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Elites
JOHAN S. G. CHU and MARK S. MIZRUCHI
Abstract
By definition, individual elite actors have a disproportionately high level of resources
at their disposal with which to influence society. The question is whether such elites
are able to act in a unified and effective manner. During the twentieth century, scholars discovered mechanisms that led to elite cohesion and unified political action.
In the early twenty-first century, these mechanisms have ceased to function. Elite
researchers are thus faced with the challenge of identifying alternative mechanisms
capable of fostering elite influence. In addition to cohesion, mechanisms of elite institutional influence and durable dominance are promising areas for study. Against
the current backdrop of popular interest in elites and the many theoretical avenues
opened up by researchers doing related work in fields such as economics, organizational theory, business, and psychology, the twenty-first century promises to be an
important period for elite scholarship.
INTRODUCTION
In the United States, elites—actors with vastly disproportionate access to
or control of resources (Khan, 2012)—are viewed with both admiration and
suspicion. Some observers view elite status as a legitimate outcome of a meritocratic system, in which those with superior ambition and skill achieve
great rewards through a process of fair and open competition. Others believe
that elite status is preserved and inherited as the consequence of a system in
which the elites write the rules, tailoring them to maintain elite privilege. This
latter view has tended to prevail during periods when inequality and elite
power are especially pronounced, such as during the Gilded Age of robber
barons and more recently since the Occupy movement.
In the mid-twentieth century, although some researchers (e.g., Domhoff,
1967; Mills, 1956) held that elites had a distinctive influence on society, most
social theorists did not distinguish elite and nonelite actors. The sociological
literature on stratification emphasized mobility among the vast majority of
the population that spanned the ladder of occupational status and income.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Theorists of institutional change and social movements neglected to provide
separate consideration to the dynamics of elite-led change initiatives.
One reason for the relative paucity of work on elites is that it has been difficult to gather data on them. Elites constitute a miniscule segment of the
population, and thus rarely appear in surveys of the general population.
Gaining access to exclusive elite enclaves to study their attitudes and actions
can be especially difficult.
Fortunately for elite researchers, in the latter half of the twentieth century,
data became readily available on one increasingly consequential elite group:
the leaders of large corporations. Public companies by law are required to
publish data on their executives and directors, and company leaders often
speak with journalists and business academics. Scholars have put these data
to good use, and much of what we know about elites in the United States and
elsewhere comes from the study of corporate elites.
Recent findings (e.g., Chu & Davis, 2013; Mizruchi, 2013), however, suggest
that the corporate elite are losing their cohesiveness and power. Researchers
can no longer use the corporate elite as a proxy for elites in general, and are
faced anew with the problem of identifying elites to study. This difficulty
is compounded by the disappearing boundary between elite and nonelite
cultures; elites no longer distinguish themselves through highbrow cultural
consumption (Khan, 2011; Peterson & Kern, 1996).
This seeming absence of a cohesive, distinct elite might suggest that American society is trending toward the open, meritocratic ideal. Yet over the past
40 years, economic mobility has declined (Kopczuk, Saez, & Song, 2010),
while the wealth gap between elite and nonelite has dramatically increased
(Piketty & Saez, 2003). Future studies of the elite must address this paradox of
durable dominance, wherein the elite maintain their disproportionate advantage seemingly without cohesive action or class distinction.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
As democracies emerged in Europe, scholars noticed that small, resilient
groups continued to maintain their power over society. Robert Michels
([1911] 1962) and Gaetano Mosca ([1896] 1939) argued that domination by
small groups of elites was inevitable. Michels famously suggested that the
challenges of organizing large groups invariably led to oligarchies—small
cadres of governing elites, who were able to maintain their privileges
because their limited numbers allowed for superior intraelite coordination.
Vilfredo Pareto ([1916] 1935) modified this view by suggesting that elites
were able to maintain their domination only through a certain level of
circulation, in which gifted and talented individuals from nonelite groups
were permitted to enter the elite. Without such openness, Pareto argued, the
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elite would lose its ability to rule, thus providing opportunities for gifted
nonelites to seize power.
