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Extant literature identifies board composition and the market for takeovers as two important measures for controlling the agency problem associated with top management. This study tests the substitution hypothesis that outside directors on the board and the effectiveness of takeover markets are substitutes for each other. This is done by first identifying a group of states that are characterized as weak takeover markets on the basis of their state takeover statutes. It is then shown that for a sample of firms in these states the stock markets react negatively to the election of an insider to the board, while no significant reaction is noted when an outsider is elected to the board. These results suggest that the election of an insider to the board signals a reduction in the monitoring power of the board over top management. We interpret this result as consistent with the substitution hypothesis.

It has been over 20 years since the landmark publication of Mizruchi (1996) and his examination of “what do interlocks do?”. Since then, the nature of interlocks and subsequent research on the subject has evolved. This paper aims to revisit the literature on interlocking directorates through a quantitative bibliometric analysis.

This study undertakes a bibliometric analysis of literature citing the Mizruchi (1996) to examine the state of research following up on “what do interlocks do”. This study examines 718 publications using keyword and co-word analysis, along with a thematic analysis to revisit the research that has followed Mizruchi’s topic of what do interlocks do.

This study finds that the topics of the corporate elite, capitalist economy and corporate governance have remained prominent themes in the field. Research areas that are emerging in the field of interlocking directorates include gender diversity, globalisation and advancing theoretical frameworks.

This paper provides a quantitative bibliometric analysis to revisit the extant literature on “what do interlocks do”, examining a high number of articles to identify areas which could be developed to advance research in the field.

While previous studies have focused on the role of directors in the formation of transnational interlocks, this paper argues that firm strategy can also influence the development of these relationships. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the practice of transnational interlocks by extending board interlocks theory from the national to the transnational context, and exploring aspects that are unique to the transnational level.

Based on the experiences of four British firms, this paper develops a conceptual framework that integrates under-examined dimensions of this networking practice at the organizational level of analysis, specifically degree of internationalization (DOI) and psychic distance (PD).

The paper argues that firms will increasingly engage in transnational interlocks as internationalization intensifies, and that expansion into psychically distant countries may result in further engagement in these connections. Further, firms will tend to form transnational received interlocks at their early stages of internationalization, and transnational sent and neutral interlocks at later stages of this process. It identifies four categories of firms: locals, extenders, explorers and cosmopolitans.

Directors can contribute to their firms’ success by interlocking with firms located in key foreign markets. Firms should also welcome directors with transnational board appointments to secure knowledge and resources overseas.

The manuscript contributes to our understanding of transnational interlocks by examining the independent and joint influence of the firm’s DOI and PD on the formation of such relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that business group (BG) networks act as conduits for diffusion of information and resources pertaining to internationalization. It considers three types of BG networks arising from three different types of ties- director interlock, direct equity, and indirect equity. In particular, it examines the effects of cohesiveness of these BG networks on the diffusion of internationalization within a BG.

Drawing on social network perspective, it is hypothesized that, for each type of network, cohesiveness enhances within-BG similarity of the extent of internationalization. An empirical investigation is conducted on a sample of 55 Indian BGs for the period 2009-2013.

Results support all the three hypotheses, suggesting that higher level of cohesiveness leads to higher level of within-BG similarity of the extent of internationalization, for all three network types.

Findings of this study contribute to the BG literature by examining the effects of BG network cohesiveness on the diffusion of internationalization within a BG, for three types of BG networks.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the links between a company’s position in a corporate network with its financial performance and strategic risk in the context of the largest Central European stock market.

This study integrates the theory of social network analysis (SNA) with corporate governance theory with a special focus on resource dependence theory. Using the framework of network social analysis, the authors use network measures of social capital and embeddedness.

The results of studying companies listed on the Polish stock exchange indicate that a company’s corporate network position has a significant negative impact on strategic risk while having no influence on its financial performance. The research also highlights the importance of a firm’s corporate governance model for both performance and strategic risk.

The data collected, and SNA measures used made it possible to conduct a cross-sectional study. Compared to longitudinal studies, this type of study has a couple of disadvantages addressed in the paper. In the future, the dependencies observed in this study should be tested using longer-term data.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper integrating the corporate personal and capital networks to test risk and performance dependencies in the context of Poland’s corporate governance model. The findings and conclusions can also be applied to analyzing Central and Eastern Europe stock markets.

This paper aims to explore the interlock-performance relationship among mainland Chinese firms listed in Hong Kong by taking advantage of a relationship-intensive context whereby such a link is likely to be especially important. Although strategic networks such as interlocking directorates have been found to affect a number of strategic behaviors, the link connecting board interlocks and corporate performance has remained ambiguous. Considerable light has been shed on the strategic networks of firms whose shares are listed abroad, which have been under-studied despite their rising importance in the global economy.

Data come from a particularly interesting historical period – the early 1990s prior to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China. Both quantitative and qualitative research have been used.

Empirically, it was found that good performance in an earlier period helps draw outside directors in a later period, and that network centrality and certain types of interlocks help improve performance, albeit with varying degrees. Overall, our results answer the question whether strategic networks such as interlocks matter for corporate performance with a qualified “yes”.

