Transnational elite communities and the reproduction of inequalities

The richest 1% of the world's population now own more than half of the world's wealth. In this context of extreme and growing levels of economic inequality, we need to 'study up' and examine the role of wealth and wealth holders in creating, reproducing and entrenching inequalities across the globe. However, few studies have yet been able to examine how elites integrate at a global level.

This project seeks to identify the role of elite business communities that work within and across the global North and South as they build alliances and circulate ideas, people and capital to shore up advantages. It will do so through an international multi-sited study of three elite organisations and their members.

The project will examine three of the leading international business communities in terms of their global reach and their members' economic influence. These organisations are known to run educational and training programmes and to connect economic elites globally, with varying requirements in terms of the minimum revenue of member's companies and the minimum number of employees.

The companies run by members of these three organisations employ millions of people and have a combined revenue of trillions of dollars annually. The research will focus on these key organisations in order to better understand two key questions in relation to global elites. First, it will examine the concrete practices through which international economic elites forge alliances and whether this evidences their potential emergence as a class or identifiable group.

Second, it will explore the various mechanisms through which these organisations create and reproduce advantage among their members. The project will focus on key elite formations and networks in three urban contexts, Delhi, Johannesburg and London, chosen in order to cover existing and emerging wealth centres. It will pioneer a multi-sited study of elite international business communities in the three cities, comparing their elite formations and mapping the transnational connections between their members.

Such insights can help us understand the role these business communities, and related elite organisations that facilitate social or business networks, play in a global architecture that sustains and grows wealth and other key inequalities.

Knowledge about how to understand, and thereby more effectively challenge, wealth inequalities is more needed than ever. The existing research on the role of intensifying concentrations of wealth at the top, including by the PI, has provided evidence that economic elites are key engines in the reproduction of inequalities, whether securing the preservation and growth of dynastic wealth with the aid of financial professional intermediaries, or gaining influence through political donations to create a favourable institutional environment.

By focusing on three leading international business communities and their networks, the research will allow us to see how ideas, people and capital circulate among some of the wealthiest owners and managers of corporations in the world. The project has been designed in close collaboration with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), a research institute that analyses the social dimensions of contemporary development issues, with the aim of analysing global elite networks and their repercussions for policy.

The UNRISD will co-host an international workshop for civil society practitioners, policy-makers and academics at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies in South Africa, and support associated outputs from that event, including a policy-briefing note and blog piece. The project findings will be used to develop further data, tools and strategies for civil society to shape political debate, hold corporations to account and inform the public about elite power, global elite networks and inequalities.