Felix Bühlmann

How do coalitions within financial sectors lead to reconfigurations in political regimes? We investigate this issue by looking at how the transformation of global wealth chains has led to the reconfiguration of Switzerland’s social blocs. To highlight the political effects of the restructuring of financial circuits, we combine a multiple correspondence analysis of the positions of Swiss parties and interest groups with a qualitative analysis of the dynamics of Swiss financial policies. We show how the Swiss financial sector is split into two sets of actors: (1) large banks, who seek to maintain access to international markets by complying with international regulation, and (2) smaller wealth managers and banks, who try to maintain the tax avoidance model. We contend that this split has resulted in a division within Swiss politics, between the traditional centre-right camp, and a new right-wing camp.

The strategies, decisions and beliefs of those who occupy prominent positions of economic power have influence on very large corporations and the markets they dominate, on vast amounts of economic resources, and on the rules of the game. However, the sociology of elites faces a dual challenge: divergent conceptualisations of what can be considered as a position of economic power and internationally incompatible sources of information hinder comparative analysis. The World Elite Database (WED) addresses this dual challenge, by generating, based on a consistent definition, standardised data for 16 countries. This research note introduces WED, its construction principles, and presents preliminary findings on how economic elites differ across countries.

The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire populations and long-term impacts, hindering efforts to address issues such as biodiversity loss, global warming, and pandemics. This article explores the structural challenges of integrating an evolutionary perspective, historically opposed to functional determinants of health and disease, into current biological science practices. Using data on Swiss biology professors from 1957, 1980, and 2000, we examine the structural power dynamics that have led to the division between these competing epistemologies, and how this division has influenced resource allocation and career trajectories. Our analysis suggests that this cleavage presents a significant obstacle to achieving fruitful reconciliations, and that increased academicization and internationalization may benefit functional biologists at the expense of evolutionary biologists. While evolutionary biologists have gained symbolic recognition in recent years, this has not translated into valuable expertise in the political domain.

Global professional service firms (GPSFs) are key actors in contemporary capitalism. They (co-) produce and disseminate new business practices, linking firms, sectors, and countries, integrating them into a global system. We examine a second, less studied function of these firms: underpinning capitalism’s status hierarchies. We ask whether these firms have emerged as producers of a new corporate nobility—as an extension of elite universities, and as a stepping stone in the selection and promotion of top executives. Focusing on the US, we ask: do global professional service firms merely amplify the credentials of elite universities, or can they compensate for an absence of an elite education in the careers of US top managers? and do professional service firms equip future top managers with specific expertise or merely with symbolic capital? Based on a sample of 2,610 top executive managers from leading American firms in 2005 and 2018, we study the role law, consulting, or audit firms played in their careers. Using multinomial regression analyses, we find that the career function of GPSFs varies: consulting firms amplify existing status and enhance the symbolic capital of alumni, aiding their ascent to the most prestigious jobs in US top firms. In contrast, top managers leverage audit firm roles to compensate for a non-elite background, yet then tend to be channelled into narrow, specialist roles in top management. We relate these results to Bourdieu’s state nobility analysis and propose an augmented typology of these firms at the heart of contemporary capitalism.

In this contribution, we introduce ‘career hubs’ as an alternative to interlocking directorates and propose to study transnational corporate elite networks with this new concept. Career hubs, the most frequent common career organizations, put emphasis on knowledge brokering and allow us to study a larger variety of organizations to understand the form and the spread of elite networks. We use a sample of 1366 firms on the Forbes 2000 list of 2018 and investigate the careers of 16,500 top executives by linking these data to the BoardEx database. We find three types of career hubs: global audit and consulting firms, financial firms participating in a transatlantic banking alliance and large US consumer goods conglomerates – and highlight the mechanisms through which they shape the spatial structures of finance led capitalism. In the conclusion, we consider the implication of our results for the literature on corporate networks and propose a series of future research avenues in the career hub perspective.

