Lothar Krempel

The Politics of the German Company Network

For over 100 years, the company network was a major feature of organized corporate governance in Germany. This paper uses network visualization techniques and qualitative-historical analysis to discuss the structure, origins and development of this network and to analyse the reasons for its recent erosion. Network visualization makes it possible to identify crucial entanglement patterns that can be traced back historically. In three phases of network formation– the 1880s, 1920s and the 1950s– capital entanglement resulted from the interaction of company behaviour and government policy. In its heyday, the company network was de facto encompassing and provided its core participants, especially the banks, with a national, macroeconomic perspective. In the 1970s, increased competition among financial companies set in. In the 1980s and 1990s, declining returns from blockholding and increased opportunity costs made network dissolution a thinkable option for companies. Because of the strategic reorientation of the largest banks toward investment banking, ties between banks and industry underwent functional changes. Since the year 2000, the German governments tax policy has sped up network erosion. Vanishing capital ties imply a declining degree of strategic co-ordination among large German companies.

Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilization in the Revolution of 1848/49: A Microhistorical Actor-Centred Network Analysis

A great part of the political movement in the Revolution of 1848 took place in the form of group and mass petitions. The National Assembly in Frankfurt, the first national German parliament, received 17,000 petitions from more than three million people. A great number of petitions, analysed by German scholars such as Best, dealt with the question of a liberal market economy, with problems resulting out of the developing process of industrialization, and with protective duties. The petitions expressed different group interests, articulated by craftsmen, merchants, entrepreneurs, and workers, who responded to current economic and social restraints. Another complex of petitions formulated requests regarding the constitution, the liberalization of the political system, or the organization of education, especially the separation of church and state. Another large mass of revolutionary petitions was addressed to the rulers or the ruling bodies of the different German states and was concerned with regional conflicts, and the adoption of ideas that were developed at national level.

Netzwerkanalyse. Ein wachsendes Paradigma

Obwohl Netzwerkanalysen nunmehr eine fast hundertjahrige Geschichte aufweisen, fristet das Paradigma in der deutschen Sozialwissenschaft eher ein Schattendasein. Im Folgenden versuche ich zu verstehen, warum dies so ist, und versuche aufzuzeigen, warum dem Paradigma dennoch eine grose Zukunft bevorsteht.