This special issue examines globalisation and resilience, variously conceived, from a network perspective. In an era that moved from hyperglobalisation to disruption—pandemics, geopolitical tensions, climate risks—we argue that a key orienting question should be how globalisation is being reconfigured across multiplex economic, social and industrial networks. With this special issue, we hope to motivate new bodies of literature deploying social network analysis to diagnose and analyse the resilience of global economic networks to exogenous shocks. Where are such shocks likely to occur? Do they get contained in network subgraphs? Or are they absorbed more equally throughout the network? In any given network, which actors and ties, or types of actors and ties, underpin systemic robustness? The four papers in the issue span a bibliometric synthesis of ‘network resilience’ across domains; an industry-level measure of supply-chain disruption linking logistics reliability to US output; a country-level study connecting embeddedness in the global FDI network to democratic resilience in less-developed countries; and a firm-level reconstruction of the EV corporate ownership network. We conclude by highlighting the substantive contributions of these papers, by calling for conceptual clarity on network resilience, and by suggesting a number of fruitful directions for future research.

Carbon capture, utilisation and storage represents an important technology for countries to address climate change challenges, achieve decarbonisation and reach net zero targets. This study examines the factors that are association with country level participation in carbon capture projects. A Poisson regression model is employed to examine the relationship between country level factors (such as GDP per capita, regional partition, trade openness, economic complexity and tax initiatives) and the number of carbon capture project initiated within a country (from 2019 up until February 2023). We find that a country's region (as defined by the World Bank), market affluence and level of CO2 emissions is associated with a country's participation in carbon capture projects. The results indicate that nations that are more affluent and have higher CO2 emissions are associated with increase participation in carbon capture projects. Carbon tax and Emissions Trading Systems have a positive impact on a country's participation in carbon capture projects, in particular carbon tax. This indicates that carbon tax acts as an effective incentive for industry engagement with carbon capture technologies. This study also examines the interplay between economic complexity and country level carbon capture project participation, where a negative relationship is observed.

This paper draws on network analysis to examine the impact of Global Value Chain (GVC) embeddedness on carbon emissions from 2000 to 2014. A country network of value added is constructed, and a Temporal Network Autocorrelation Model (TNAM) is applied to examine the impact of network position in the GVC and emissions of network partners on the CO2 emissions of a country. The paper finds weak evidence of a positive impact of GVC participation on CO2 emissions. This paper does not find support for the EKC hypothesis. Additionally, the analysis examines the impact of the economic complexity level of a country on emissions and finds no significant relationship.

The corporate governance literature has often been concerned with whether individuals with a high number of board directorships are too busy to serve in their role. In the UK, many MPs also hold positions on boards of directors. This raises the question of whether MPs with board memberships are too busy to serve their constituents, party and parliament. To address this question, we construct a network of directors (including MPs) and the firms they are associated with. We then draw on measures from social network analysis to capture how embedded these individuals are in the UK corporate system. We employ a regression approach to examine the relationship between MPs’ position in the corporate system and their participation in Parliament. We find that that some positions within the corporate network are associated with increased participation and others with decreased participation. MP participation increases when they have high numbers of directorships or high levels of corporate opportunity, but it decreases for those who are deeply embedded in the corporate system, sitting on the boards of well-connected firms. The latter are potentially ‘too busy’ to serve.

Industrial decarbonisation has become an increasingly important policy issue in recent years, as governments and nations aim to tackle the climate crisis. This study makes use of UK research council and Horizon 2020 data to map the research landscape for industrial decarbonisation. This includes an analysis of 435 projects funded by various UK research councils, and 239 projects funded under Horizon 2020 linked to industrial decarbonisation. This study finds in the UK case, University–Industry–Government links are critical elements of the decarbonisation research landscape. Universities playing key roles in the UK system are often members of the prestigious Russell Group. In the case of the European industrial decarbonisation landscape (as captured by projects funded under Horizon 2020), private firms play a crucial role. This study also maps a country-to-country collaboration network based on industrial decarbonisation research projects funded under Horizon 2020. This study examines the link between country position in the network and share of electricity consumption that comes from coal; no significant relationship is identified.

