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Everything Changes So That Nothing Changes? The French Economic Elite Networks, 1840-2009
| Our research concentrates on the members of boards and executive managers of the top 100 French firms: we built a dataset compiling this information for three different dates of the 19th century (1840, 1857, 1883) and three different dates of the 20th and 21st centuries (1957, 1979, 2009).
While thus beginning with traditional sources and techniques of “interlocking directorates” studies, we have modified them in order to address key questions that have often been neglected in this literature. Our general goal is to reconcile the firms-side approaches (especially those concerned with corporate governance and cooperation issues) and the elite-side approaches of interlocking directorates in order to understand how changes on each side interact.
The French case is particularly suited to such a dual approach as it exhibits a remarkable stability in the general patterns of interlocking directorates and in the main types of top executive careers both between 1840 and 1857 (at the time when joint-stock companies were beginning to become a common form of organization) and between 1979 and 2009 (at the time when shareholder value and the decrease of State intervention supposedly changed the governance of firms). We are now expanding our study of each period to 1883 and 1957 respectively. The distant comparison between the 19th and late 20th century is aimed at investigating two possible forms of similarity:
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in terms of macro changes and their consequences. These two long sequences were marked by forms deregulation and of internationalization of trade. Did the ties between firms and the careers of the economic elite adapt in the same way to these similar macro changes in the two periods?
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in terms of mechanisms underlying the precise shape of the network of interlocking directorates. Taking into account cases that seem very distant in time, and studying contemporary accounts of what boards did, will allow us to shed additional light on both general and context-specific mechanisms leading to the building-up of such ties. For example, we find an enduring centralization of the network, with a central place of banks, but does this rely on the same mechanism in 1857 and 1957? In the 19th century, it was common to put military officers or noblemen in boards so as to better advertise for the sale of shares: what group, if any, played a similar role in the late 20th century?
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