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Continuity and Change in the Evolution of the Danish Corporate Elite, 1910-2017

Elites
Business
Big Data
Capitalism
Christoph Ellersgaard
Copenhagen Business School
Hubert Buch-Hansen
Copenhagen Business School
Christoph Ellersgaard
Copenhagen Business School

Abstract

This paper takes a longitudinal perspective on the evolution of the Danish corporate elite, situating its trajectory in the context of both external shocks and incremental structural changes in the Danish political economy over the past 100+ years. Specifically, it seeks to establish the extent to which developments in the sectoral composition of the Danish economy is reflected in the composition of the corporate elite and vice versa. Moreover, it considers whether and how the corporate elite was affected by major external shocks, such as World War I and II, institutional change and deep economic crises. To gain insights into the composition of the corporate elite at different junctures, the paper utilises a novel dataset drawn from a large database on the wider elite. This database has been constructed based on all entries in Kraks Blå Bog , the Danish equivalent to the British Who’s Who, over the 1910-2017 period. Focusing solely on the corporate elite, the paper uses a novel approach, k-circles, to identify the key overlap between individuals and organizations through shared memberships and occupational trajectories to identify the most central individuals and organisations in the corporate sector in different decades. The findings are related to rankings of the biggest companies in different years and historical statistics on developments in the relative weight of different sectors in the Danish economy. The latter for instance show the decline of agriculture and the rise of some forms of industry and services among the sectors contributing the most to economic growth. The paper investigates whether such developments were reflected in the composition of the corporate elite or if major discrepancies between key sectors and the corporate elite composition can be observed. To conceptualise the corporate elite the paper engages with notions such as the ‘inner circle’ (Useem 1984), ‘hegemonic blocs’ (Poulantzas 1978) and ‘social blocs’ (Baccaro and Pontusson 2019). More generally, to interpret and put into perspective its findings, the paper draws on recent theoretical and empirical scholarship in the fields of economic sociology, political economy and business history. Our preliminary findings indicate that while there were important changes in the constellations of corporate organisations forming part of the corporate elite, it was in other key respects characterised by remarkable stability. Another preliminary finding is that the K-circle score was on the rise in most of the time window, culminating around 2000, indicating increasing cohesion of Denmark’s corporate elite. Subsequently it declined, suggesting a fracturing of the corporate elite.