Eelke M. Heemskerk

Eelke M. Heemskerk
University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Political Science and Sociology

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86
Publications
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2,640
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Publications

Publications (86)
Preprint
Full-text available
Our perceptions are shaped by the social networks we are embedded in. Despite the acknowledged influence of close contacts on how we perceive the world, the role of the broader social environment remains opaque. Here, we leverage a unique combination of population-scale social network and survey data on perceptions of immigration. We find that both...
Preprint
Full-text available
The dominance of online social media data as a source of population-scale social network studies has recently been challenged by networks constructed from government-curated register data. In this paper, we investigate how the two compare, focusing on aggregations of the Dutch online social network (OSN) Hyves and a register-based social network (R...
Article
Full-text available
Large-scale human social network structure is typically inferred from digital trace samples of online social media platforms or mobile communication data. Instead, here we investigate the social network structure of a complete population, where people are connected by high-quality links sourced from administrative registers of family, household, wo...
Preprint
We propose a social network-aware approach to studying socio-economic segregation. The key question that we address is whether patterns of segregation are more pronounced in social networks than the common spatial neighborhood-focused manifestations of segregation. We, therefore, conduct a population-scale social network analysis to study socio-eco...
Preprint
Full-text available
Large-scale human social network structure is typically inferred from digital trace samples of online social media platforms or mobile communication data. Instead, here we investigate the social network structure of a complete population, where people are connected by high-quality links sourced from administrative registers of family, household, wo...
Article
Full-text available
Community detection is a well-established method for studying the meso-scale structure of social networks. Applying a community detection algorithm results in a division of a network into communities that is often used to inspect and reason about community membership of specific nodes. This micro-level interpretation step of community structure is...
Article
Corporations seek various relationships, such as board interlocks, with other firms to reduce resource dependencies. The consistent theoretical expectation and empirical finding that physical proximity is an important driver for board interlock formation is seemingly at odds with the emerging and growing literature on transnational board interlock...
Chapter
This paper investigates the stability and evolution of the world stage of global science at the city level by analyzing changes in co-authorship network centrality rankings over time. Driven by the problem that there exists no consensus in the literature on how the spatial unit “city” should be defined, we first propose a new approach to delineate...
Article
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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 ask...
Article
Full-text available
Production networks are integral to economic dynamics, yet dis-aggregated network data on inter-firm trade is rarely collected and often proprietary. Here we situate company-level production networks within a wider space of networks that are different in nature, but similar in local connectivity structure. Through this lens, we study a regional and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Production networks are integral to economic dynamics, yet dis-aggregated network data on inter-firm trade is rarely collected and often proprietary. Here we situate company-level production networks among networks from other domains according to their local connectivity structure. Through this lens, we study a regional and a national network of in...
Article
Full-text available
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’ tha...
Article
Full-text available
Corporations increasingly engage in innovative ‘tax planning strategies’ by shifting profits between jurisdictions. In response, states try to curtail such profit shifting activities while at the same time attempting to retain and attract multinational corporations. We aim to open up this dichotomy between states and corporations and argue that a w...
Preprint
Full-text available
Community detection is a well established method for studying the meso scale structure of social networks. Applying a community detection algorithm results in a division of a network into communities that is often used to inspect and reason about community membership of specific nodes. This micro level interpretation step of community structure is...
Article
Full-text available
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 l...
Preprint
Corporations increasingly engage in innovative ‘tax planning strategies’ by shifting profits between jurisdictions. In response, states try to curtail such profit shifting activities while at the same time attempting to retain and attract multinational corporations. We aim to open up this dichotomy between states and corporations and argue that a w...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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 i...
Article
Full-text available
In corporate networks, firms are connected through links of corporate ownership and shared directors, connecting the control over major economic actors in our economies in meaningful and consequential ways. Most research thus far focused on the connectedness of firms as a result of one particular link type, analyzing node-specific metrics or global...
Research
This is a blogpost for The Conversation UK. For the full text, please follow the link: https://theconversation.com/who-is-more-powerful-states-or-corporations-99616
Article
Full-text available
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 call BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street the ‘New Perman...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
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 bot...
Article
Full-text available
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 impl...
Chapter
Politics is about conflict, struggle, decision-making, power and influence. But not every conflict and not every situation in which power is exercised is widely regarded as politics. A football coach who decides to leave a player on the bench because he has given him a bit of lip, is exerting power, and there is conflict here, too. However, few peo...
Article
Full-text available
Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active toward 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 that together they constitute the largest shareholder in...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
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...
Article
Full-text available
