elite research in sociology
Shamus Khan’s book, Privilege, makes an excellent point. Elites get relatively little attention in sociology. However, I think this needs an important qualification. Elites get little attention from non-organizational sociology. Folks in stratification, political sociology, and other areas love the little guy. The situation in organizational sociology is the reverse. Elite organizations get tons of attention. Think about how much attention has been paid to firms like GM. Now, think about how much attention is paid to the local auto repair shop.
Why is that? I think it goes something like this…
- Regular people are easy to find and highly accessible. Many are even excited when university researchers contact them. If you ask enough people to be part of your research, you’ll get enough. In contrast, elite people are highly secretive. First, there are fewer of them. More importantly, they highly value their privacy. They also, in my experience, are more guarded and like to give canned answers. So: commoners – all over and open to discussion; elites – few and they hide in the Bohemian Grove. There are a few exceptions – celebrities and politicians have a lot of public data about them. But your average hedge fund managers is harder to track down.
- Regular organizations are often hard to find and they don’t like outsiders. Small businesses may be numerous, but they don’t have a lot of time to talk to you. They don’t have a lot of public data about them. In contrast, elite organizations often generate tons of public information through litigation, journalism written about them, public filings, and high profile leaders. If they are publicly traded firms, they disclose a lot. If they are government organizations, there is also tons of information in public archives. And don’t forget disgruntled employees and customers – they’ll talk to no end about the inner workings of their organizations.
Also, there is a professional incentive. It’s glamorous (in sociology at least) to talk about the poor, but less glamorous to talk about the 1%. In organization studies, we care a lot about market leaders and innovators, so we focus on the elites. Shamus’ excellent book and the work of Lauren Rivera shows an important change among younger researchers. I hope it continues.
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Interesting that you should link to Alex Jones in re the Bohemian Grove. I think that nails it on the head: if sociologist were to study elites by the same means they use to study “ordinary people” (or anthropologists once used to study “savages”) they would immediately be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Of course, they would also immediately uncover all manner of conspiracies that would go a long towards explained why society is the way it is.
Thomas
January 17, 2012 at 6:50 am
There has been some really good work on elites by “younger researchers” in the last 5 years, in addition to Shamus’s book. Younger in quotes because some of these people are fairly well known. Michael Lindsay (originally at Rice now President of Gordon College–a Christian college in Massachusetts) had incredible access to elites for his book on evangelicals (Faith in the Halls of Power). Though, I think he had to sacrifice asking some tougher questions to get the kind of access that he did (even getting interviews with Presidents Carter and Bush). And I would have liked to have heard more from him about his process for getting access.
Always liked the work of Michael Dreiling on elites and NAFTA. Burris.
Tom Medvetz (now at UCSD) wrote a great dissertation on think tanks (forthcoming book with Cambridge too). Also prescient with reference to discussions of Fligstein and McAdam’s work on strategic action fields. Not surprising as Medvetz was at Berkeley. Medvetz has a good argument for think tanks as an emergent field. Thought it did a nice job of Bourdieusian theory to elite theory.
Scott Dolan
January 17, 2012 at 1:57 pm
I think the relative dearth of elite studies has less to do with the glamor of poverty research (?) or of stratification scholars “loving the little guy,” and more to do with elite scholarship itself.
As I’m sure Fabio knows, for a time post-Mills it was very fashionable in class/inequality scholarship to study, and theorize about, elites and their impact. This old literature, and elite studies more generally, has two well-known problems: first, scholars can’t agree on a definition of “the elite”. Is “the elite” the social elite? the military elite? the political elite? the business elite? the cultural elite? people who graduate from elite universities, however defined? the overlapping set of the business, military, and political elite? With as many definitions of elites as there are elite scholars, it’s not too surprising that intellectual progress was hard to sustain.
(Yes, there’s also debate about who is poor or who is underclass. But, at least there is an official definition of poverty to fall back on, and one that has social meaning insofar as it affects program eligibility, etc.)
Second, even where researchers began/begin with an a priori definition of elites (as opposed to the “we’ll know it when we see it” approach), many only studied elites, usually with convenience “samples:” CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, graduates of HPY, persons listed on a social registry, students at an elite boarding school, etc. (The Middletown studies are a notable exception, but they’re, what, 70+ years old?) This design doesn’t give much leverage to make well-supported claims about how elites differ from everyone else in attributes, behaviors, political influence, life chances, deference behaviors, and so forth. It put elite studies at odds with most “mainstream” inequality scholarship of the 1970s-2000s, and opened the door for conspiracy theories or just charges of same.
