The Influence of Corporate Power, Social Status, and Market Position on Corporate Interlocks in a Regional Network

The paper seeks to identify the criteria which companies use to select board members and which firms use to select the outside boards they sit on. Hypotheses were drawn from theories which view corporate interlocks as a strategy of market cooptation and from theories which argue that board interlocks are based on the prestige of CEOs or the prestige of companies. These hypotheses were tested on a population of 116 manufacturing corporations in a major metropolitan area. The statistical models used in the paper were developed by Fienberg and Wasserman. In sum, we found that interlocking on the metropolitan level was not influenced by the market position of firms.