The Anthropology of Elites

Power, Culture, and the Complexities of Distinction

J. Abbink, T. Salverda, J. Abbink,T. Salverda, J. Abbink, T. Salverda

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137290557
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering insightful anthropological-historical contributions to the understanding of elites worldwide, this book helps us grasp their ways of life and role in times of contested global inequalities. Case studies include the Polish gentry, the white former colonial elite of Mauritius, professional elites, and transnational (financial) elites.

CHAPTER 1

Researching Elites: Old and New Perspectives

Huibert Schijf

DEFINING ELITES

The phenomenon of elites is ancient but the concept is relatively recent and originally meant something else: “The term ‘elite’ was introduced in the seventeenth century to describe commodities of an exceptional standard and the usage was later extended to designate social groups at the apex of societies” (Daloz 2010a, 1). Over the years the use of the term has been extended. Reviewing literature on elites, the British sociologist John Scott concludes that “at the height of its popularity almost any powerful, advantaged, qualified, privileged, or superior group or category might be described as elite . . . It was applied to such diverse groups as politicians, bishops, intelligent people, aristocrats, lawyers and successful criminals” (2008, 27). Scott certainly has a point, but following his critique would make research on elites very restrictive, as we shall see. Who then are elites in modern society? The answer will turn out to be far from easy, as elites are often related to positions of power and prestige but also to social mobility and complex procedures of inclusion and exclusion. Needless to say that prestige, power, and influence are relational concepts, as is indicated by Salverda and Abbink (see the Introduction, this volume). Elites will use a variety of resources to exert and maintain their positions.

Therefore, if resources and influence are the key concepts, the crucial question is how they interact. Researchers on elites have spent much time addressing the questions how certain resources can wield this influence and how elites came into possession of these resources. The question that follows is how they are able to transfer them to the next generation eventually. Particularly forms of reproduction, such as education, have often been the topic of research by sociologists. Far less attention is paid to hereditary reproduction, both in a biological and a social sense, because not even in largely meritocratic societies where people are judged by their individual achievements is everybody able to reach a top position without the proper social background and helpful networks. In most societies people still gain resources by benefiting from the resources of their parents, who in their turn might have benefited from their parents’ resources. This observation can be linked to the well-known sociological dichotomy of ascription and achievement. Hence, an important research question is how are people able to reach these highest strata, to maintain positions, and to handover these positions to the next generation? The nobility is a well-researched group, and lineages are described in many biographies, where at least some qualities are ascribed, as they are gained by birth (cf. also Jakubowska’s chapter, this volume).

RESEARCHING ELITES

Political scientists and sociologists tend to define elites as the incumbents of top positions in decision-making institutions in both the public and the private sectors. Scott (2008, 28) strongly argues “that the word elite should be used only in relation to those groups that have a degree of power.” The focus of their research is on individual characteristics, such as gender, religion, level of education, or past career. By doing so, many researchers use the implicit assumption that people with the same social background will share the same opinions and policies, which is not necessarily true as their behavior in parliaments testify. Still, it can be argued that the majority of British politicians who went to Cambridge or Oxford, all belonged to ‘our kind of people’, whatever the political differences might be as can be said of many French politicians.

However, as a consequence of defining elites as members of powerful institutions the problem who to select for investigation is transferred to the selection of particular institutions. Apart from obvious political institutions such as Parliament and the cabinet or economic institutions such as large corporations, what kind of institution is worthy to be selected for further investigation of its incumbents? First, it might be that traditional centers of decision-making, such as national parliaments, have become marginal in the developing global world, where new international organizations or multinational corporations have perhaps gained more influence. Although in the nineteenth century local elites were of much importance, national elites became dominant in the twentieth century. Will global elites play such a role in the twenty-first century?

Second, one might argue that families, that sometimes develop into industrial or financial dynasties, are also institutions worth researching, because as families they have influence and wealth. In the above-mentioned definition by political scientists, characteristics of families and kinship relations are not ignored but are included as individual characteristics of the incumbents, whereas families as institutions do not form the subject for detailed research. Such an approach with genealogical descriptions and marriage patterns between families is familiar in historical research (e.g., Farrell 1993), but far less so among social scientists. This chapter contends that there much is to learn from how historians do research on elites.

