Davide Carbonai

Measuring Gender Differences in Information Sharing Using Network Analysis: The Case of the Austrian Interlocking Directorship Network in 2009

In recent literature a relevant problem has been the relationship between career/personal contactnetworks and different career paths. In addition the recent advances in social capital theory have shown the way in which networks impact on personal careers. In particular women’s careers appear to be negatively affected by the informational network structure. The main contribution of this work is to propose empirical evidence of this phenomenon by considering the gendered directorship network with relation to Austria and to show the structural differences by gender in the network. By using community detection techniques we have found various communities in which females seem not to be present at all, where females show significantly fewer contacts than males in the network, and finally where the proportion of males exceeds 91%. The results show the predominant role in the network of male directors;these differences are very relevant if we consider the network as a tool of vehicle information and as a power mechanism. In this paper we wish to make an original contribution to the debate of the well-known “glass-ceiling” effect.

Interlocking Directorates as a Trust Substitute: The Italian Non-Life Insurance Industry

This paper investigates the Italian insurance system by analyzing the (interlock) linkages among companies created through their directors. This approach defines interlocking directorates as the tie created between two companies when a person is a member of both boards of directors; each case of administrators’ co-presence is thus a connection between companies. The investigation follows a two-step procedure: first, it analyzes the social network of the insurance industry by focusing on the linkages among directors and among companies. Second, network statistics are combined in synthetic indices through principal component analyses in order to verify a correlation between indices and companies’ market shares. For the sake of brevity, this analysis is mainly restricted to non-life insurances, which are indeed the least competitive (as claimed 11 companies control the 78% of market) and most closed compared to the competition of other financial agents (life insurances compete with other forms of financial investments).

Positive Freedom in Networked Capitalism: An Empirical Analysis

The article proposes a social network analysis of the main European capitalisms and its correspondence with an index of economic freedom. The analysis relates to two kinds of economic liberties taken from the concept of freedom formulated by Isaiah Berlin. While the first kind of freedom (negative freedom) depends on the external system (e.g. the constraints on the firm defined by the regulations), the second refers to the internal obligations within the business system itself that prevent the free exercise of business (positive freedom): specifically, the social network, in which the company is embedded. After an operationalization of the two concepts of freedom, the analysis of a comprehensive database allows us to explore the relationship between the two kinds of freedom.

What is a Workers’ Referendum for? Evidence from Italy

In July 2007, the Prodi government and representatives of the three main Italian trade union confederations signed a landmark agreement on welfare and economic development. In October, in order to ratify or reject the agreement, the Italian labor movement organized a referendum, i.e. the Workers’ Referendum of 2007, inviting workers, pensioners and the unemployed to assess the agreement. Based on a comprehensive sampling (1,574 interviewees), these research notes provide an analysis of the Workers’ Referendum with regard to both key societal voting features and attitudes toward unions.

Participatory water governance in Mercosur countries

Water is crucial to existence, and is getting scarcer. Participatory governance and involving citizens and social movements in the various stages of managing access to water in Mercosur countries increases access to water and is an important means of democratising natural resource policy-making.