‘That segment of the world bourgeoisie that represents transnational capital; the owners of the leading worldwide means of production as embodied in the transnational corporations’ (W. Robinson 2003); an ‘ “ungrounded and deterritorialized” class’ (Ley (2004) TIBG 29, 2).

Carroll and Meindert-Fennema (2002, Int. Sociol. 17) claim that ‘transnational corporate interlocking is less about intercorporate control than it is about the construction of an international business community’, and Robinson and Harris (2000, Sci. & Soc. 64, 1) argue that ‘the TCC became politicized from the 1970s into the 1990s and has pursued a class project of capitalist globalization institutionalized in an emergent trans-national state apparatus and in a “Third Way” political program’. ‘Transnational elites have long been associated with the global city: embedded at work, disembedded at home’ (Beaverstock and Bostock (2000) GaWC Res. Bull. 27). However, Burris and Staples (2012) Int. J. Comp. Soc. 53, 4, 323 conclude that a transnational capitalist class is very far from being realized on a global scale.