By the mid-twentieth century, American political theorists sought to reconcile the presence of elites with assumptions of democratic rule. Schumpeter
(1942), Lipset (1960, 1962), and other scholars in what came to be known as
the pluralist tradition asserted that democracy under elite rule was possible
if elites engaged in a “competitive struggle for the votes of a mainly passive
electorate” (Lipset, 1962, p. 33). Through this struggle, the interests of different segments of the population would be represented by different segments
of the elite.
A new generation of American elite theorists took issue with this argument,
suggesting instead that elites were generally unified. According to Hunter
(1953) and Mills (1956), the disagreements expressed in electoral politics
were relatively minor and not threatening to elite interests. Ruling elites were
thus seen as offering a highly restrictive set of political choices—all of which
ultimately served the interests of the overall elite. Mills’ book, in which he
described a “power elite” consisting of leaders within corporate, political,
and military institutions, set off an intense debate between pluralists and
elite theorists.
A natural extension of this debate was the question of whether the leaders of major corporations—the corporate elite—were unified in their political opinions and actions. This question became especially important by the
mid-twentieth century, as corporations grew increasingly large and powerful. Even pluralists acknowledged the potential power of these large firms,
but maintained that the corporations lacked mechanisms that would allow
them to engage in unified collective action.
Writing in the late 1960s, elite theorists G. William Domhoff (1967, 1970)
and Ralph Miliband (1969) responded to this criticism by identifying mechanisms that could resolve conflicts within the business elite, thereby allowing
elites to present a unified face to the state. These mechanisms included kinship ties and socialization devices (such as prep schools, elite colleges, and
social clubs) that fostered a unity of outlook, board of director interlocks
and cross-ownership of stocks among firms that aligned interests, and policy
making organizations (such as the Committee for Economic Development,
which was prominent at the time, and later the Business Roundtable) that
explicitly represented business interests to policy makers. These theorists
were in turn criticized by a group of Marxist scholars, who argued that the
state itself served as the mechanism reconciling disparate corporate interests (Poulantzas, 1972). Both Marxist (Block, 1977) and pluralist (Lindblom,
1977) critics suggested that the state worked to uphold the interests of business not because corporations controlled the government, but because the
government depended on business for its revenue.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
A considerable amount of evidence was presented by all sides in this
debate (see Mizruchi, 1992, Chapter 2 for a summary). The corporate elite
appear to be both unified and divided, which leads to a perhaps more
pertinent question: under what conditions is business unified or divided?
Michael Useem (1984) provided insight into this question with his groundbreaking study of corporate elites in the United States and Britain. Although
Useem found that the majority of the business community was fragmented,
a small group of leaders of the largest corporations—what he termed the
“inner circle”—was able to achieve a unified perspective and act collectively
to further the long-term interests of the business community. Mark Mizruchi
(1992) established the theoretical and empirical bases for a synthesized
theory of elite influence, showing that political unity is most likely to occur
in the presence of interfirm networks created by economic interdependence
among firms and board of director interlocks, rather than shared interests
per se.
A related debate concerned the importance of social background and family resources in rising to positions of corporate power. In the 1930s, Adolf
A. Berle Jr. and Gardiner C. Means ([1932] 1968) argued that as corporations
became increasingly large and stock ownership dispersed, the professional
managers who ran the day-to-day affairs of the firm gradually wrested control of corporations from their legal owners. Three decades later, John Kenneth Galbraith (1967) argued that because of improvements in technology,
power was now vested in those with control of information and knowledge,
who often operated a step below the firm’s top management. If power was
increasingly linked to expertise, then to the extent that the society was meritocratic, the traditional elite was being replaced by one whose status was
based on achieved rather than ascribed criteria, that is, on their skills rather
than their social backgrounds. On the other hand, there was continuing evidence that upper-class individuals—or at least the offspring of high-status
professionals—were disproportionately represented in these new positions
of power (Useem & Karabel, 1986), and that upper-class families continued
to transmit advantages to their offspring.
