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ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

Theme 1 Integrative Project 4: New elite(s)

Our explicitly integrative fourth project develops themes that emerge from the different inquiries within the first three projects. We aim to do this by providing an account of the rise of putative new UK elites empowered and constituted by changes in public and private governance.

While there has been some discussion of the decline of old establishments and control elites, there is comparatively little recent, sophisticated British academic analysis of the ascent of their elite successors in public and private sectors and the relations between them and the discourses and practices with which they are associated. Those who problematise social cohesion have studied the behaviour and identity of the lowest and most marginal groups but are curiously reluctant to study upper social groups whose economic gains have just as surely undermined any common polity.

Hence our preliminary aim is to consider all the elite groups who have gained power, status and wealth from the governance changes of the past twenty years. And to do so within an intellectual frame which opens new perspectives on the coexistence of establishments, control elites and change networks within the current conjuncture which may well involve a changing balance between elite commitment to other directed political and social projects as distinct from private objectives of personal and family enrichment.

In the first instance we plan four inquiries which will produce a position paper on elites and elite theory plus three empirical studies which will involve different theme 1 researchers.

 

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