Glocal Capitalist Class: How Same-Nation Interlocks Facilitate Transnational Corporate Political Unity in Global Environmental Politics

Abstract

Elite theorists assume that transnational capitalist class unity is facilitated through transnational elite spaces and networks. We argue for a more glocal notion of transnational unification that highlights the role of same-nation networks of interlocking directorates linking major transnational corporations (TNCs) in disseminating corporate political behaviours on a global scale. The same-nation elite networks are effective mechanisms of transnational unity because their members, whom we call ‘glocal interlockers’, are at once socialized into the global system and influential figures in their national TNC communities. Empirically, we analyze how interlocking directorates among the world's largest 189 TNCs facilitated the worldwide adoption of private environmental practices in the period 2006–2013, in the context of TNCs’ mobilization to preempt an intergovernmental regulatory regime on climate change by promoting a global governance privatization agenda. We find that firms’ level of centrality in glocal interlocks networks explained their levels of private environmental practices adoption, while their centrality in the transnational inner circle of cross-border interlockers did not. These results suggest that the persistence of local elite formations can enable rather than hinder transnational corporate unity.