Third, given the political definition of elites, would it be possible to select orchestras with a reputation worldwide and to study their musicians as incumbents? Or can only the incumbents of decision-making positions in cultural organizations be called elite, whereas the performing artists themselves are not, although they are universally recognized as top musicians? These comments are meant to show that the method often used by political scientists and sociologists to define and research elites has its limitations. Moreover, it also differs strongly from the daily use of the term “elite,” often applied to a wide range of people, such as a sports elite or an intellectual elite. Interestingly, the Italian economist V. Pareto, who introduced the concept of elite into the social sciences (1968), defined elites as those who are most capable in any area of activity, although he did not explain how to establish these qualities and how to compare them. His definition is close to the original meaning of elite as Daloz indicates (2010a).

Theoreticians like Pareto and his compatriot Gaetano Mosca emphasized the circulation or alternation of elites imbedded as they are in society. They also hold strong opinions on how elites should act and how their positions can be justified. The Italian society in which Mosca and Pareto lived was politically very unstable, which makes Pareto’s phrase that “history is a graveyard of aristocracies” understandable. However, Pareto and Mosca underestimated the possibilities of members of elite families with a variety of resources at their disposal to reach and maintain high positions, even in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, it rarely happens that political dynasties can hold such high positions for long as democratic rules and voters’ whimsical political attitudes make a prolonged political career unlikely, let alone last for several generations. Therefore, it is more plausible that elite families prefer careers elsewhere, such as in business or law.

There are cogent arguments why political scientists prefer such a focus on decision-makers, especially when it is used in comparative research for several nations (e.g., Best and Cotta [2000] on lawmakers), because many scholars of social science are interested in changes of social mobility and stratification over time, whereas political scientists are more interested in the workings of democracies and political systems in general.

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

For many sociologists studying elites (or any other social group) as a separate subject of research is very often beyond their interest, because their research questions mainly are about the openness of modern meritocratic societies. For them the focus is social mobility. Two types of social mobility should be distinguished: structural and circular. The former indicates that in modern advanced societies more positions are available at the top than in the past and this offers more opportunities to men and women to gain a high-ranking position. Multinational corporations with regional heads and sectional managers offer more top positions than local ones run by just one family. However, according to sociologists, it is circular mobility, that is, the possibilities of people from lower strata of society reaching positions in a higher strata, that matters as far as openness of a society is concerned.

Many members of the elite follow a lifelong career by switching from one sector to another, acting as universalists—a process known as pantouflage in French political life (Charle 1987, 1115). It is also known in other countries where, for instance, ministers of finance might become bankers or vice versa, or a trade unionist becomes a prime minister. The process indicates horizontal integration of the governing elites; we can assume that at least they have some values and ideologies in common, although it does not necessarily mean that the governing class forms a closed entity. Research on vertical integration of elites however focuses on questions such as, how representative are these elites or how open are they toward newcomers.

In modern economic life some managers have a tendency to switch from one corporation to another, regardless of their knowledge of a branch of industry. Others become specialists and follow a career in just one sector, or even one company. Many members of the economic elite do not necessarily operate in their native country. The focus of much research on elites is not only on the individual characteristics of elites but also on the extent to which the characteristics correlate, or the chance that people with certain characteristics are able to obtain such an elite position. Defining power elites as incumbents of top positions in three sectors, C. Wright Mills (1956) shows that governmental, military, and business elites—all male, white, and Christian in the United States in the 1950s—were highly interconnected. This finding inspired many subsequent researchers to investigate overlapping networks of elites. The German political scientist Wilhelm Bürklin (1997) and his coresearchers did something different when they studied the elites in Germany, based on long interviews with incumbents in various sectors, such as political, economic, religious, and labor. They were not especially interested in the overlapping of these elites, but whether elites from East Germany had started to integrate with the local and the national elites from West Germany since 1989.

On the border line between studies of corporate networks based on linkages between corporations created through multiple functions of members of the boards of executives and elite studies is the exploration by the German sociologist Paul Windolf (2002). His area of research was interlocking directorates, on which much research has been done already (Fennema and Schijf 1979). Windolf is one of the few who contributed a new element to this network research by also investigating the ‘qualities’ of the persons who created the network of interlocking directorates. At least in one way Mills’s seminal study (1956) is outdated: over the following decades, women, Afro-Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans entered the American power elite. Not always in large numbers, but the newcomers have given a new diversity to the power elite and with it their cooperative networks changed it (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1998).

