From Canadian corporate elite to transnational capitalist class: transitions in the organization of corporate power

Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, The, August, 2007 by William K. Carroll

As the "golden era" of postwar boom and class compromise drew to a close, the elite created agencies of business activism that brought corporate capitalists and organic intellectuals together for explicitly political purposes. With the founding of the Business Council on National Issues in 1976 (rebranded in 2001 as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives [CCCE]), the corporate elite's basis for community began to shift from the sphere of leisure to that of political activism. As the elite mobilized for political action, a neo-liberal policy bloc--an extensive network of elite interlocks between leading corporate and policy-planning boards--took shape. Its diverse organizational ecology has made possible the development of a rich discursive field within which the vanguardist Fraser Institute has played a role complementary to that of the more mainstream groups. In this division of labour, business activism has mimicked social movement activism. Typically, a movement develops as a field of organizations, some practising a more flamboyant politics than others. The more "extreme" groups--and here the Fraser Institute comes to mind--attract the media coverage that puts political ideas into circulation, enabling more moderate groups to make similar claims from a more "respectable" footing (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993: 122). The fact that, by the late 1990s, the Fraser Institute was no longer presented in the mainstream media as the voice of the far right confirms how effectively neo-liberal business activism has managed to shift the terms of political discourse.

The corporate governance reforms of the 1990s furthered the shift from leisure to activism. As the old boys' network thinned and the ranks of women and non-British ethnicities at the upper echelons grew, the corporate elite became less monocultural and less petrified, less a fixture of exclusionary corporate boards and private clubs and more diverse. These developments modernized the face of Canadian corporate capital. The transition within the corporate elite from oligarchy to meritocracy seems integral to a new form of hegemony--a more porous elite social organization offering greater possibilities for the ruling class' reach into civil society, for civil society's reach into the ruling class, and thus for more effective business leadership.

Transitions in the Global Elite

At this point, let us widen the lens by shifting from Canada to the global level and the question of a global corporate elite, the top tier, perhaps, of a nascent transnational capitalist class. In a series of recent studies, colleagues and I have mapped the network of the world's largest corporations. Here again, the two faces of corporate power--those of accumulation and hegemony--are evident. Clearly, recent decades have witnessed a massive transnational concentration and centralization of capital. My concern has been with how these structural developments articulate with the social organization of corporate power, now in a global field.