What is the nature of chief executive officers’ (CEOs) relationships with each other, as mediated by third-party, non-company organizations? Our paper aims to answer this question and other related inquiries by analyzing a historical, existing dataset and creating a new, modern network to examine as well.
The paper starts by analyzing the data from Galaskiewicz’s (1985) seminal study on chief executive officer membership in social clubs and organizations in the Twin Cities metropolitan area—St. Paul and Minneapolis. Next, we construct a new network data set from scratch on current Fortune 500 CEOs in the Twin Cities.
Since we did not have the resources to survey social clubs and CEOs as Galaskiewicz did, we instead constructed a novel data set from publicly available data on CEO membership on non-profit boards and their alma maters for both undergraduate and graduate education, where applicable.