Belonging to the tradition of research on social mobility is the study by Hartmann (2002) who looked at the social backgrounds of engineers, lawyers, and economists who defended their dissertation in 1955, 1965, 1975, and 1985. Since German dissertations require a brief curriculum vitae, it was easy to gather information on the social background of the students. Using large-scale datasets and advanced statistical methods, Hartmann then examined who had reached an elite position later in life. As a sociologist he was interested in the measure of openness of German society. His concluded that although the openness of the German educational system has increased, this is not true for the chance of obtaining an elite position, which still depends much on an appropriate social background. Schijf, Dronkers, and Van den Broeke-George (2004) offered another example of this type of research where they focused on noble and patrician families in the Netherlands. They compared the noble families with patrician families as a kind of control group. Again, advanced statistical methods were used to estimate the chance of noble daughters and sons to reach an elite position not only in comparison to their parents’ chances but also compared to their patrician peers. One remarkable finding was that a noble mother is an important predictor to the chance to reach an elite position, because of her role in inculcating specific noble symbolic and cultural capital in her children. In contrast to the accepted open and meritocratic character of modern Dutch society, Schijf, Dronkers, and Van den Broeke-George demonstrated that the ability to obtain an elite position among the Dutch nobility, an ascriptive elite based on birth, has hardly declined during the twentieth century, although in Dutch public discourse nobility is often seen as a relic from the past. Easily available printed sources were used to process a large dataset for the purpose of this research.

Monique de Saint Martin (1993) elaborated the concept of “symbolic capital” in her in-depth study on the French nobility. Although a noble title no longer has a formal significance in modern France, she argues that its symbolic value should not be underestimated. Noble titles still offer symbolic capital as credit, supplementing or even dominating the social and cultural capital of noble families. Symbolic capital also represents a system of values sometimes summarized as “noblesse oblige” (ibid., 25–27). Other forms of symbolic capital, such as being well-connected with the art world or charity organizations, or owning a Gulfstream jet or a huge country house, also help.

Cults around kings and rulers also strengthen the symbolic capital of the person involved. Irene Stengs (2003) offers an interesting case study in her work of the Thai royal family—how the family uses symbolic power to justify and maintain its position vis-à-vis the population as a whole. More in general, symbolic superiority and ostentatious consumption among elite families are topics worth pursuing. Families also tend to strengthen their present and future position “by monumentalizing the past” (Herzfeld 2000, 234), by emphasizing how old the family is or by showing a thorough knowledge of the family tree. As Schijf, Dronkers, and Van den Broeke-George (2004) show in their research, official sources establishing the pedigree of Dutch noble and patrician families can be fruitfully used for advanced statistical analyses.

Instead of defining elites as incumbents of positions of power and influence, there are other ways of looking at them. For instance, we can use concepts introduced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1980; see also Portes [1998] on social capital) and argue that elites might differ from other people in terms of financial, cultural, social, or symbolic capital, although that does not imply that differences are defined by dichotomies. Moreover, Bourdieu’s concepts offer a multidimensional way of determining elite positions, as it might be more than likely these days that men and women scoring high on cultural capital are not necessarily the wealthiest people in a society. This approach to the definition of elites offers many more topics worthwhile to research than defining them simply as incumbents of top positions. With this approach the word “elite” would almost be abolished and we would just be speaking of the upper class with respect to several types of capital. More would be brought into view than in the research confined to the two mentioned paramount elements of society, namely openness and the reproduction of the various forms of capital. However, Daloz (2010b) argues convincingly that these concepts cannot be seen as universalistic as is sometimes suggested, because they are imbedded in a particular time and society—France in the seventies and eighties in the last century—which makes them less useful as a theoretical framework to apply to historical research in non-Western societies.

ANTH...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Anthropological Perspective on Elite Power and the Cultural Politics of Elites
• 1   Researching Elites: Old and New Perspectives
• 2   Land, Historicity, and Lifestyle: Capital and Its Conversions among the Gentry in Poland
• 3   Continuity and Change as Two Identifying Principles amongst Nepalese Nobility
• 4   Beyond Wealth and Pleasant Posture: Exploring Elite Competition in the Patronage Democracy of Indonesia
• 5   In Defense: Elite Power
• 6   Pupillage: The Shaping of a Professional Elite
• 7   Becoming Elite: Exclusion, Excellence, and Collective Identity in Ireland’s Top Fee-Paying Schools
• 8   Financial Professionals as a Global Elite
• 9   Management Consultants at Work with Clients: Maintenance and Contestation of Elite Status
• 10   Money Relations, Ideology, and the Formation of a Cosmopolitan Elite at the Frontier of Transnational Capitalism: An Ethnographic Study of African Finance Professionals in Johannesburg
• Notes on Contributors
• Index