Corporate Networks

What is the role of (corporate) networks in International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship? Throughout its young history, the field has developed different conceptual and empirical approaches to answer this question. At the same time, corporate networks are still underappreciated as fora for political and economic change. This chapter argues that such underappreciation can be remedied by bringing in the insights and methodological advances of the “big data” revolution of the 2010s. Such an application can help in answering and bringing existing conceptual ideas to the fore. Beyond either using “networks” as an anecdotally illustrated metaphor or as a methodological tool only, this chapter proposes to develop new ways of combining long-standing theoretical problems with innovative empirical methods and applications. By surveying the literature on networks in IPE of the last decade, this chapter shows how the gap between theoretical and empirical accounts still persists, but is being increasingly bridged by contributions outside the “mainstream core” of IPE journals.