Beyond the corporate world, sociologists examined the role of resources
in maintaining and transmitting elite status. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) insight
into the role of cultural capital was particularly influential. DiMaggio and
Mohr (1985) found that familiarity with “high culture” in high school predicted educational attainment and marital selection. Michèle Lamont (1992)
interviewed successful men in the United States and France, finding that they
defined their social class boundaries based on shared tastes and attitudes.
The men preferred to socialize and conduct business with others who shared
cultural markers.
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CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent findings suggest that the elite have changed in two important ways.
First, the corporate elite are decreasingly cohesive, and are less consequential as well. In America, Useem’s inner circle of well-connected “corporate
diplomats” has all but disappeared. Chu and Davis (2013) find that the number of individuals serving on five or more S&P 1500 boards declined from 61
in 2000 to 11 in 2010. In 2000, Vernon Jordan served on nine boards. By 2010
no director served on six or more boards. Chu and Davis attribute this decline
to a reversal in the status accorded to directors serving on multiple boards.
Before the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, recruiting such in-demand
directors was a signal of a firm’s quality. After the scandals, multiple-board
directors became seen as stretched too thin to provide an appropriate level
of governance.
Mizruchi (2013) argues that the US corporate elite has become fragmented,
and thus ineffectual at pursuing the group’s collective interests. Corporate
leaders successfully united to confront labor and government in the 1970s,
but then were forced to focus on short-term shareholder value after the
takeover wave of the 1980s. In the twenty-first century, they lack both the
willingness and the ability to unite behind solutions to issues of concern to
both business and the larger society.
Similar changes have been observed in Europe. Beyer and Hoppner (2003),
David, Ginalski, Rebmann, and Schnyder (2009), and Heemskerk (2007)
have found evidence of declining network density in Germany, Switzerland,
and the Netherlands respectively. Corresponding to the decline in density,
Heemskerk (2007) has also found a decline in class consciousness among
Dutch elites.
The second important change is the disappearance of exclusively elite
cultural activities and tastes. Although elites in both the United States and
Europe have traditionally sought to set themselves apart by monopolizing
consumption of highbrow culture (Levine, 1988), today’s elite are increasingly inclusive in their cultural tastes (Peterson & Kern, 1996). Shamus
Khan (2011) argues that such eclecticism is what now sets elites apart from
nonelites. In his ethnographic study of an elite prep school, Khan finds
that students there are provided exposure to a variety of cultural experiences that others with less privileged backgrounds would find difficult to
emulate.
Cultural capital gained from school-age experiences is consequential in
launching elite careers. Lauren Rivera (2012) illuminates the mechanisms
behind this relationship in an ethnographic study of hiring at elite professional firms (law firms, investment banks, and management consultants).
She finds that cultural matching processes played a large role in hiring
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
decisions, with applicants being evaluated on how well their experiences,
leisure pursuits, and presentation styles matched the preferred culture of
the firm and its incumbent employees.
Rivera’s study is one example of a promising wave of recent scholarship
that examines mechanisms related to elite status. Another example is Rider
and Tan’s (2014) paper on lateral partner hiring at large US law firms. Their
study suggests that high status firms are able to generate increased profits by
attracting partners from lower-status but high profit firms. Conversely, lower
status but high profit firms purchase status by hiring partners from high status firms with lower profits. Rosette and Tost (2013) examine a microlevel
mechanism in their study of individuals’ perceptions of privilege. They find
that highly successful individuals are less likely than less-successful individuals to view social inequity as the result of privilege. This tendency to be
blind to privilege is tempered, however, when an individual is low status
on at least one dimension of social hierarchy. White women, for example,
are more likely to perceive the advantages of white racial privilege than are
white men.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The changes noted above beg the question of whether a cohesive, distinct,
and consequential elite still exists in the United States. If the corporate elite
is no longer capable of collective political action (Mizruchi, 2013), has another
cohesive elite arisen to take its place? Davis (2009) has argued that the corporation is no longer the center of economic power, and that instead finance and
financiers determine the conditions of the American economy. Today’s financial firms, however, do not seem interested in using their power to control or
influence nonfinancial firms. Although commercial banks from the late 1940s
through the early 1980s filled their boards with prominent corporate executives, this practice declined in the 1980s, as the banks lost their role as both
holders and providers of capital (Davis & Mizruchi, 1999).
