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AbstractBusiness has played a central role in the debate over Britain's place in the European Union. This paper examines the socio‐economic characteristics of directors of Britain's largest corporations who affiliated either to Business for Sterling or Britain in Europe. It reports associations between directors' social backgrounds and their probabilities of affiliation. Elite university education, club membership, wealth and multiple directorships were all associated with higher propensities to affiliate. The associations are consistent with the idea that directors' social resources allow them to overcome collective action problems as well as supplying them with the motivations to affiliate. They also indicated that directors form a privileged group in that they have a number of very powerful actors who can take unilateral political actions.

Business has played a central role in the debate over Britain's place in the European Union. This paper examines the socio-economic characteristics of directors of Britain's largest corporations who affiliated either to Business for Sterling or Britain in Europe. It reports associations between directors' social backgrounds and their probabilities of affiliation. Elite university education, club membership, wealth and multiple directorships were all associated with higher propensities to affiliate. The associations are consistent with the idea that directors' social resources allow them to overcome collective action problems as well as supplying them with the motivations to affiliate. They also indicated that directors form a privileged group in that they have a number of very powerful actors who can take unilateral political actions.

Large economic corporations play a central role in the economies of modern societies. Much of what we consume is produced and marketed by corporations, and many of us are employed by them. Our economic fates appear to be inextricably linked to their actions. Not for the first time, however, corporations are facing pressures to expand the scope of their concerns even further. Two cases neatly illustrate the nature of these pressures. First, movements promoting corporate social responsibility exert pressures on corporations to take account of the negative and positive consequences of their actions to third parties; they are requesting that corporations act as more than pure profit maximisers. Second, political parties of the centre left, influenced by Third Way (Giddens 1998) thinking, have begun perceiving corporations as partners in the implementation of their policy objectives. A British example is the centrality of corporations to the delivery of New Labour's policies such as the New Deal and the Private Finance Initiative. It appears that trends are developing that could lead to corporations playing a larger role in our lives than they already do.