Social Structure and Globalization of Political and Economic Elites in India Suraj Beri and Christian Schneickert Abstract: Contemporary Social Sciences show a strong interest in studying power and domination in postcolonial societies. Elite research has become crucial to understand the changes in the political and economic dimensions of power structures in the context of democratic experience and economic development in countries such as India. These changes can be located within social structures and the globalization of elites. This study is an attempt to make sense of the ongoing transformations happening in the field of power in India. The existing scholarship on elites in India has been more related to socio-political transformations post-independence, and less on the relation between globalization and changes in the composition of political and economic elites in India. Therefore, we study the context and impact of the process of globalization on the social background of these elites and the emerging larger dynamics regarding socio-economic changes in the Global South. Introduction Post-colonial societies are undergoing huge transformations as part of worldwide liberal capitalist developments. The process of globalization initiated urbanization, the growing of consumerist markets, the rise of new regional power centers and the formation of new classes in India. Fur- thermore, we witness an increasing differentiation and globalization of the Indian power structure. Studying elites is crucial to understand such processes of social change and newly emerging di- mensions of social inequalities. Therefore, this paper explores the basic structures of the field of power in India, theoretically by employing Bourdieu’s field theory and empirically by analyzing biographic data of top politicians and CEOs (N=91). One of the major issues within elite research is the question of sampling: who are the elites and how can power and influence be empirically operationalized? Social science research has shown that it is the social and material conditions within which certain kinds of elites emerge and flourish. Whereas the classical elite theorists (Pareto, 1935 [1916]); Mosca, 1939; Michels, 1968 [1911]; Manheim, 1956) were mainly interested in elites in a more political sense(focused on Europe), social scientists like Mills (1956), Dahl (1961), and Domhoff (1967, 1978) are a few who investigated the origins, composition and influence of elites from a social framework in the Ameri- can context. These critical elite theories based on empirical data were then further developed and reinvented in a structuralist way (e.g., field of power) in French sociology by Bourdieu (1996). Ger- man sociologist Hartmann then continued that ’school’ based on a multitude of empirical works, prominently institutionalizing critical elite research in German sociology (Hartmann, 2000, 2002, 2007a, 2007b, 2010). Thus, the concern is to go beyond the bold assertion classical elite theorists have made, i.e., the ”inevitability of elites”, and to ask what the channels for recruitment are and how they influence the social context within which they emerge. The popular debates on ’plurality of functional elites’ within western democracies was questioned with the post-1990 shift 115