This article offers a new interpretation of the coming of state ownership in aluminium-related big businesses in Norway. It shows that the Norwegian aluminium business of the late 1930s and the 1940s was undertaken by a Scandinavian business elite fully capable of filling capital requirements after the war. This elite had, however, entangled itself into the German war effort in Norway mainly by supporting the building of new aluminium plants under the German occupiers’ control. This left it morally vulnerable to the increasing emphasis during the war on aluminium as a strategic metal. The Allied war effort—especially evident in US attitudes—had come to see the cartelized aluminium industry of the 1930s as working against the national interest by impacting national production capacity in a negative way. The Allies bombed the major new plant in Norway in 1943, and after the war the US acted restrictively toward Norwegian capital assets in the US. By pursuing ownership after 1945, the Norwegian state performed strategic ownership roles in large corporations, thereby also protecting these entities from the possible wrath of the US against private owners.

Life-story interviews carried out in the Czech Republic confirm that the new business elite is dominated by men who had already achieved high managerial positions in the Communist era. More surprisingly, however, they also reveal a marked overrepresentation within this group of descendants of the national bourgeoisie that was expropriated when the Communists came to power in 1948. These ‘buoyant class’ life stories show some of the ways in which children of bourgeois lineage were able to negotiate their way around the Communist regime's ‘class politics’. They also show how bourgeois family lineage can now be used as a resource for averting the potential moral stigma of a Communist-era senior executive career. The ‘buoyant class’ appears to be a self-confident and significant component of the new Czech business elite.