Flexible design for a large-scale corporate data base

This paper describes the design and implementation of a “pre-structured multi-purpose data base” for information about the Canadian corporate structure. This system includes data on directorship, officcrship, executive board membership, and ownership ties among approximately 10,000 Canadian and other financial and industrial corporations and about 6,000 organizations (law firms, brokerage houses, public institutions, etc.) with which directors resident in Canada were affiliated. In addition, it contains data on the operating accounts, and standard industrial classification codes, for a large subset of these. Here we summarize its capabilities and analytic uses.     

The determination of enterprise groupings through combined ownership and directorship ties

Recent work on economic structure has tended to focus around discovering general or global mappings to represent complex patterns of binary or multiplex ties. By contrast, this paper seeks to define an intermediate level of structure—the “enterprise ”—and to measure it concretely using a combination of ownership and director/officership or executive board membership ties.In the first section, we outline the theoretical and substantive basis of the concept of “enterprises” as it is used in the literature. Difficulties in the operationalization of this concept are then surveyed and some tentative solutions suggested. In the second section, we describe in detail the methods used to implement our definition of enterprises for a set which includes the 5306 firms which most directly shape the Canadian economy. The third section outlines the impact of the use of four slightly different versions of this definition on arrays of enterprise memberships. Finally, the larger implications of our findings—both for the measurement of intermediate levels of structure and for the study of cross-national economic connections—are discussed.