Compare methods

	Board Interlock Network Analysis	Upper Echelons (TMT) Analysis
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1996	1984
Originator	Mark S. Mizruchi; Gerald F. Davis	Donald C. Hambrick & Phyllis A. Mason
Type	Network-analytic pipeline for inter-firm ties created by shared directors	Demography-to-strategy pipeline linking executive characteristics to organizational outcomes
Seminal source	Mizruchi, M. S. (1996). What do interlocks do? An analysis, critique, and assessment of research on interlocking directorates. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 271-298.	Hambrick, D. C., & Mason, P. A. (1984). Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of Management Review, 9(2), 193-206.
Aliases	Interlocking Directorate Analysis, Director Interlock Network Analysis, Corporate Board Network Analysis, Intercorporate Network Analysis	Top Management Team Demography Analysis, Upper Echelons Theory Testing, TMT Characteristics Analysis, Executive Demographic Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	Board interlock network analysis treats the corporate economy as a network in which two firms are tied whenever they share a director, and studies how these interlocking directorates channel information, influence, and the diffusion of practices among companies. Mizruchi's 1996 Annual Review of Sociology synthesis crystallized the field, distinguishing the determinants of interlocks from their consequences and cataloguing the mechanisms — collusion, cooptation and monitoring, legitimacy, career advancement, and social cohesion — that interlocks have been argued to serve. Davis's 1991 study of how the poison-pill takeover defense spread through the board network gave the perspective its canonical demonstration that corporate practices diffuse along director ties. The method combines two-mode-to-one-mode network construction with positional metrics and diffusion modeling.	Upper echelons analysis tests the proposition that organizations become reflections of their top managers: that the strategic choices a firm makes and the performance it achieves can be partly predicted from the observable characteristics of its top management team. Hambrick and Mason's 1984 Academy of Management Review article launched this perspective, arguing that because executives act on their construed view of complex situations, their experiences, values, and personalities shape outcomes — and that hard-to-measure cognitions can be proxied by observable traits such as age, tenure, functional background, and education. Hambrick's 2007 update sharpened the theory, emphasizing managerial discretion and executive job demands as the conditions under which executive characteristics matter most. The analysis links team demography to strategy and performance.