lunding, Jacob Aagaard
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.01.2024
Subjects
Banking
Capitalism
career hubs
Careers
Companies
Consumer goods
corporate networks
Economic elites
Elites
Executives
Finance
globalization
Interconnections
Interlocking directorates
Interorganizational networks
top executives
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Summary:In this contribution, we introduce ‘career hubs’ as an alternative to interlocking directorates and propose to study transnational corporate elite networks with this new concept. Career hubs, the most frequent common career organizations, put emphasis on knowledge brokering and allow us to study a larger variety of organizations to understand the form and the spread of elite networks. We use a sample of 1366 firms on the Forbes 2000 list of 2018 and investigate the careers of 16,500 top executives by linking these data to the BoardEx database. We find three types of career hubs: global audit and consulting firms, financial firms participating in a transatlantic banking alliance and large US consumer goods conglomerates – and highlight the mechanisms through which they shape the spatial structures of finance led capitalism. In the conclusion, we consider the implication of our results for the literature on corporate networks and propose a series of future research avenues in the career hub perspective.
ISSN:1470-2266
1471-0374
DOI:10.1111/glob.12430