Transnational Elites

Abstract

This article focuses on how economic and urban geographers have engaged with and developed the ‘transnational elites’ concept in human geography. The article first focuses upon the critically important role of political economy perspectives in developing the concept in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period transnational elites were conceived of as the people who bring global production chains into being, the ‘command and control’ officers of the private sector dimension of the world economy. Over time this structuralist take on the social formation was both broadened out and linked to a particular sociospatial formation (the global city). The reformulation process continued apace into the 1990s and early 2000s, as geographers reframed their level of abstraction, and became more aware of the geographically and historically specific nature of transnational elites, of the nature of state–transnational corporation (TNC) relations, of the contingencies associated with the construction of global networks, and of the critically important role of transnational political and policy elites in the ‘denationalization’ process. In short, a more process-oriented and institutionally aware form of political–economic analysis emerged. This said, there is a paucity of work on elites in economic geography, and even more so in human geography. Human geographers have devoted far more attention to the excluded and marginalized than they have elites. But the discipline of human geography cannot continue to effectively ignore the primary architects of the systems that we all have to adapt to, and seek our livelihoods in, whatever forms of work and play we engage in.