Professor Leslie Sklair

Leslie Sklair is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at LSE. He received his PhD from LSE, and his thesis, Sociology of Progress, was published by Routledge in 1970 and was then translated into German. In 1973 he published Organized Knowledge: Sociological View of Science and Technology (which was translated into Spanish). In the 1980s he carried out field research on the developmental impacts of foreign investment in Ireland, Egypt and (more intensively) China and Mexico. He published Assembling for Development: The Maquila Industry in Mexico and the United States in 1989, with a second updated edition in 1993. These works provided the material basis for Sociology of the Global System (published 1991, second updated edition in 1995, translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Persian and Korean). A third edition completely revised and updated, of this book, Globalization: capitalism and its alternatives, was published by OUP in 2002, and Portuguese – this book and The Transnational Capitalist Class (2001) are now in Chinese translations.

Professor Sklair was a consultant to the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations in New York (1987-88); the ILO in Geneva (1993); the US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment (1991); and the UN Economic Commission on Latin America in Mexico City (1992). He was a Visiting Research Fellow: at the Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego (1986-87; 1990); the Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong University (1994); and the School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Sydney (1995). In addition, he held Visiting Professorships at the Department of Sociology in New York University (Spring 1993); and University of Hong Kong (1994). New School University in New York (2002), University of Southern California (2004) and Strathclyde University (2005-2008). He has lectured at universities and at conferences in the UK, Europe, North, Central and South America, Egypt, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Australia and Jamaica.

Professor Sklair embarked on a new research project "Iconic architecture and capitalist globalization" in 2000, building on his previous work on "Globalization and the FORTUNE Global 500", which was partly based on interviews with major corporations around the world within a theoretical framework that recasts the relationship between global capitalism, classes, consumerism and the state. The architecture project focuses on how the transnational capitalist class uses iconic architecture. He has presented papers on this project recently at international workshops in Paris (2015) and Berlin (2016) and lectured on it in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2016. Oxford University Press published his new book – The Icon Project: Architecture, cities, and capitalist globalization in 2017 – a Serbian translation was published in 2023.

His new project is an investigation into the aphorism 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism and the state in the time of the Anthropocene'. The first fruits of this project can be found in his edited book, The Anthropocene in Global Media and Second Thoughts on capitalism and the State, referenced below.

Professor Sklair is currently the President of the Global Studies Association and was on the International Advisory Board of the ESRC funded major project 'Cities in Conflict,' based at Cambridge University.