Organizational structure of Mazda's Keiretsu: A graph theoretic analysis

According to Freeman, centrality indices, which include degree, closeness, and betweenness, are an effective way to measure organizational structure. However, Ito discussed the implications of centrality, and found that differences exist even when the centrality is the same. Using data on transactions and cross shareholdings that were drawn from Mazda's Yokokai Keiretsu, a new method - the SNW model - is proposed to calculate structural importance. Therefore, this article provides a new perspective for discovering the structural importance of network organizations. Furthermore, implications based on statistical comparisons between the SNW model and corporate performance such as sales and profits are proffered.