Is guanxi withering with the internationalisation of the Chinese economy?With the growing exposure of Chinese businesses to market discipline and Western business practices, have traditional Chinese practices become impediments, and anachronisms to be abandoned?In this review, we consider the grounds for expecting a pervasive Chinese business practice, guanxi, to change in the face of internationalisation.To do so, we examine guanxi as a multifaceted process, applied differently in different circumstances.We argue that, while guanxi has many differences from Western business networks, concepts from social network analysis, particularly the contrast between brokerage and closure, are useful in considering the dynamics of guanxi in an internationalising context.We use the review to develop a conceptual model of the expected impact of internationalisation on guanxi, finding internationalisation promotes dynamics of short-term brokerage at individual and organisational levels alongside a long-term tendency towards closure at an individual level.

PurposeThe outbreak of COVID-19 has caused a slowdown of economic activity across the globe, which has resulted in high levels of disruption to labour markets. This study seeks to examine how the outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted the search strategies of students seeking for an internship, and whether these have changed since the start of the pandemic. The study utilises the strength of weak ties hypothesis, social capital theory and status attainment theory to explore the changes in securing a position since the outbreak of COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachThis study draws on data from two cohorts of MBA students seeking to secure internships: one before the outbreak and one during. A multinomial regression is employed to examine how students have used network ties to secure internships and how this has changed since the outbreak of COVID-19.FindingsThe multinomial regression results indicate that there was little difference in the strategies employed by students before the crisis compared to those that secured them during, potentially indicating that students are unwilling to deviate from typical job search strategies, especially in times of uncertainty.Originality/valueThis study provides insights into how network ties are used by job seekers during a period of economic and environmental uncertainty.

This paper investigates the link between value chain importance and economic growth for the EU24 regions between 2008 and 2018. It finds that relying more on GVCs worsened regional growth during the financial crisis, but led to higher growth in the long run. The results contribute to the literature on regional resilience and the public debate on the impact of shocks and the desirability of GVCs. Furthermore, by separately analyzing the importance of global and regional value chains it contributes to the discussion on the effect of regionalization and provides insights on how the re-configuring of value chains may affect regional growth.

Purpose Corporate success depends partially on the quality of knowledge accessible to the executive board. One route of access to such knowledge is the appointment of directors who already hold directorships with prominent other corporate actors. Such director appointments provide interlocks to a corporate knowledge ecosystem (Haunschild and Beckman, 1998). The purpose of this paper is to examine how linkages between companies belonging to different sectors impact firm performance and to examine how linkages created by female directors, as opposed to male directors, shape performance. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates the interlocks created between UK FTSE 350 companies from 2010 to 2018. It draws on network analysis to map the roles that male and female directors play in linking firms with varying sector classifications. The paper provides an examination of the impact of these roles on firm performance, through a panel data regression analysis. Findings This paper finds that there is an increase of inter-industry brokers over the period, and that men are still dominant in both the network and creating inter-industry ties amongst companies. However, the role of women in establishing these ties appears to be changing, and women are more important when it comes to create inter-industry ties among key economic sectors. Originality/value This paper provides a novel approach to examine the interplay between gendered inter (and intra) sectoral linkages and firm performance. It provides an original application of the two-mode brokerage analysis framework proposed in Jasny and Lubell (2015).

Achieving impact through research for development programmes (R4D) requires engagement with diverse stakeholders across the research, development and policy divides. Understanding how such programmes support the emergence of outcomes, therefore, requires a focus on the relational aspects of engagement and collaboration. Increasingly, evaluation of large research collaborations is employing social network analysis (SNA), making use of its relational view of causation. In this paper, we use three applications of SNA within similar large R4D programmes, through our work within evaluation of three Interidsiplinary Hubs of the Global Challenges Research Fund, to explore its potential as an evaluation method. Our comparative analysis shows that SNA can uncover the structural dimensions of interactions within R4D programmes and enable learning about how networks evolve through time. We reflect on common challenges across the cases including navigating different forms of bias that result from incomplete network data, multiple interpretations across scales, and the challenges of making causal inference and related ethical dilemmas. We conclude with lessons on the methodological and operational dimensions of using SNA within monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) systems that aim to support both learning and accountability.

