European top management careers: a field-analytical approach

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Career models
• Europe
• internationalisation
• multiple correspondence
• analysis
• top management
• field analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Felix Bühlmann studied sociology and political science at the universities of Geneva, Berlin, Lausanne and Manchester. He is Associate Professor of Life Course Sociology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His current research interests include the life course, economic sociology and political sociology.

Eric Davoine is a Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and holds the Chair Human Resources and Organization. His primary research interests include international HRM, cross-cultural management, top management careers, and evaluation of executive education.

Claudio Ravasi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES (Overcome Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives) and at the Chair of Human Resources and Organization (University of Fribourg, Switzerland). He works on careers and his research interests include expatriation, top management, and international elites.

Notes

1 ‘National and international elite formation processes interact with organizational and inter-organizational career-building developments to create particular propensities towards the growth of global management elites in different countries and in different type of multinationals’ (Morgan 2011: 432).

2 Information about the executive board members of the firms Salzgitter (Germany), Essilor, LVMH, Capgemini and BNP Paribas (France) and Diageo (UK) was not found in annual reports or press releases. The STM, EADS, Arcelor Mittal, Dexia (France) and Xstrata (UK) firms were not taken into account, as they were not considered to be French or British firms since their headquarters are not based in France or in the UK. In the sample of British firms, Diageo and Xstrata were substituted by BT Group and British Sky Broadcasting (these were ranked as the following most imported firms on the FTSE 100 list, on ranks 31 and 32).

3 Eight British firms (BT Group, HSBC, Lloyds, National Grid, S&S Energy, Standard Chartered and Tesco) did not indicate the members of top management team on their websites or in their annual reports. In these cases, the executive members of the board of directors for these firms were used.

4 In particular, it proved to be difficult to collect comparable data on social origin in all four countries. As our analytical focus was on international comparability, we decided to relinquish data on social origin. Even though the level and type of education can be considered as a rough proxy for social origin, we dare not to use it in our theoretical discussion – this would be over-interpreting our results.

5 When an individual holds several university degrees, we gave a preference to ‘law’ and ‘business studies’, as these two disciplines can be considered as the most orthodox for top managers. Business studies and Economics are pooled together, as these two disciplines have become increasingly close in recent years (Fourcade and Khurana 2013).

6 These elite universities include: Oxford and Cambridge for the UK, Ecole Polytechnique and HEC for France, St. Gallen and ETH Zurich for Switzerland and Munich and Cologne for Germany. We have tested versions of the variable with three and four top universities; the overall results do only very weakly differ from the adopted version with two top universities.

7 Sometimes, managers only indicated ‘in several other positions’ or ‘in several other sectors’. In order not to lose this information, we gave a value of 3 in these cases.

8 This operationalisation narrows down the spheres in which managers build social capital and focuses rather strongly on the occupational sphere. It would be interesting to include other sectors, such as education or associations. We were not able to collect this type of data across all four countries. However, the variable ‘elite university’ might not only inform us on educational capital, but can also be considered as an indicator for social capital (especially in the French case, see Section 5.4).

9 Because it is difficult to collect data on the group of top managers, also this operationalisation of cosmopolitan capital is merely a rough approximation: for example, it would be helpful to have more precise and explicit data on the ability to speak foreign languages or the density of friendship and occupational networks in other countries.

10 For a detailed report of the contributions of the variables, please refer to the appendix.