ABSTRACT

This chapter explains the development of the Dutch corporate network of exchange-listed firms between 1903 and 2008. A number of sociologists and historians have already produced literature about the Dutch corporate network. Hubert Schijf analyzes the emergence of corporate elites in 1886 and 1902 (Schijf 1993, 1984). Joost Jonker, a business historian, shows that the increasing amount of bank lending to industrial firms in the period 1910–1920 was the reason for an increase in the amount of interlocks between banks and industry, which diminished once again following the banking crisis of 1921 (Jonker 1989). Helmers et al. (1975) describe the interlocks between Dutch firms in the 1960s, based on the largest 86 Dutch firms identified in 1969. The study put a strong emphasis on the finance-capital model as an explanation of the structure of the network. The decline of the network at the end of the twentieth century is analyzed by Eelke Heemskerk (2007) using three benchmark years: 1976, 1996 and 2001. Taken together, these studies give an indication of how the Dutch corporate network evolved over time, but a truly longitudinal study is still lacking. Heemskerk and Fennema’s study of 2009 is an exception. They investigate the cohesion of the Dutch business elite during the twentieth century, focusing on the interpersonal perspective of the network. Their study is based on a different reading of data on board interlocks to those already mentioned. The disparity of the data in all of these studies, however, makes comparison between them over a long time period difficult, if not impossible. There is thus no narrative for the entire twentieth century (for an overview of the data, see Table 1 in Heemskerk and Fennema 2009, 817).