Maybe we are seeing a revival of elite studies, driven internally by the pendulum swinging toward qualitative and network methods and externally by societal trends that have made “elites” more salient. But if I think if the revival is to stick, elite scholars will need to solve the same two problems that plagued the earlier generation.
krippendorf
January 17, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for the plug, Fabio! @krippendorf: I completely agree. I have an annual review piece on the “Sociology of Elites” coming out in this year’s issue that attempts to address these two issues (how well, you’ll have to see). But on the second: the same could be said of the very poor, or any groups at the far far tail of distributions when looking at survey data. For these reasons I think there are three ways to look at the elite:
Administrative data (so, tax returns a la Piketty and Saez)
Available/public data (boards of directors, political giving — though super-PACs will make this harder, etc.)
Qualitative work
This makes representative attitudinal data hard to get at, and limits the contexts within which you can make strong claims about differences between elites and others.
shakha
January 17, 2012 at 2:20 pm
Scott,
Michael’s a good friend of mine and I can tell you that a big part of it was simply getting a shitload of airmiles. Most of the time we were in grad school he was criss-crossing the country on endless trips, each of which only netted a few interviews. When you’re dealing with elites you make appointments on their schedules and you graciously accept it when they cancel and reschedule.
gabrielrossman
January 17, 2012 at 4:44 pm
Folks in stratification, political sociology, and other areas love the little guy. The situation in organizational sociology is the reverse.
I would take a little issue with this — while many in social movement scholars “love the little guy,” it is also the case that political sociologists of the state, of democratization, and so forth, focus heavily on elites (and have been criticized in the past for excessively doing so).
Trey
January 17, 2012 at 6:04 pm
I avoided the self-promotion plug in the first email, but I just cannot resist now. I apologize in advance for my shameless-ness. For my dissertation (completed in May) I examined elite interlocks (interlocking directorates among the top corporations (n=100) and nonprofit organizations (public charities (n=91), foundations (n=50), and think tanks (n=26), with a chapter on each of their ties to all federal advisory committees.
I think elite researchers have come a long way in defining who is an elite. Borrowing from Higley and Burton (Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy 2007), I defined an elite “persons who are able, by virtue of their strategic positions in powerful organizations and movements, to affect political outcomes regularly and substantially.” Using John Scott’s work, my focus was on “the most central and salient
institutional hierarchies and systems of resources in society.” Membership in
an elite group, therefore, is contingent upon two factors: the formal positions held by elite
members and the characteristics of the organization with which the position is associated (though some social movement scholars might take umbrage with the formal organization component).
Of course, in line with Krippendorf’s comments, there are also questions about how we decide which are the most salient and central institutional hierarchies and what we mean by regularly and substantially (one of the reasons I focused on formal organizations, in my mind those that are institutionalized). But I think at least from a U.S. perspective, the idea of an ‘inner circle’ borrowed from Useem (people who occupy multiple positions) takes a long way to identifying these elites with out having to say “we know em when we see ‘em” ex post facto. Instead, the key is to identify those people with formal influence across multiple fields (thus my earlier posts regarding my affinity for the Fligstein/McAdam piece). Though again such a definition might leave me open to questions from people focused on how power and influence simmers from below too.
With regards to elite research in general, I am excited to see others moving the field ahead. Lindsay’s book was fantastic and I look forward to his work coming out of his extended interviews (his Platinum study). Loved the more qualitative work in Shamus’s Privilege. One of the thing I have enjoyed about elite research has been the accessibility of more senior scholars. Seems like there are a group of really well-established people (Domhoff, Higley, Mizruchi, Burris, my own advisors Gwen Moore and Richard Lachmann, and many many others) who have been willing to work with younger scholars to advance the literature.
Scott Dolan
January 17, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Where do we find elites studied as exemplars? Denouncing the rich is easy enough. The unstated assumption seems to be that elites are created by nefarious means that good people would eschew, avoid, deny, and shun. Rather, if we study how and why some succeed better than others, we might learn more about success. In the century from Benjamin Franklin (“The Way to Wealth”) to Horatio Alger, we commonly accepted the need and benefit of hard work, planful competence, delayed gratification, and careful attention to detail. Now, money falls out of the sky, from basic welfare to corporate bailouts. Yet, some individuals and some firms do achieve elite status without state largess. I believe that the anti-capitalist, anti-individualist bias in sociology prevents the broad and common study of success.
Michael E. Marotta
January 18, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Michael, I think you should read elite research before you overgeneralize about its political orientations or its unstated assumptions. Elite research is multidisciplinary and runs the gamut. My particular definition focusing on their formal position says nothing about whether they are exemplars or nefarious. I leave such discussions to biographers. Also when you objectively define who is an exemplar and who is nefarious, then I might start doing work like you suggest.
I think sociologists have done a great job looking at the interplay between the individual and the social structure. There are many working hard to figure out the connections between structure and agency. We grant you the importance of the individual.
Now I am just waiting for a libertarian to recognize that individuals are embedded in a whole set of social groups, which both constrain and provide opportunities.
Scott Dolan
January 18, 2012 at 5:43 pm