Another possibility is that the elite reduced its use of corporate boards as
centers of interaction and shifted to other, less-visible fora (Chu & Davis,
2013). In the mid-twentieth century, large bank boards and other corporate
directorships were sinecures, with few expectations for time-consuming
work, little personal liability, and abundant opportunities to socialize with
other elites. Since the 1980s, however, directors’ responsibilities and liabilities have increased, making board service increasingly onerous. Directors
have been increasingly compelled to fill the role prescribed for them in
agency-theoretic formulations of firm governance, acting foremost as stewards of shareholder value. As improved board oversight became the norm
and financial products allowed for easier diversification, elites may have
Elites
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seen less need to actively monitor their investments by sitting on corporate
boards.
If elites have taken their interactions elsewhere, researchers are again faced
with the problem of gaining data on the elite and access to their interactions.
Researchers will need to investigate new arenas for elite socialization, possibly including private equity boards, nonprofit boards, online communities,
and elite social events.
Regardless of whether elites are losing their cohesiveness, they continue to
bequeath economic, social, and cultural capital to their children—albeit in
qualitatively different ways than in previous generations. Children of elites
have greater opportunities to travel, eat more exotic food, and have more
diverse friends than do children of nonelites (Khan, 2011). They are also likely
to be highly competent in leisure pursuits that require high levels of parental
economic support and investment of time. These cultural markers provide
access to elite careers (Rivera, 2012). However, access to these formative experiences is no longer proscribed by race, gender, or ancestry. The increasing
heterogeneity of the elite may have contributed to the difficulty of unified
political action. (Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 2006).
Yet if elite cohesion has disappeared and elite membership has become
more open, what explains the increasing and durable gap in wealth between
elites and nonelites? In the United States, money is easily transposed into and
from other resources. Khan (2011), Rider and Tan (2014), and Rivera (2012)
all describe mechanisms whereby actors convert economic capital into other
forms of capital and back. The distribution of wealth in the population is thus
a useful proxy for the distribution of other resources—and this distribution
is becoming increasingly skewed. Between 1989 and 2008, the average family income of the top 0.1% more than doubled. During the same period, the
bottom 90% experienced a decrease in average income and the bottom 99%
an increase of only 6.7%.1 Moving between income percentiles is becoming
increasingly difficult, as economic social mobility for men has substantially
decreased (Kopczuk et al., 2010).
Researchers face a paradox of durable dominance: continuous, often
trans-generational control of disproportionate resources by a small group
of actors that persists even though previously identified mechanisms of
elite cohesion have ceased to function. To resolve this paradox we need to
address two broad questions.
First, how and when can elites alter institutions? Although the
mid-twentieth century debates centered on the existence of collective
elite action targeting the state, newer scholarship has examined the actions
1. Data from Emmanual Saez at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/∼saez/.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of actors targeting not just regulative institutions, but normative and cognitive ones as well. Teles (2008), for example, has examined the conservative
legal movement that, beginning in the 1970s, altered the taken-for-granted
norms of discourse within the academic legal community, the federal
courts, and regulatory agencies. This movement helped institutionalize
an economics-driven approach to the law, which laid the foundations
for the rise of the shareholder value paradigm in the corporate world.
Movement leaders included the John M. Olin Foundation and academics
at the University of Chicago, and the movement targeted elite academics,
jurists, and policy makers. Others have examined the role of elites in moving
American political discourse and policy in a more conservative direction
(see Himmelstein, 1990 for an excellent example of this work, and Mizruchi,
2013, Chapter 6 for citations to this literature).
In investigations of elite influence, researchers can benefit from recent
advancements in theories of institutional change and social movements.
Neo-institutionalism has been criticized for bracketing out motivated,
agentic behavior, but scholars have recently begun to bring power back into
studies of institutional change (Lawrence, 2008). Social movement theory
tended to focus primarily on actions of the disenfranchised targeting the
state, but here too attention has turned toward the role of the powerful in
targeting cultural institutions (Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008). Investigations
of elite influence will draw from and contribute to these literatures.
