“Partners in Power: Job Mobility and Dynamic Deal-Making.”

This essay, co-authored with Matthew Checkley from Warwick Business School, explores whether senior managers' job mobility is causally significant in shifting dynamic inter-organizational networks. It considers how the connectedness of venture capital firms changes with the job mobility of senior venture capitalists between those firms. By estimating actor-driven models for network evolution on our data, we test whether senior managers are able to "drag" prior inter-firm relational links with them as they move between employing firms. First findings do support the general notion of managers attracting ties, but do not support the more specific hypothesis that manager movements "drag" specific inter-firm links with them. This preliminary result is broadly consistent with an institutional view of venture capital syndication, suggesting that the pool of managers has the function of a resource rather than the function of social capital.

The slides were presented at the Fifth Workshop on Networks in Economics and Sociology (Utrecht, June 22, 2006) and the First Interdisciplinary Workshop on Applications of Network Analysis (Rotterdam, November 23, 2006).

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