Throughout the world, there has been a growing wave of interest in global corporate power and the rise of a transnational capitalist class, triggered by economic and political transformations that have blurred national borders and disembedded corporate business from national domiciles. Using social network analysis, William Carroll maps the changing field of power generated by elite relations among the world's largest corporations and related political organizations.
Carroll provides an in-depth analysis that spans the three decades of the late 20th and early 21st century, when capitalist globalization attained unprecedented momentum, propelled both by the transnationalization of accumulation and by the political paradigm of transnational neoliberalism. This has been an era in which national governments have deregulated capital, international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum have gained prominence, and production and finance have become more fully transnational, increasing the structural power of capital over communities and workers.
Within this context of transformation, this book charts the making of a transnational capitalist class, reaching beyond national forms of capitalist class organization into a global field, but facing spirited opposition from below in an ongoing struggle that is also a struggle over alternative global futures
Bill Carroll is a professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he directs the Social Justice Studies Program. His research interests are in the areas of the political economy of corporate capitalism, social movements and social justice, and critical social theory and method. Among his recent books are Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication (coauthored with Bob Hackett), Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neo-Liberal Times and Critical Strategies for Social Research. He has won the Canadian Sociological Association's John Porter Prize twice, for his books on the structure of corporate power in Canada. He has held visiting fellowships and appointments at the University of Amsterdam, Griffith University, Kanazawa State University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. He is a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an associate editor of the journal Socialist Studies, and a member of Sociologists Without Borders.
"William Carroll provides a superb analysis of global corporate power and the complexities surrounding the issue of transnational capitalist class formation. Sensitive to the relations between the global, regional, and national, the challenges posed by state capitalism, and the early impact of the global financial crisis, this will remain the definitive work on the subject for years to come." —Stephen McBride, McMaster University
"With this exciting book Bill Carroll has written a landmark study on transnational class formation setting a new standard for years to come. The longitudinal approach, rigorous empirical research, and great theoretical sensitivity and nuance give the book a unique and exemplary quality. It raises numerous questions for futher research and debate and makes a major contribution to critical social research." —Henk Overbeek, VU University
"Carroll and his co-workers take the debates on global capitalism and the network society to a new level. Identifying the emergence of a transnational capitalist class, they document its changing contours over the last two decades and its position in the global distribution of wealth and advantage. Powerful research using techniques of social network analysis shows that corporate power holders have become increasingly cosmopolitan and are the key agents of regional and global financial hegemony within the world economic system." —John Scott, University of Plymouth
"Building on Fennema's pathbreaking research on corporate networks in the 1980s, Carroll and his colleagues have produced an impressive array of evidence to suggest that a transnational capitalist class is in the making. Mapping the social organization of this class through the network-analytic approach, the book reveals a multitude of corporate interlocks over space and time showing that transnational corporate and political linkages have been growing, particularly in the case of Fortune Global 500 corporations from 1996 to 2006. All this is accomplished with the help of dozens of tables and figures, making this very complex subject much clearer to understand than would be the case with text alone. This book is the most significant recent contribution on the transnational capitalist class." —Leslie Sklair, London School of Economics
