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.