TITLE WAVE: THE DIFFUSION OF THE CEO TITLE THROUGHOUT THE US CORPORATE NETWORK by

In 1955 only one of the 200 largest industrial corporations in the United States used the title Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to denote its chief executive. By 1975 all but one of these firms had a CEO. This innovation can not reasonably be argued to either have been the result of strategic considerations, nor to have had a measurable effect on firm performance; in fact, it is probably most accurately described as a fad. But as such, it provides us with a near-perfect test of contagion via cohesion, contagion via structural equivalence models, and other explanations of diffusion. Relying primarily .upon corporate director interlock data for the period 1955-75, we test these explanations and draw conclusions about both the spread of the innovation through the intercorporate network as well as diffusion research in general.