Corporate networks, the links between companies and their leaders, reflect a country’s economic organization and its corporate governance system. Most research on corporate networks focuses on individual countries or particular time periods, however, making fruitful comparisons over longer periods of time difficult. This book provides a unique long-term analysis of the rise, consolidation, decline, and occasional re-emergence of these networks in fourteen countries across North and South America, Europe, and Asia in the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this volume, the editors bring together the most internationally well-known specialists to investigate the long-term development of corporate networks. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches, the authors describe the main developments and changes in the corporate network over time by focusing on important network indicators in benchmark years, and identify historical explanations for these developments. This unique, long-term perspective allows readers insight into how and why national corporate networks have evolved over time.

Corporate networks, the links between companies and their leaders, reflect a country’s economic organization and its corporate governance system. Most research on corporate networks focuses on individual countries or particular time periods, however, making fruitful comparisons over longer periods of time difficult. This book provides a unique long-term analysis of the rise, consolidation, decline, and occasional re-emergence of these networks in fourteen countries across North and South America, Europe, and Asia in the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this volume, the editors bring together the most internationally well-known specialists to investigate the long-term development of corporate networks. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches, the authors describe the main developments and changes in the corporate network over time by focusing on important network indicators in benchmark years, and identify historical explanations for these developments. This unique, long-term perspective allows readers insight into how and why national corporate networks have evolved over time.

An accessible illustrated introducton to the networks we use every day, from Facebook and Google to WiFi and the Internet What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected by six steps or less? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart and accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the computer networks we use every day. The Power of Networks unifies these ideas through six fundamental principles of networking. These principles explain the difficulties in sharing network resources efficiently, how crowds can be wise or not so wise depending on the nature of their connections, why there are many layers in a network, and more. Along the way, the authors also talk with and share the special insights of renowned experts such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, former Verizon Wireless CEO Dennis Strigl, and “fathers of the Internet” Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

A powerful, visual framework helps managers discover how employees really communicate and collaborate to get work done - and helps them identify ways they can influence these social networks to improve performance and innovation. In The Hidden Power of Social Networks, Cross and Parker, experts in "social network analysis"—a technique that visually maps relationships between people in large, distributed groups - apply this powerful tool to management for the first time. Based on their in-depth study of sixty informal employee networks in well-known companies around the world, Cross and Parker show managers how to conduct a social network analysis of their organization.

Mapping Corporate Education Reform outlines and analyzes the complex relationships between policy actors that define education reform within the current, neoliberal context. Using social network analysis and powerful data visualization tools, the authors identify the problematic roots of these relationships and describe their effects both in the U.S. and abroad. Through a series of case studies, each chapter reveals how powerful actors, from billionaire philanthropists to multinational education corporations, leverage their resources to implement free market mechanisms within public education. By comprehensively connecting the dots of neoliberal education reforms, the authors reveal not only the details of the reforms themselves, but the relationships that enable actors to amass troubling degrees of political power through network governance. A critical analysis of the actors and interests behind education policies, Mapping Corporate Education Reform uncovers the frequently obscured operations of educational governance and offers key insights into education reform at the present moment.

For all the attention globalization has received in recent years, little consensus has emerged concerning how best to understand it. For some, it is the happy product of free and rational choices; for others, it is the unfortunate outcome of impersonal forces beyond our control. It is in turn celebrated for the opportunities it affords and criticized for the inequalities in wealth and power it generates. David Singh Grewal’s remarkable and ambitious book draws on several centuries of political and social thought to show how globalization is best understood in terms of a power inherent in social relations, which he calls network power. Using this framework, he demonstrates how our standards of social coordination both gain in value the more they are used and undermine the viability of alternative forms of cooperation. A wide range of examples are discussed, from the spread of English and the gold standard to the success of Microsoft and the operation of the World Trade Organization, to illustrate how global standards arise and falter. The idea of network power supplies a coherent set of terms and concepts—applicable to individuals, businesses, and countries alike—through which we can describe the processes of globalization as both free and forced. The result is a sophisticated and novel account of how globalization, and politics, work.

This book is a startling expose of the increasing threat to free speech a democratic government. Mazzocco describes the ways that an ever-expanding U.S.-based multinational media cartel velis the machinations of the corporate state by dominating worldwide markets for TV, radio, newspapers, books, movies, cable, recordings, and videos.

During the last decade, platform businesses such as Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and eBay have been taking over the world. In almost every sector, traditional businesses are under attack from digital disrupters that are effectively harnessing the power of communities. But what exactly is a platform business and why is it different? In Platform Strategy, Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier provide a practical guide for students, digital entrepreneurs and executives to understand what platforms are, how they work and how you can build one successfully. Using their own "rocket model" and original case studies (including Google, Apple, Amazon), they explain how designing, igniting and scaling a platform business requires learning a whole new set of management rules. Platform Strategy also offers many fascinating insights into the future of platforms, their regulation and governance, as well as how they can be combined with other business models. Benoit Reillier and Laure Claire Reillier are co-founders of Launchworks, a leading advisory firm focused on helping organizations develop and scale innovative business models.

Mikkel Flyverbom s The Power of Networks is a timely and important contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary study of cyberspace politics. In an exceptionally well-written and researched book, Flyberbom employs a form of ethnographic method to uncover the grounded practices that inform the many hybrid forums and entangled authorities of Internet governance. The book will be of interest to those who want a deeper understanding of the complexity and nuance of the many social forces shaping global cyberspace today. Ronald J. Deibert, University of Toronto, Canada Flyverbom presents an original ethnography of the political ordering processes of the digital revolution. He lays bare the relational practices within hybrid global forums in which multiple actors are mobilized to participate, contest, and dialogue. The book makes an important contribution to emergent global politics governing technologies, networks, meanings, and people within the United Nations system. J.P. Singh, Georgetown University, US With an ever-growing number of users, the Internet is central to the processes of globalization, cultural formations, social encounters and economic development. These aside, it is also fast becoming an important political domain. Struggles over disclosure, access and regulation are only the most visible signs that the Internet is quickly becoming a site of fierce political conflict involving states, technical groups, business and civil society. As the debate over the global politics of the Internet intensifies, this book will be a valuable guide for anyone seeking to understand the emergence, organization and shape of this new issue. In this vivid study, Mikkel Flyverbom captures how questions about the digital divide and the information revolution, dialogues with stakeholders, and networked forms of organization have become key features of the global politics of the Internet. Tracing the making and stabilization of this transnational issue in and around the United Nations over almost a decade, this book demonstrates how multi-stakeholder networks make new political domains accessible and unsettle established ways of organizing transnational governance. The Power of Networks offers a rich account of the practices and effects of organizing global politics and governance through dialogues and collaborations between governments, business and societies the world over. Offering a novel analytical vocabulary for the study of ordering, governance and organization, this innovative ethnographic study of hybrid organizations and entangled forms of power in global politics shows how insights from actor-network theory and the Foucauldian governmentality literature can reinvigorate studies of transnational governance and organizational processes.