How mobile is the transnational business elite? Evidence from Swiss banking executives

Abstract

Over the last two decades, a growing literature has examined the emergence of a transnational business elite. However, the pathways of transnational mobility have not been fully characterized. In this article, we use a combination of sequence analysis and the concept of a career script to investigate the geographical mapping and organizational contexts in which transnational mobility occurs. To achieve this, we rely on a database of 186 executives from the 28 largest Swiss banks, as well as 20 interviews with chief human resource officers and 15 interviews with banking executives. Our findings contribute to relativize and differentiate the phenomenon of transnationalization of business elites by underlining the importance of the career context and by identifying distinct interpretations of international career resources according to different types of banks.