Hunting the Gene-Hunters: The Role of Hybrid Networks, Status, and Chance in Conceptualising and Accessing ‘Corporate Elites’

The globalisation of the world's economy and the creation of new flexible regimes of accumulation are necessarily generating new forms of corporate organisation. Increasingly, new economies and trade in mutable resources such as information, global finance, and genetic material are controlled not by conventional corporate elites but rather by constellations of disparate but highly influential actors linked together across an equally mutable regulatory landscape. With the aid of my recent research into the elite which controls global trade in genetic material as a case study, I begin to deconstruct conventional notions of what constitutes a corporate elite, positing in its place an alternative construction in which they are understood not as formally constituted, institutionally based entities, but rather as increasingly informal, hybridised, and invisible ‘elite networks’. I then consider some of the methodological issues which confront researchers investigating the constitution and behaviour of these elite networks. In so doing I reflect upon the role which processes such as luck, chance, and intuition play in determining the direction and outcome of research projects. I conclude with a discussion of some of the ethical tensions which surround issues of disclosure, textual representation, and attribution of sources.