Overlapping Social Circles in Historical Elite Career Networks: Measuring Accumulated Social Status with ‘K-Circles’ and Circle Esteem in Bipartite Networks

By extending Breiger’s (1974) notion of the duality of persons and groups to biographical data, individuals and organisations can be linked through career overlaps, formalised as k-circles, a minimal members decomposition approach. This k-circle measure is used to identify key individuals and organisations in biographies of more than 30,000 Danish elites between 1910 and 2020. We compare the central circle based on CV data to an elite identified through affiliation networks, showing that k-circles identify career hubs rather than the meeting points of elites. We discuss how k-circles are associated with standard measures of centrality.