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In the 43rd issue of the journal Social Change in Switzerland, Emil Böhme and Felix Bühlmann show that, in 2020, the average tenure of CEOs and board directors in Switzerland was between seven and eight years. This is half the length it was at the beginning of the 20th century. This reduction is primarily linked to the decline of Swiss family capitalism.
The study draws on the OBELIS database at the University of Lausanne, which contains more than 40,000 biographical entries on Switzerland’s political, economic, and academic elites. The two sociologists examined 1,377 CEO and board chair positions at the 110 largest Swiss companies. Their analysis shows that between 1909 and 2015, the average tenure dropped from 15 to 7 years.
Neither globalization nor the expansion of education explains this trend. Admittedly, the proportion of foreigners in Switzerland’s economic elite has risen from 3% in 1980 to nearly 40% today, and even to over 60% in publicly traded companies. But international executives do not have significantly shorter tenures than their Swiss counterparts. Similarly, the expansion of education has not shortened the duration of tenures, for example by delaying the start of a career.
The decline of family capitalism, which began as early as the start of the 20th century, is far more significant. The differences among companies illustrate this point: family-owned private banks in Geneva, such as Pictet and Lombard Odier, are among those with the longest tenures. In contrast, widely held banks such as UBS or industrial companies independent of their founding families, such as Oerlikon-Bührle and ABB, have the shortest tenures.
What does this shortening of tenure mean? Due to management turnover, today’s companies are less stable and more vulnerable to uncertainty. At the same time, the power of CEOs has declined slightly: due to the shorter duration of their terms, they no longer have the same influence on the company’s long-term strategy and employees’ working conditions as they did in the mid-20th century.
LIVES Centre / FORS Communication
Böhme, E. D. & Bühlmann, F. (2026). La durée des mandats des élites économiques suisses, 1890–2020. Social Change in Switzerland, N°43, www.socialchangeswitzerland.ch
The Social Change in Switzerland series provides an ongoing record of changes in Switzerland’s social structure. Published jointly by FORS, the Swiss Center of Excellence in the Social Sciences, and the LIVES Centre, it aims is to track changes in employment, family life, income, mobility, voting and gender in Switzerland. Based on cutting-edge empirical research, the series is intended for a wider audience beyond specialists.