Discovering Organizational Hierarchy through a Corporate Ranking Algorithm: The Enron Case

This paper proposes the CorpRank algorithm to extract social hierarchies from electronic communication data. The algorithm computes a ranking score for each user as a weighted combination of the number of emails, the number of responses, average response time, clique scores, and several degree and centrality measures. The algorithm uses principal component analysis to calculate the weights of the features. This score ranks users according to their importance, and its output is used to reconstruct an organization chart. We illustrate the algorithm over real‐world data using the Enron corporation’s e‐mail archive. Compared to the actual corporate work chart, compensation lists, judicial proceedings, and analyzing the major players involved, the results show promise.