ABSTRACT Research on European business elites has been dominated by a ‘national career model’ approach, arguing that each country has a specific top management career pattern. In recent years, this line of argument has been challenged due to the increasing international circulation of top managers. To examine the impact of internationalisation on career models, we will draw on a database of 916 top managers in Germany, Switzerland, France and Britain. Our field-analytical analysis reveals that the most important career distinction – between internal and external careers – is valid beyond national models. In addition, international managers do not constitute a separate homogenous group: in some countries, they imitate national career patterns; in others, they pursue complementary strategies.

ABSTRACT As a legacy of the early stages of its state building process, Switzerland continues to be characterised by a cohesive elite whose members simultaneously occupy political and economic positions. Whereas sectoral analyses of the economic or political elite are widespread, few researchers have scrutinised the connections between business and politics. Therefore, this paper focuses on the linkages between the economic and political fields. Based on a joint multiple correspondence analysis of the CEOs and board members of the 110 largest Swiss companies in 2000 and 256 parliamentary members, we examine the interactional and objective relations between the fields through an analysis of personal interchange, participation in meeting places and structural homology of educational capital. It appears that the connections between elites are cumulative: in each field, the dominant faction shares a background in law or engineering, participates in meeting places, and personally moves between the fields. Reversely, the dominated, which come from a rather heterogeneous educational background, are excluded from interactional relations and moves between the two fields. That the two forms of elite coordination coincide and reinforce each other could be typical for a small country with little differentiated fields, where elite members quickly get to know each other and can easily meet on a regular basis.