From local champions to global players: A long-term perspective on Swiss companies’ connections across territorial scales

Abstract

Corporate interlocking at the national and transnational scale has received substantive scholarly attention. Less is known about companies’ ties to the cities and regions in which they have their seats. In this paper, we conduct a long-term analysis of the multilevel ties that companies maintain with the local and the national context they are embedded in. To do so, we adopt a positional approach and identify the directors of the major companies in the three largest Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) and study company directors’ ties to local and national organizations in seven benchmark years between 1890 and 2020. Our analysis documents the rise and fall of company directors’ ties to national organizations over the course of the 20th century, and it highlights the continued persistence of companies’ ties to the local level and their region until the new millennium, when companies’ ties with national and local organizations vanish, coinciding with the transnationalization of company boards.