The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:30:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The End of the Era of the Corporate Interlock Network – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The End of the Era of the Corporate Interlock Network https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/07/09/the-end-of-the-era-of-the-corporate-interlock-network/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-end-of-the-era-of-the-corporate-interlock-network https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/07/09/the-end-of-the-era-of-the-corporate-interlock-network/#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:43:33 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=30380?d=20150105111102EST Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on Monday, July 9, 2012
Editor's Note:

The following post comes to us from Johan Chu of the Department of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

In the paper, Who Killed the Inner Circle? The End of the Era of the Corporate Interlock Network, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, I show that the American board interlock network has changed in fundamental ways.

Throughout the 20th century, the American board interlock network—in which companies are linked by shared board directors—exhibited a stable cohesiveness, characterized by short path lengths between companies and the existence of an “inner circle” of well-connected directors. This enduring cohesiveness of the interlock network was both the result of elite social cohesion and a key mechanism for maintaining this elite cohesion (e.g., Mills, 1956; Useem, 1984). The characteristics of the interlock network were so stable that Davis, Yoo, and Baker (2003) asserted that short path lengths and an inner circle were inevitable properties of “networks qua networks”.

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