From Presence to Influence: Gender, Nationality and Network Centrality of Corporate Directors

The lack of diversity in the corporate elite continues to attract attention from scholars and practitioners. However, the issue of representation or ‘body count’ – in particular for women – tends to dominate the discussion and overshadows social-relational dimensions. Adopting a network perspective, this article investigates how gender and nationality interact with human and social capital (i.e. director capital), explaining why particular directors hold more influential positions in the corporate elite. Findings from Swiss data show that some specific aspects of human and social capital matter more than others for being an influential director and that, ceteris paribus, Swiss citizens benefit most from both sources of capital. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211018579