In this repo, I analyze & visualize board connections among Fortune 500 corporations.
Key takeaways from this repo:
- understanding the significance of social networks
- creating social networks at different levels of analysis
- visualizing social network graphs
Researchers think of social networks as 'pipes and prisms'. Social connections aka pipes enable people & organizations to access resources & information which influence their options & limitations. Social connections aka prisms also affect how they perceive the world & vice versa. Social network analysis is a sytematic way to measure constructs like status which affect an organization's exchange partners.
Social network analysis can be used to discern:
- Power dynamics
- Sources of knowledge
- Communities of influence
- How information spreads <- check out my paper with implications on how the spread of negative information affects associated organizations
Social networks comprise of: nodes (these are the entities that are connected to each other) and edges (relationships between nodes)
Examples of nodes:
companies
universities
institutions
departments within an organization
people
patents
Edges can reflect characteristics like:
type of interpersonal relationships: authority, advice giving-solicitation, teacher-student, friendship, romance, familial
types of interorganizational relationships: alliances, partnership
Strength of the connections
Direction of resource flow: uni-directional / bi-directional
- Identifying change agents within an organization --> important for implementing new policies
- Understanding relationships between banks and their clients
- Discerning entities vulnerable to fraud
- Interpreting someone's network & expertise --> useful for hiring sales people / recruiters
- Analyzing the patents used in new product development
This repo uses data on corporate board intelocks in 2018. A board interlock occurs when a director sits on 2 or more boards. Thus, forming a connection (aka interlock) between them. Board interlocks are important because they affect the practices that companies adopt as well as power & governance.
This data is proprietary & comes from Boardex. It comprises of:
- 773 nodes (companies)
- 1,368 edges (board interlocks)
- These board interlocks are based on 5,538 corporate directors
This is useful for:
- Building aggregated network graphs built on individuals' actions (e.g. another example: connections between universities & firms based on where students work post-graduation)
- Visualizing a large network
Key characteristics of the graph:
- non-directional
- interactive and dynamic - you can zoom into the nodes, click on them to see additional information & drag them
- customizable