This study relates the local property of node dominance to local and global properties of a network. Iterative removal of dominated nodes yields a distributed algorithm for computing a core-periphery decomposition of a social network, where nodes in the network core are seen to be essential in terms of network flow and global structure. Additionally, the connected components in the periphery give information about the community structure of the network, aiding in community detection. A number of explicit results are derived, relating the core and periphery to network flow, community structure and global network structure, which are corroborated by observational results. The method is illustrated using a real world network (DBLP co-authorship network), with ground-truth communities.