We develop a conflict-oriented model of board task performance and argue that a common framework, that is, a shared understanding of its role, helps boards to perform well. Conflict is the mediating effect through which this plays out. We posit that a common framework increases board task performance because it reduces intragroup relationship confl...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
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...
Article
Full-text available
We argue against the dominant a priori distinction between national and transnational in the study of corporate elites. Business elites reconfigure their locus of organization over time, from the city level, to the national level, and beyond. We ask what the current level of elite organization is and propose a novel theoretical and empirical approa...
Article
Full-text available
Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active towards passive investment strategies. This burgeoning passive index fund industry is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which we call the ‘Big Three’. This paper is the first to comprehensively map the ownership of the Big Three in the United States. We find that already in 40 p...
Article
Network data on connections among corporate actors and entities – whether through investment flows, 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 perils of using Big Corporate Network Data (BC...
Article
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...
Article
There is an increased awareness that the performance of boards (good governance) is not only determined by structural determinants but by behavioral determinants as well. These behavioral determinants might be particularly important for public and nonprofit governance, where the role of the board is more diffuse and heterogeneous than in corporate...
Article
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...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The transnational orientation and organization of corporate elites has for long attracted the attention of those who expect that ongoing globalization goes hand in hand with transnational elite cohesion. The laborious nature of compiling reliable network datasets has hitherto forced scholars to focus on those arena’s where we expect transnational c...
Conference Paper
What impact did the financial and economic crisis that swept the Western world have on the international network of the corporate elite? Has corporate governance become more national or have transnational networks been robust? Here we take a first step in answering this question. We see the financial crisis as a test case for the cohesion of the tr...
Article
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 ta...
Article
Full-text available
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 Nether...
Article
We open the black box of the board and explore how a cohesive and consistent collective view among a board of directors on their role and responsibilities influences board dynamics and hence performance. Building on detailed observation of 11 board of directors we provide primary data of boards in action. The results indicate that a shared understa...
Article
Full-text available
The boards of directors at large European companies overlap with each other to a sizable extent both within and across national borders. This could have important economic, political and management consequences. In this work we study in detail the topological structure of the networks that arise from this phenomenon. Using a comprehensive informati...
Data
Full-text available
Figure S1, Degree (Left) and strength (Right) distributions. The empirical distributions are of the cumulative complementary type. The scale is logarithmic on both axis; the insets show the same plot on a semi-logarithmic scale. Round black points refer to year 2005, triangular red points to year 2010, as in the legend. Figure S2, k-core decomposit...
Article
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 wa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The consistent finding that gender diversity in corporate boards is not related to firm performance runs counter to the normative idea that gender diversity equals good corporate governance. It also conflicts with those theories from social psychology that claim diversity to be an antidote to ‘group think’ and helps to increase the problem solving...
Article
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 com...
Chapter
This chapter examines the impact of two structural breaks related to the economic liberalization and integration of European markets, privatizations, and governance reforms on corporate networks, a major aspect of corporate governance regimes. It analyzes the evolution of corporate networks in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Italy, a...
Chapter
An empirically rich study of the influence of social networks on corporate governance across countries and the emergence of a new transnational community. The financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the hidden network of relationships in corporate governance: who owes what to whom, who will stand by whom in times of crisis, what governs the provision of...
Article
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: i...
Article
  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 t...
Book
Full-text available
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 changin...
Article
Full-text available
: 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 el...
Article
Full-text available
De topsalarissen en riante beloningen van bestuurders van grote bedrijven zijn veel mensen een doorn in het oog. Volgens Eelke Heemskerk is meer wetgeving of extern toezicht alleen echter niet voldoende om uitwassen in de financiële sector tegen te gaan. Maatregelen hebben alleen maar zin als ze worden gedragen door een morele gemeenschap. Een plei...
Article
This paper investigates the shifting relationships between business and state over the period 1969-2006 in a coordinated market economy. Participation of corporate directors in advisory boards and boards of other state institutions create a web of business-state relationships. This network had its heydays during the mid-seventies. Since then, it ha...
Article
Abstract Interlocking directorate networks among business enterprises have increasingly come under pressure due to internationalization and deregulation of markets. We show that in the small and internationalized economies of Switzerland and the Netherlands extensive changes have taken place. However, considerable differences in the form and the ex...
Article
Traditionally, much of big business in the industrialized Western world has been organized around particular corporate societies—notoriously referred to as “old boy” networks. With the recent drift toward a more liberal market economy, however, these networks have been showing signs of decline—in some cases, all but disappearing. Eelke M. H...
Article
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 financials played a less prominent role in the network even th...
Article
Op de titelp. abus. als promotiedatum: 25 januari 2006. Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. Met lit. opg. - Samenvatting in het Nederlands.

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