The second question that we need to address involves the mechanisms
that contribute to durable dominance and the conditions under which they
are effective. Rider and Tan’s (2014) study demonstrates how resources can
be transposed and traded to maintain the dominance of elite actors. Elite
law firms can maintain high profitability by attracting profit innovators
from lower status firms. This mechanism works primarily in industries such
as law, in which status and performance rankings are clearly visible and
consequential. High status firms can bill out the same work at higher rates,
and thus more than recoup the costs of hiring high-profit partners from
lower-status firms.
What systems and taken-for-granted institutions buttress the mechanisms
of durable dominance? This is a difficult question to answer. Transparently
pro-elite institutions are likely to become targets of attack by the nonelite
supermajority, and so the links between institutions and their effects will tend
not to be obvious. Consider the deep-rooted American belief in the power of
open markets and fair competition. Critics of large corporations have argued
that industries with high barriers to entry and large economies of scale have
deleterious consequences for society, since elite firms can use their advantages to unfairly lock out would-be challengers, and thus deter innovation as
Elites
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well as price competition. On the basis of this rationale, policy-makers regulate markets to discourage excessive rent-seeking by market-dominant companies and to create as open and level a playing field as possible (although
the extent to which the state does this varies depending on who is in power).
A thought experiment suggests, however, that measures for open and fair
competition can create an immutable elite/nonelite dichotomy. Consider
an industry or society in which the important resources are scalable (i.e.,
resource levels can differ between actors by many orders of magnitude) and
Matthew effects (Merton, 1968) apply such that each actor’s gain or loss of
resources over a given time period is proportional to the actor’s existing
stock of resources at the beginning of the period. In such a situation, we
expect to see a highly skewed distribution of resources, in which a few
actors control the bulk of total resources—that is, a system of elites. On the
other hand, since each gain sets up the possibility of an even greater gain
in the next time period, over time, lucky or skillful nonelites can grow their
resources to reach elite status—and a streak of bad luck or bad judgment can
cause an elite actor to lose almost all its resources. Although the distribution
of resources is skewed, elite/nonelite mobility is possible and elite status is
not durable.
If policy-makers subsequently enforce restrictions on the use of existing
resources to amass future resources, however, then the Matthew effect disappears. Each actor’s gain or loss of resources over a given time period is no
longer proportional to the actor’s existing stock of resources. The distribution of gains (losses) per time period has a central tendency, and the center
point of this distribution will be many orders of magnitude smaller than the
difference in resource levels between elites and nonelites. Those actors who
had disproportionate resources at the moment of policy implementation will
continue to do so in perpetuity, and no other actors will be able to achieve
elite levels of resources. The result is a dichotomized system where the elite
stay elite and the nonelite stay nonelite. Changing the rules of competition
to be “level” freezes in place the advantages of the elite gained in the prior
period of less-level competition.
The two questions we have posed—one concerning elite influence on
institutions and the other concerning the effect of institutions on elite
mobility—are obviously related. Elites may be motivated to influence
institutions so as to preserve their disproportionate resources over time.
Such conscious self-interest is not necessary for durable dominance to occur,
however. Like everyone else, elites are affected by cognitive and normative
institutions—taken-for-granted common sense. Indeed, as Rosette and
Tost (2013) show, elites may be more susceptible than nonelites to holding
simplistic beliefs about factors underlying their success in life. Durable
dominance may be a natural and inevitable consequence of a society in
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
which personal wealth is unlimited and eminently transposable, and where
meritocracy and open competition are revered.
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JOHAN S. G. CHU SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Johan S. G. Chu is an Assistant Professor of Organizations and Strategy at
the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. His research focuses
on understanding large-scale change and stasis and examines mechanisms
of elite entrenchment and influence. Johan has a PhD in physics from the
California Institute of technology, and a PhD in management and organizations from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. In between
PhD programs, he spent 13 years in the business world as a management
consultant, entrepreneur, and executive search consultant.
