PATTERNS OF ACCESS TO BUSINESS LEADERSHIP IN FRANCE.

The article examines the patterns of access to business leadership in France. The question of patterns of access to elite membership has been a recurrent one in the literature on elites. It has been especially prominent in studies of business elites, and most such studies dutifully include information on the social origins and educational attainments of elite members. Without denying the emergence and great importance of some managerially controlled firms, it may be that the generally accepted view of the situation in the United States has been applied to the business elites, of other countries with insufficient care. The analysis seeks to examine the effects of some of these mechanisms in the case of access to business leadership in France. Differences in patterns of access can be described in terms of differences in the experiences and strategies of founders, heirs, managers, and owner-managers. Founders and heirs, for example, display radically divergent patterns in terms of social origins, education, and even in the growth rates of their firms. In order to research the problem of access to the business elite in terms of the possible formation of a hereditary technocracy, future inquiries will need to investigate a number of factors which have generally been ignored in studies of the patterns of access to business elite membership.