The corporate board archive

- Summary:
The corporate board archive mainly contains the names of all board members and general managers in the 200 largest companies in Norway, as well as in all banks. The archive contains data for every five years: 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000

- Contents:
The archive consists of two levels with corresponding datasets. The first data set contains information about the company (name, type of company, number of man-years, turnover and total assets for banks). The second data set contains information about the general manager as well as the people on the company boards (name and type of position). See also the variable descriptions under the respective data sets.

- Background:
The data material was collected by Sigmund Grønmo at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen. For the period 1970 to 1995, this was collected in connection with the research program 'The new money society', which was carried out under the auspices of the Research Council of Norway in the period 1989–1996. The Inquiry into Power and Democracy has financed the collection of the material for 2000. In August 2002, the material was transferred from the Department of Sociology to NSD for archiving and distribution to ev. other research purposes.

- Data quality:
The original data transferred to NSD contains information on the number of man-years and turnover (total assets for banks). This is information that has never been prioritized when the collection took place; there is therefore a lack of information for many companies at the same time as the quality of data varies.

- Use:
The corporate board archive is primarily collected for the purpose of being able to study power structures that arise when one and the same person is a board member in more than one company. Such connections are often called "overlapping board positions" or "board communities". By aggregating "board communities", it is possible to say something about where power is centralized in that some boards have many people on other boards and how such central points of power are maintained and changed over time. This is often called network analysis. Through network analysis, one can thus look at connection lines between the business community's actors, the network patterns that these connection lines together constitute and the individual actors' position within these networks.

- Sources:
A large part of the material about the board members in the companies has been made available by the Brønnøysund registers. The latest data has been received in electronic form, while information from the 1970s and 1980s has been systematized and registered on the basis of archived letters and reports from the companies. The Brønnøysund registers facilitated the conditions for data collection in an excellent way. In connection with the data collection for 2000, we also benefited greatly from the fact that Dagens Næringsliv provided access to its overview of the largest Norwegian companies. NSD has contributed to the facilitation of the 1995 and 2000 vintages.