Contenu du sommaire : Milieux d'affaires et cercles dirigeants

By studying the boards of fourteen economic groups listed between 2000 and 2015 in the index of the Mexican Stock Exchange as well as their 529 directors' career paths, this work aims to explain the cohesive business environment in Mexico. In a context of preservation of family capitalism and despite corporate governance reforms, family and friendship ties remain prevalent to access positions of power on the boards and constitute clans around the majority shareholders and their family business. In addition, the analysis of 2-mode corporate networks carried out between companies and families for the year 2010 shows that these family clans act in solidarity to defend their interests with the government and to face the international competition.

Do capitalist families concentrate economic power through coordinating capital in networks of interlocking directorates? This study analyzes how super-rich capitalist families are embedded in the 2020 network of interlocking directorates common to the world's largest 254,207 firms and their 1,473,149 top managers and directors. I identify 4,250 family members from 2,313 super-rich families, each with an estimated family net worth of US$250 m or more. I map these family members in the networks between firms and between individuals. Factors facilitating super-rich participation in global and national networks of interlocking directorates are tested using logistic regression models. Results show that, first, directors belonging to super-rich families are more likely to be embedded in corporate elite networks than are other directors. Family-level explanatory variables such as family wealth and size of a dynasty further increase the odds of forming part of the largest connected component. The share of firms with any type of super-rich involvement increases towards the core of the global network–but only up to a share of about 20% of all firms. Second, two individuals' being members of two different super-rich families does not increase the odds of their sitting on the same board. This speaks against the idea, suggested by the class cohesion model, that super-rich capitalists coordinate on corporate boards because they are driven by shared interests based on the commonality of owning or controlling capital. Instead, large, listed firms seem to hire members of super-rich families to supervisory positions, possibly to utilize either their prestige, as a signal of credibility for stakeholders, or their contacts, as potential clients, and investors.

This article investigates how the internationalization of the Swiss banking sector has transformed the careers of banking elites. By combining a multiple correspondence analysis of the executives of the 37 largest Swiss banks in 2010 with a qualitative analysis based on prosopographical data and biographical interviews, we show that the careers of banking executives are polarized by an opposition between transnational and national elites. The transnational elites, evolving in large groups, are characterized by a high degree of international mobility, in the form of education and professional experience abroad, while the national elites, evolving in less financialized structures, are characterized by a regional anchorage.

Following the adoption of the Copé-Zimmermann law, women have made a significant entry into the management bodies of major French companies. Have they become women of power? Our article examines the possible transformations of the French business world by studying the forms of authority that women have acquired. Distinguishing two types of authority, one institutional, the other relational, we systematically compare females and males. We show that the new balance masks an unequal gender distribution of institutional forms of authority. On the other hand, women occupy a central place in the network of CAC 40 directors, being more multi-positioned than men. However, their cumulative positions of authority remain lower than those of men. More often independent or foreign, and regularly appointed for their proximity to the presidency or the management, women are not in a position to use their connections to influence debates.

In this article, we study the changes of demographics of the core of Swiss elite networks for a period of 105 years to explore the relationship between network cohesion and social closure, linked to different processes of elite reproduction. We investigate changes in gender diversity, elite background, educational and professional closure, cosmopolitan capital and geographical integration of the most interconnected and central elite group. We show that since the 1910s the elite core experienced a progressive movement from a family-based process of reproduction among integrated corporate elites to an educational and professional-based mode of reproduction within a more integrative corporatist core during the 1950s and 1980s. This movement still accelerated when the core desegregated into a fragmented business elite since the 1990s (and into a loose-knit pluralistic group for some years after the financial crisis), although some individual examples show, as suggested by the international literature, that in the corporate world family-based reproduction relying on the inheritance of billionaire corporate assets still endures.

This article contributes to the debate on “the fracturing of elites” by examining the collective organization of elite business leaders outside the professional sphere. We draw on data from an original database to analyze a two-mode network linking 1,272 corporate administrators and heads from ten economic sectors to 5,590 organizations in eight different social sectors. Using resource mobilization theory, we demonstrate the relevance of taking account of sectoral differentiation when comparing two sets of top business leaders. One falls into the category of established businesses represented by the oldest historical sectors, such as industry, raw materials, food, and retail sales. Another into the category of “challenger” companies in more recent sectors, such as hedge funds, private equity firms, and technology corporations. By modeling access to social capital, strength of intergroup ties, and political involvement, we show that at the present time the established elite still has a greater capacity to take collective action than the challenger group.

This article focuses on an organization created in 1974 by executives of large agri-food corporations: the French Foundation for Nutrition. Its initial objective was to fund research in the field of nutrition, but its activities gradually evolved into those of a think tank aiming to reassure the French people about food safety. Starting from a discussion of the litteratures on the repertoires of collective action and on the production of ignorance, the article shows how this think tank associating economic and academic elites was built in reaction to the rise of the consumerist movement, and how it developed a specific repertoire of action based on discrete action targeted at certain professions responsible for relaying reassuring scientific information to the general public. The succession of food crises and controversies from the mid-1990s onwards led to a significant change in the think tank's repertoire of action. Its role should no longer be to disseminate the allegedly consensual point of view of the experts, but on the contrary to highlight the multiple debates around food choices, deflecting attention away from food safety toward the social and cultural dimension of food behavior and the responsibility of consumers.