MARK S. MIZRUCHI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Mark S. Mizruchi is the Barger Family Professor of Organizational Studies,
Professor of Sociology, and Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the areas of economic, organizational, and political sociology, and the methods of social network analysis.
His book, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013.
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Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
Class, Cognition, and Face-to-Face Interaction (Sociology), Lauren A. Rivera
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash
-
Elites
JOHAN S. G. CHU and MARK S. MIZRUCHI
Abstract
By definition, individual elite actors have a disproportionately high level of resources
at their disposal with which to influence society. The question is whether such elites
are able to act in a unified and effective manner. During the twentieth century, scholars discovered mechanisms that led to elite cohesion and unified political action.
In the early twenty-first century, these mechanisms have ceased to function. Elite
researchers are thus faced with the challenge of identifying alternative mechanisms
capable of fostering elite influence. In addition to cohesion, mechanisms of elite institutional influence and durable dominance are promising areas for study. Against
the current backdrop of popular interest in elites and the many theoretical avenues
opened up by researchers doing related work in fields such as economics, organizational theory, business, and psychology, the twenty-first century promises to be an
important period for elite scholarship.
INTRODUCTION
In the United States, elites—actors with vastly disproportionate access to
or control of resources (Khan, 2012)—are viewed with both admiration and
suspicion. Some observers view elite status as a legitimate outcome of a meritocratic system, in which those with superior ambition and skill achieve
great rewards through a process of fair and open competition. Others believe
that elite status is preserved and inherited as the consequence of a system in
which the elites write the rules, tailoring them to maintain elite privilege. This
latter view has tended to prevail during periods when inequality and elite
power are especially pronounced, such as during the Gilded Age of robber
barons and more recently since the Occupy movement.
In the mid-twentieth century, although some researchers (e.g., Domhoff,
1967; Mills, 1956) held that elites had a distinctive influence on society, most
social theorists did not distinguish elite and nonelite actors. The sociological
literature on stratification emphasized mobility among the vast majority of
the population that spanned the ladder of occupational status and income.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Theorists of institutional change and social movements neglected to provide
separate consideration to the dynamics of elite-led change initiatives.
One reason for the relative paucity of work on elites is that it has been difficult to gather data on them. Elites constitute a miniscule segment of the
population, and thus rarely appear in surveys of the general population.
Gaining access to exclusive elite enclaves to study their attitudes and actions
can be especially difficult.
Fortunately for elite researchers, in the latter half of the twentieth century,
data became readily available on one increasingly consequential elite group:
the leaders of large corporations. Public companies by law are required to
publish data on their executives and directors, and company leaders often
speak with journalists and business academics. Scholars have put these data
to good use, and much of what we know about elites in the United States and
elsewhere comes from the study of corporate elites.
Recent findings (e.g., Chu & Davis, 2013; Mizruchi, 2013), however, suggest
that the corporate elite are losing their cohesiveness and power. Researchers
can no longer use the corporate elite as a proxy for elites in general, and are
faced anew with the problem of identifying elites to study. This difficulty
is compounded by the disappearing boundary between elite and nonelite
cultures; elites no longer distinguish themselves through highbrow cultural
consumption (Khan, 2011; Peterson & Kern, 1996).
This seeming absence of a cohesive, distinct elite might suggest that American society is trending toward the open, meritocratic ideal. Yet over the past
40 years, economic mobility has declined (Kopczuk, Saez, & Song, 2010),
while the wealth gap between elite and nonelite has dramatically increased
(Piketty & Saez, 2003). Future studies of the elite must address this paradox of
durable dominance, wherein the elite maintain their disproportionate advantage seemingly without cohesive action or class distinction.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
As democracies emerged in Europe, scholars noticed that small, resilient
groups continued to maintain their power over society. Robert Michels
([1911] 1962) and Gaetano Mosca ([1896] 1939) argued that domination by
small groups of elites was inevitable. Michels famously suggested that the
challenges of organizing large groups invariably led to oligarchies—small
cadres of governing elites, who were able to maintain their privileges
because their limited numbers allowed for superior intraelite coordination.