This paper provides an examination of inter-organizational collaboration in the UK research system. Data are collected on organizational collaboration on projects funded by four key UK research councils: Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. The organizational partnerships include both academic and nonacademic institutions. A collaboration network is created for each research council, and an exponential random graph model is applied to inform on the mechanisms underpinning collaborative tie formation on research council-funded projects. We find that in the sciences, collaborative patterns are much more hierarchical and concentrated in a small handful of actors compared to the social sciences and humanities projects. Institutions that are members of the elite Russell Group (a set of 24 high-ranking UK universities) are much more likely to be involved in collaborations across research councils.

Gender diversity in STEM remains a significant issue, as the field continues to be a male dominated one, despite increased attention on the subject. This article examines the interplay between gender diversity on projects funded by a major UK research council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the publication activity of a project, as measured by the average journal quality of project publication output, over a 10-year period. The proportion of female representation and leadership on these projects remains very low. For the projects examined as part of this study, over 70% of these projects have no female representation, and less than 15% have a female lead. This study does not find a significant relationship between gender diversity and journal quality output. This study highlights that an important avenue for future work is the development of alternative metrics to assess the performance of research projects in a discipline characterized by very low levels of gender diversity, to fully unpack the impact of project team gender diversity on project output activity.

The Gould and Fernandez local brokerage measure defines brokering roles based on the group membership of the nodes from the incoming and outgoing edges. This paper extends on this brokerage measure to account for weighted edges and introduces the Weighted-Normalized Gould-Fernandez measure (WNGF). The value added of this new measure is demonstrated empirically with both a macro level trade network and a micro level organization network. The measure is first applied to the EUREGIO inter-regional trade dataset and then to an organizational network in a research and development group. The results gained from the WNGF measure are compared to those from two dichotomized networks: a threshold and a multiscale backbone network. The results show that the WNGF generates valid results, consistent with those of the dichotomized network. In addition, it provides the following advantages: (i) it ensures information retention, (ii) since no alterations and decisions have to be made on how to dichotomize the network, the WNGF frees the user from the burden of making assumptions, (iii) it provides a nuanced understanding of each node's brokerage role. These advantages are of special importance when the role of less connected nodes is considered. The two empirical networks used here are for illustrative purposes. Possible applications of WNGF span beyond regional and organizational studies, and into all those contexts where retaining weights is important, for example by accounting for persisting or repeating edges compared to one-time interactions. WNGF can also be used to further analyze networks that measure how often people meet, talk, text, like, or retweet. WNGF makes a relevant methodological contribution as it offers a way to analyze brokerage in weighted, directed, and even complete graphs without information loss that can be used across disciplines and different type of networks.

Intra-firm trade describes the trade between affiliated firms and is increasingly important as global production is fragmented. However, statistics and data on global intra-firm trade patterns are widely unavailable. This study proposes a novel multilevel approach combining firm and country level data to construct a set of country intra-firm trade networks for various segments of the automotive production chain. A multilevel network is constructed with a network of international trade at the macro level, a firm ownership network at the micro level and a firm-country affiliation network linking the two, at the meso level. A motif detection approach is used to filter these networks to extract potential intra-firm trade ties between countries, where the motif (or substructure) is two countries linked by trade, each affiliated with a firm, and these two firms linked by ownership. The motif detection is used to extract potential country level intra-firm trade ties. An Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) is applied to the country level intra-firm trade networks, one for each segment of the automotive production chain, to inform on the determinants of intra-firm trade at the country level.

World systems theory proposes that global trade is stratified into hierarchical groups, a tightly connected core, and a weakly connected periphery. The theory suggests that this hierarchical structure contributes to power imbalances in the global economy and the organisation of the international division of labour. This paper employs a complex network model, an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM), to a set of international trade networks to examine how the export patterns of the core differ from the periphery. The analysis highlights that many of the processes underpinning the formation of trade ties are consistent across product groups. The key differences between the high- and low-tech groups are import patterns. The difference between export activity of the core and periphery is also more pronounced for low-tech compared to high-tech. The differences between the export activity of the core and periphery are, that in the low-tech case, larger nations in the periphery are more likely to export, whilst in the core it is smaller nations (up to a point) that are likely to export these low-tech goods. In both the case of the high-tech and low-tech, less affluent nations in the core are more likely to export.

