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.

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.

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.

Elites are those who can impose upon others the duty of filling out questionnaires … those whose sociology no one dares to write (Schmitt 1991:181, authors' translation)

This article focuses on historical elite dynamics and investigates elites' integration over time. We describe the changing relations and composition of the central circles in Swiss elite networks at seven benchmark years between 1910 and 2015 by relying on 22,262 elite individuals tied to 2587 organizations among eight key sectors, and identify for each year the most connected core of individuals. We explore network cohesion and sectoral bridging of the elite core and find that it moved from being a unitary corporate elite, before 1945, to an integrated corporatist elite, between the 1950s and 1980s, before fragmenting into a loose group, with an increased importance of corporate elites, in the 1990s onwards. The core was always dominated by business and their forms of legitimacy but, at times of crisis to the hegemony of corporate elites, after the Second World War and (only) shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, elite circles expanded and included individuals with delegated forms of power, such as politicians and unionists. In the most recent cohort (2015), the share of corporate elites in the core is similar to the one before the First World War and during the interwar period. This return to the past echoes findings on wealth inequality and economic capital accumulation by a small group of individuals organized around the most powerful companies.

Career narratives among the Danish power elite often include the facilitating presence of an elite superior. We explore the role patrons play in the mobility narratives of the Danish power elite. Drawing from a highly select group identified in the core of elite networks, we interviewed 37 individuals selected for maximal variation in career paths, networks and positions within the power elite. We referenced the concept of patrimonialism to understand the relations between patrons and protégés in building an elite career and develop a typology identifying three kinds of patrimonial relations described by elites, intra-organizational relations to mentors and patriarchs and inter-organizational relations to sponsors. We then empirically explore the three types of patrimonial relations. Finally, we argue that each of these patrimonial relations reinforce elite cohesion, even in the supposedly critical case of good governance in Denmark. Hence, patrimonial relations present a crucial perspective for understanding contemporary power structures.

This article focuses on historical elite dynamics and investigates elites’ integration over time. We describe the changing relations and composition of the central circles in Swiss elite networks at seven benchmark years between 1910 and 2015 by relying on 22,262 elite individuals tied to 2587 organisations among eight key sectors, and identify for each year the most connected core of individuals. We explore network cohesion and sectoral bridging of the elite core and find that it moved from being a unitary corporate elite following family-based elite reproduction, before 1945, to an integrated corporatist elite involved in educational and professional-based reproduction, between the 1950s and 1980s, before fragmenting into a loose group in the 1990s onwards. The core was always dominated by business and their forms of legitimacy but, at times of crisis to the hegemony of corporate elites, elite circles expanded and included individuals with delegated forms of power, such as politicians and unionists, detaining more university credentials, and less transnational connections and elite family ties.

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.