Although the business elites in western societies have a very privileged social background in common, there are substantial differences in the reproduction mechanisms and social trajectories leading to a position within this elite group. These differences are explored by comparing the career paths of the top 100 CEOs in Britain, France, Germany and Denmark. In France and Britain, this reproduction is mediated through degrees from elite universities. In Germany, the principle of admission is the incorporated cultural capital acquired through an exclusive bourgeois origin combined with any university degree. Elite universities also hold little importance for Danish top CEOs, partly due to the institutions' historic decline; instead, reproduction is mediated through time spent in the economic field, placing the case of the Danish CEOs between that of their British and German counterparts. Specific trajectories of Danish executives, in particular sales people, are identified using Multiple Correspondence Analysis and cluster analysis.

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To capture elites, we must map out the organizational landscape through which they pass during their careers. This organizational landscape moulds the character of elites, tells us about the prestige of organizations that are elite incubators and provides valuable indicators about how different sectoral experiences serve to accumulate capital for the elite. Unpacking the organizational experience challenges theoretical and methodological understandings of the elite character, calling for a renewed focus on the organizational embedding of elites after school. By analysing the occupational history of 416 highly central individuals in a Danish elite network, what we term ‘the power elite’, a very distinct set of career trajectories, running through a subset of large, well-established, interconnected organizations, is mapped and analysed. To understand the different ways in which the members of this power elite accumulate ‘organizational capital’ in different fields, sequence analysis on six distinct channels, sector, subsector, size, level, rhythm and geography, is applied. Through this multi-channel sequence analysis, 10 distinct clusters of career trajectories are identified, distinguishing primarily between four private sector clusters: corporate ambassadors, industrial inner circle, bankers and landed gentry; and six public sector clusters: state nobility, professional politicians, lobbyists, scientists, unionists, and education and local politics. Analysing the careers, private sector careers are shown to be more homogeneous than public sector careers, while careers based on positions with a democratic mandate, mainly politicians and union leaders, are more turbulent and unpredictable. We link pathways to social backgrounds, showing preference for pathways for the natives in the upper class.

* This version of the article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the publisher's final version AKA Version of Record.

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What is the relationship between the various forms of power held by elites in contemporary society? Using Bourdieu’s notion of the field of power, we address this question by exploring the division of labour of domination among contemporary Danish elites. Via a specific multiple correspondence analysis of 44 variables with 198 categories, we examine the relationship between the volume and distribution of various forms of capital held by 423 individuals at the core of Danish elite networks, arguing that they constitute effective agents in the field of power. We find three major differentiations between: (1) established and newcomers; (2) public and private forms of legitimation; and (3) rural or industrial-based, but nonetheless organisationally well connected, elites and the social elite surrounding Copenhagen state nobility. The legitimising pole of the field of power does not necessarily derive its positions from the cultural field but can also rely on delegated forms of capital.

The aim of this article is to analyse social status differences in alcohol norms and practices seen from the perspective of 'health governance'. Survey data on 1442 employees in a middle-sized, Danish firm are used to construct a Bourdieu-inspired social space, tied to four forms of capital: economic, cultural, inherited and organisational. A range of variables measuring alcohol norms, drinking prac tices and alcohol-related problems are then inserted into the space. This article identifies status differ ences in the employees' drinking patterns indicating that respondents with large amounts of economic, cultural and inherited capital are more responsive to alcohol-related health messages than respondents (and especially males) occupying positions low in the social space. This, however, does not mean that respondents from dominant groups have 'safe' drinking habits, as these are defined by the Danish National Health Board. Rather, this article identifies a relatively large group of high-positioned respond ents balancing at the limits of risky drinking -or transgressing them, if measured by international standards.

In this paper, we propose a methodological framework to analyse cross-sectorial elite career using sequence analysis to identify particular career trajectories. As empirical case, we use 416 members of the Danish power elite, found in the core of the Danish elite networks. We describe how career data can be constructed based on CV’s, how career states can be coded and how sequence analysis in combination with optimal matching and of hierarchical agglomerative clustering can be used to develop typologies of careers.