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OWNERSHIP STRUCTURES AND INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATES AND BOARDS IN THE CONTEMPORARY BRAZILIAN BANKING SECTOR: an empirical analysis of the national financial elite

In the article, we employ Social Network Analysis (SNA) to investigate the Brazilian financial elite, focusing on the intertwined ownership and board structures formed by 25 banking corporations that traded their shares on the B3 in 2022. The article utilizes the annual reference forms submitted by the companies to the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM), and analyzes the information on the executive boards and boards of directors of these companies with the assistance of the Gephi 0.10.1 software. Dealing with issues relating to the relationships between elites, conceiving markets as social spaces of continuous relations, and following the positional method developed by Wright Mills, the work demonstrates how the simultaneous participation of individuals in organizations (1), their common educational background (2), and their professional trajectory (3) give rise to a cohesive elite, which constitutes a necessary basis for the exercise of power. The work also identifies the institutional mechanisms through which this national financial elite sustains its relative insulation from individuals and groups of foreign and/or global financial elites, particularly the dual ownership structure that prevails in these corporations, indicating the political nature of the formation and preservation of the Brazilian financial elite.

Ownership structures; Interlocking directorates; Financial elite; Banking sector; Social Network Analysis (SNA


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