Public Enterprises go to the Stock Market. Interlocking Directorates and Governance in European Network Industries

Privatization waves that occurred since the Nineties deeply changed the landscapes of public enterprises and “national champions”, a key feature of European economies after WWII. The deep changes that involved market regulation and public capitalism in Europe paved the way for the development of new agents and new patterns of corporate governance that affected the economic arena as well as the political one. According to literature on the theme, the transformation of former public enterprises through corporatization and privatization into mixed public-private owned companies was instrumental to shape public intervention, paving the way for the creation of new places for the interaction of public and private actors. The simultaneous liberalization of sectorial markets (e.g. energy and gas) pushed mixed formerly public enterprises to enter into the stock market, forcing public owners to adapt to a different environment. Research until now, however, has relatively overlooked the composition of the boards and ties of members in these enterprises. Still, social networks build connections with other organizations in their environment and set incentives that influence economic and political arenas. Our paper is based on a new dataset on the boards of listed companies and applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) to the members of board of directors of the major “network industries” in European stock markets. The description of these networks can be a useful tool to envisage what relational resources public enterprises hold through their members, compare them cross-country and cross-sector, assess individual resources, to account for the level of internationalization, and describe the differences between companies (partly) owned by local and national governments. The overall aim is to provide a more complete picture of the patterns of state intervention in the economy in European countries.