ESRC Seminar Series 'Studying Elites: Theory, Evidence, Practice'
The seminar series is intended to help bring elites research back onto the social science agenda and will do so by building on existing work and networks created within and around CRESC (the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester and the Open University). CRESC has already focused on elites – political, economic and cultural – as one of the unifying themes of its programme of work, and in doing so has confirmed a growing, though currently dispersed, interest in a range of new elite groups by social scientists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This seminar series aims to contribute to the revival of the tradition of elite research, to discuss the latest research findings and to generate exchanges within a broad multi-disciplinary research community which will stimulate fresh work. Over a series of four meetings we will examine the intellectual history of elite studies, and their contemporary significance in a range of critical social sites – political, financial, corporate, economic and cultural. The membership of the seminar will be truly cross-disciplinary, drawing on the networks which have already been created through earlier activities organised for the wider academic community by CRESC.
Seminar organisers
- Mick Moran, University of Manchester (michael.moran@manchester.ac.uk)
- Julie Froud , University of Manchester (julie.froud@manchester.ac.uk)
- Yuval Millo, London School of Economics (Y.Millo@lse.ac.uk)
- Glenn Morgan, University of Warwick (Glenn.Morgan@wbs.ac.uk)
Background and Aims of the Seminar Series
The study of elites was central to some of the founding texts of modern social science, and no wonder: at root, any significant theory of social organization is a theory about the formation, defence and perpetuation of elite groups. A generation ago the social sciences were characterised by extended debates about the meaning of elites – about how they formed, and how they wielded power and influence. The high point in Anglo-American social science was perhaps marked by the debates following the publication of C. Wright Mills’, The Power Elite (1956), a work which argued that occupation of leading positions in key institutions conferred a special elite status on those occupants: that power and privilege followed control of key institutional sites. Yet in recent decades this tradition has fallen into neglect: in part this is due to changing intellectual fashions in the social sciences; in part it is due to the fact that the study of elites represented, quintessentially, the tradition of inquiry by a unified social science which observed no clear disciplinary boundaries – an enterprise which has proved hard to sustain in an age of disciplinary specialisation.
Yet the need to turn to the study of elites again is particularly urgent. We live in an age of rapidly growing inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, and apparently slowing social mobility, across many advanced industrial societies – notably those of the Anglo-Saxon world. We also live in a new age of globalisation when new institutional sites for elite occupation have been created. The growing importance of financial markets, financial institutions and intermediaries around these contexts has renewed interest in the way in which financial power is constructed and developed and the impact which it has on business organisation and politics. The governance and management of multinational businesses is creating new networks of global power that transcend national contexts and organise private power through complex processes of wealth generation, the transmission of social capital and the organisation of access to centres of economic and political decision-making. If social science has neglected elites, elitism has perhaps never been more important.
The seminar will consist of four sessions spread over two years, with a core of about thirty participants, drawn from the UK and abroad. The sessions will be day long events, with the exception of the final meeting which will stretch over two days and which will partly be concerned with planning future developments, practical and intellectual.