Meso-level contexts (e.g., neighbourhood or community contexts) have a profound influence on vulnerability trajectories. They may mediate, mitigate, or reinforce the impact of variables such as gender, age or social class. This chapter studies how meso-level economic factors cushion or worsen the negative effects of adverse circumstances on people’s socio-economic trajectories, health outcomes, or political attitudes. This chapter showcases four case studies, which show: (1) that meso-level labour market contexts can alter the size of the penalties associated with low levels of educational attainment or a more disadvantaged background for young people seeking employment for the first time; (2) that meso-level social networks act as multipliers of inequality; close social ties in the neighbourhood increase the probability of exiting unemployment in resourceful neighbourhoods, whereas they decrease the probability of unemployment exits in deprived neighbourhoods; (3) that people residing in locations with higher levels of income inequality perceive others as being more competitive, which produces paradoxical effects on their self-rated health and undermines the psychological health of the most economically vulnerable; (4) how the confrontation with meso-level inequality and diversity shapes people’s beliefs in meritocracy and examine how everyday experiences of local inequality reinforces or weakens people’s belief in meritocratic value.

Status attainment theories assert that individuals are recruited based on the length and functional background of their training. Elite theories assume that top managers often deviate from these socially acceptable mechanisms of status attainment to entrench their advantage. In this study, focusing on the US financial sector, we investigate whether educational institution prestige—rather than the subject or length of education—increasingly influences appointments to top executive positions. We analyze 1987 US top executive managers affiliated with 147 firms from both financial and non‐financial sectors in 2005 and 2018. Our study demonstrates that alumni of prestigious universities have a strikingly higher likelihood of attaining a top executive role in finance than in non‐finance. Within finance it is no longer investment banking, but private equity, that contains the highest proportion of elite university graduates. Our findings suggest that notwithstanding the major power shifts between finance and non‐finance—and also within the finance sector—elite groups still dominate the most symbolically valued education, and as a result, top managerial positions.

A puzzle has emerged amidst rising inequality: why do people profess high levels of belief in meritocracy even as income gains are increasingly concentrated at the top? In light of contradictory theories and evidence, we undertake the first assessment of the relationship between local income inequality and meritocratic beliefs outside the United States, using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. We find that the positive relationship between country-level income inequality and meritocratic beliefs identified in the recent literature does not translate straightforwardly below country level: there is no robust relationship between local income inequality and meritocratic beliefs in England. However, there is a robust—and somewhat paradoxical—positive association between high local income inequality and meritocratic beliefs among those with the lowest incomes. On average, respondents with annual household incomes of £10,000 are five points more likely (on a 100-point scale) to believe their hard work will pay off if they live in the most rather than the least unequal places in England. We also show that this applies beyond the specific case of meritocratic beliefs: low-income respondents in unequal places are also notably more satisfied with their own (low) income than similar respondents in more equal localities. In line with system justification theory, we argue that belief in meritocracy serves as an important tool of psychological resilience for low-income individuals who regularly come into contact with others more economically fortunate than themselves: though it legitimates their current position at the bottom of the status hierarchy, this belief also offers the promise of future advancement. While this reduces concern about the psychological effects of growing local income inequality on the most economically vulnerable, it also suggests that there is little prospect of demand for systemic economic change emerging from what might have been considered the most likely places.

Finance is widely seen as a driving force of modern capitalism, a progress of organizational rationalization, and scaffolding for meritocratic elite reproduction. Using Orbis data on over 28,000 US financial firms, and sociodemographic data on 806 founders and managers in key firms, we show that neo-patrimonial elements, such as hybrid legal forms and trust relationships, are spreading within finance. Our findings show that hedge and private equity funds rely heavily on secretive hybrid forms in which “elite white men” benefit from baked in advantages. Financialization is not a modernization process but a recombination of bureaucracy and neo-patrimonial logics.