Taking advantage of a relationship-intensive context, this article explores the interlock-performance relationship among mainland Chinese firms listed in Hong Kong. Focus is specifically on the two years, 1993 and 1995, due to their specific historical importance because these two years represent the beginning of Chinese firms’ listing in Hong Kong.

In the recent literature on financialization and the rise of investor capitalism, the successor of managerial capitalism, which dominated until the 1970s, suggests that the firm is today enacted as a bundle of financial assets managed to create value for the shareholders. This paper aims to demonstrate how such views are established relatively recently by examining leadership literature published in the 1970s, representing an entirely different view of leadership work, the role of the firm and capital–labour relations.

Two books and one Harvard Business Review article published by the Volvo CEO Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, one of the most prominent Swedish industry leaders of the past century and one of the architects behind Volvo’s internationally renowned Kalmar and Uddevalla plants in Sweden, are examined. Based on a critical discourse analysis framework, these two volumes are treated as representatives of what Alfred Chandler speaks of as the regime managerial capitalism, today largely displaced by the regime of investor capitalism.

Gyllenhammar’s discourses stresses the role of the corporations as serving a wider social community than merely the shareholders, and regard the manufacturing industry as the legitimate site for the development of new production systems better suited to a more educated workforce demanding more qualified work assignments and greater autonomy. This argument, in favour of a view of the corporation as being socially embedded and responsive to wider social needs, can be contrasted against the contemporary view of leadership and corporate governance practice.

The paper addresses the shift from managerial capitalist regime of the post-Second World War period to the investor capitalism of the financialized economy and the financialized firm by contrasting leadership writing of the 1970s against today’s strong focus on shareholder enrichment and the enactment of CEOs and directors as the servants of the capital owners. A long-term perspective on the changes occurring over the past four decades may enable a better understanding how leadership, governance and industry are subject to ongoing re-interpretations and understanding in the face of novel economic, social and political conditions.

From a multidisciplinary perspective, combining international entrepreneurship and institutional theory, a model is presented in order to enrich the understanding of the speed of internationalization in small firms. This is achieved by including individual's attitudes and behaviour, as well as factors from the environment that may enhance firms' international behaviour.

Information from a random sample of 104 Spanish SMEs was gathered via personal interview with a structured questionnaire. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), specifically Partial Least Squares (PLS), was employed in analyzing the multiple relationships among the proposed constructs.

The results show how one of the main institutional determinants of the age of entry into international markets are the inter‐firm relationships, specifically the tendency to imitate the behaviour of other firms with successful activities in international markets. In addition, the results note the complementary nature of the approaches used, even though they are apparently distant, and suggest the need to undertake more eclectic research approaches in this field.

Results enhance the importance of having a good competence scanning system in firms as it may help in reducing the time of adoption for certain behaviours, in this case internationalization behaviour. Besides this, the export promotion agencies may find these results useful in improving the results of the implemented policies in order to obtain a greater impact with the same resources, taking advantage of the diffusion of the behaviour.

Both the methodology and the constructs analysed, have scarcely been implemented in the internationalization literature when compared to other management fields.

Corporate success depends partially on the quality of knowledge accessible to the executive board. One route of access to such knowledge is the appointment of directors who already hold directorships with prominent other corporate actors. Such director appointments provide interlocks to a corporate knowledge ecosystem (Haunschild and Beckman, 1998). The purpose of this paper is to examine how linkages between companies belonging to different sectors impact firm performance and to examine how linkages created by female directors, as opposed to male directors, shape performance.

This paper investigates the interlocks created between UK FTSE 350 companies from 2010 to 2018. It draws on network analysis to map the roles that male and female directors play in linking firms with varying sector classifications. The paper provides an examination of the impact of these roles on firm performance, through a panel data regression analysis.

This paper finds that there is an increase of inter-industry brokers over the period, and that men are still dominant in both the network and creating inter-industry ties amongst companies. However, the role of women in establishing these ties appears to be changing, and women are more important when it comes to create inter-industry ties among key economic sectors.

This paper provides a novel approach to examine the interplay between gendered inter (and intra) sectoral linkages and firm performance. It provides an original application of the two-mode brokerage analysis framework proposed in Jasny and Lubell (2015).

The purpose of this paper is to address the following research question: how do the interlocking editorial advisory boards (EABs) of operations and supply chain management (OSCM) journals map out the field’s diverse academic communities and how demographically diverse is the field and its communities?

The study applies social network analysis (SNA) to web-based EAB data for 38 journals listed under operations management (OM) in the 2010 ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide.

The members of EABs of the 38 journals are divided into seven distinct communities which are mapped to the field’s knowledge structures and further aggregated into a core and periphery of the network. A burgeoning community of supply chain management academics forms the core along with those with more traditional interests. Male academics affiliated to the US institutions and to business schools predominate in the sample.

A new strand of research is opened up connecting journal governance networks to knowledge structures in the OSCM field. OM is studied separately from its reference and associated disciplines. The use of the ABS list might attract comments that the study has an implicit European perspective – however the authors do not believe this to be the case.

The study addresses the implications of the lack of diversity for the practice of OM as an academic discipline.

The confirmation of the dominance of particular characteristics such as male and US-based academics has implications for social diversity of the field.

As the first study of its kind, i.e. SNA of EAB members of OSCM journals, this study marks out a new perspective and acts as a benchmark for the future.