Purpose The relationship between interlocking directorates and firm performance has been increasingly debated, with a focus on whether firm's centrality in interlock networks is associated with performance. The purpose of this study is to examine not only how a firm's position in this network is associated with performance but also how the performance of network partners can impact a firm's performance. This study examines how firms effectively utilise the interlock network to achieve the goal of higher market capitalisation – termed market capitalisation rank (MCR). Design/methodology/approach The premise of the study is the UK FTSE 350 firms from 2014 to 2018. The paper makes use of a temporal network autocorrelation model to examine how firm characteristics, the structural position in the interlock network and the performance of network partners affect MCR over time. Findings The analysis indicates that firms with ties (via the interlock network) to firms with high market capitalisation are more likely to enhance their own MCR, highlighting network partners have the opportunity to play a critical role in a firm's dominance strategy to optimise firm value. Originality/value The value of this research is that it does not only look at the impact of a firm's position in the network on performance, but the impact of the performance of network partners on a firm's market performance as well.

This study examines patterns of regionalisation in the International Trade Network (ITN). This study makes use of Gould Fernandez brokerage to examine the roles countries play in the ITN linking different regional partitions. An examination of three ITNs is provided for three networks with varying levels of technological content, representing trade in high tech, medium tech, and low-tech goods. Simulated network data, based on an advanced network model controlling for degree centralisation and clustering patterns, is compared to the observed data to examine whether the roles countries play within and between regions are result of centralisation and clustering patterns. The findings indicate that the roles countries play between and within regions is a result of centralisation and clustering patterns; indicating a need to examine the presence of hubs when investigating regionalisation and globalisation patterns in the modern global economy.

Social animals self-organise to create groups to increase protection against predators and productivity. One-to-one interactions are the building blocks of these emergent social structures and may correspond to friendship, grooming, communication, among other social relations. These structures should be robust to failures and provide efficient communication to compensate the costs of forming and maintaining the social contacts but the specific purpose of each social interaction regulates the evolution of the respective social networks. We collate 611 animal social networks and show that the number of social contacts $E$ scales with group size $N$ as a super-linear power-law $E=CN^{\beta}$ for various species of animals, including humans, other mammals and non-mammals. We identify that the power-law exponent $\beta$ varies according to the social function of the interactions as $\beta = 1+a/4$, with $a \approx {1,2,3,4}$. By fitting a multi-layer model to our data, we observe that the cost to cross social groups also varies according to social function. Relatively low costs are observed for physical contact, grooming and group membership which lead to small groups with high and constant social clustering. Offline friendship has similar patterns while online friendship shows weak social structures. The intermediate case of spatial proximity ($\beta=1.5$ and clustering dependency on network size quantitatively similar to friendship) suggests that proximity interactions may be as relevant for the spread of infectious diseases as for social processes like friendship.

PurposeThis paper aims to provide an exploratory analysis of male and female directors, comparing the case of UK FTSE 350 boards of directors for 2010–2018, with Norwegian boards from 2002 to 2018, to examine patterns of busy female directors. This paper considers the differences between the effects of interest groups’ actions and those of quotas on the emergence of busy female directors.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses a longitudinal approach, providing an examination of both non-busy directors and busy directors sitting on the boards of UK and Norwegian firms, with a focus on female directors. Drawing on methods from social network analysis, several trends and patterns are mapped for the two corporate systems. The paper tests whether the proportion of busy male directors is significantly different from the proportion of busy female directors in the two institutional settings.FindingsThe results show there has been an increase in the proportion of busy female directors, whereas the level of busy male directors is slightly decreasing in the UK from 2010 to 2018. In Norway, following the introduction of gender quotas on corporate boards, there has been an increase in overboarded directors, especially female directors, along with the rise of so-called “golden skirt” directors. However, when compared to the UK case, the proportion of busy male and female directors is higher, suggesting that the emergence of the golden skirts in Norway is not a result of quotas alone.Originality/valueThe topic of busy directors has received increased attention in recent years, yet the gender of these directors is often neglected. This paper provides an overview of the characteristics of busy female directors for large UK and Norwegian firms, presenting avenues for future research.