Vilfredo Pareto ([1916] 1935) modified this view by suggesting that elites
were able to maintain their domination only through a certain level of
circulation, in which gifted and talented individuals from nonelite groups
were permitted to enter the elite. Without such openness, Pareto argued, the
Elites
3
elite would lose its ability to rule, thus providing opportunities for gifted
nonelites to seize power.
By the mid-twentieth century, American political theorists sought to reconcile the presence of elites with assumptions of democratic rule. Schumpeter
(1942), Lipset (1960, 1962), and other scholars in what came to be known as
the pluralist tradition asserted that democracy under elite rule was possible
if elites engaged in a “competitive struggle for the votes of a mainly passive
electorate” (Lipset, 1962, p. 33). Through this struggle, the interests of different segments of the population would be represented by different segments
of the elite.
A new generation of American elite theorists took issue with this argument,
suggesting instead that elites were generally unified. According to Hunter
(1953) and Mills (1956), the disagreements expressed in electoral politics
were relatively minor and not threatening to elite interests. Ruling elites were
thus seen as offering a highly restrictive set of political choices—all of which
ultimately served the interests of the overall elite. Mills’ book, in which he
described a “power elite” consisting of leaders within corporate, political,
and military institutions, set off an intense debate between pluralists and
elite theorists.
A natural extension of this debate was the question of whether the leaders of major corporations—the corporate elite—were unified in their political opinions and actions. This question became especially important by the
mid-twentieth century, as corporations grew increasingly large and powerful. Even pluralists acknowledged the potential power of these large firms,
but maintained that the corporations lacked mechanisms that would allow
them to engage in unified collective action.
Writing in the late 1960s, elite theorists G. William Domhoff (1967, 1970)
and Ralph Miliband (1969) responded to this criticism by identifying mechanisms that could resolve conflicts within the business elite, thereby allowing
elites to present a unified face to the state. These mechanisms included kinship ties and socialization devices (such as prep schools, elite colleges, and
social clubs) that fostered a unity of outlook, board of director interlocks
and cross-ownership of stocks among firms that aligned interests, and policy
making organizations (such as the Committee for Economic Development,
which was prominent at the time, and later the Business Roundtable) that
explicitly represented business interests to policy makers. These theorists
were in turn criticized by a group of Marxist scholars, who argued that the
state itself served as the mechanism reconciling disparate corporate interests (Poulantzas, 1972). Both Marxist (Block, 1977) and pluralist (Lindblom,
1977) critics suggested that the state worked to uphold the interests of business not because corporations controlled the government, but because the
government depended on business for its revenue.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
A considerable amount of evidence was presented by all sides in this
debate (see Mizruchi, 1992, Chapter 2 for a summary). The corporate elite
appear to be both unified and divided, which leads to a perhaps more
pertinent question: under what conditions is business unified or divided?
Michael Useem (1984) provided insight into this question with his groundbreaking study of corporate elites in the United States and Britain. Although
Useem found that the majority of the business community was fragmented,
a small group of leaders of the largest corporations—what he termed the
“inner circle”—was able to achieve a unified perspective and act collectively
to further the long-term interests of the business community. Mark Mizruchi
(1992) established the theoretical and empirical bases for a synthesized
theory of elite influence, showing that political unity is most likely to occur
in the presence of interfirm networks created by economic interdependence
among firms and board of director interlocks, rather than shared interests
per se.
A related debate concerned the importance of social background and family resources in rising to positions of corporate power. In the 1930s, Adolf
A. Berle Jr. and Gardiner C. Means ([1932] 1968) argued that as corporations
became increasingly large and stock ownership dispersed, the professional
managers who ran the day-to-day affairs of the firm gradually wrested control of corporations from their legal owners. Three decades later, John Kenneth Galbraith (1967) argued that because of improvements in technology,
power was now vested in those with control of information and knowledge,
who often operated a step below the firm’s top management. If power was
increasingly linked to expertise, then to the extent that the society was meritocratic, the traditional elite was being replaced by one whose status was
based on achieved rather than ascribed criteria, that is, on their skills rather
than their social backgrounds. On the other hand, there was continuing evidence that upper-class individuals—or at least the offspring of high-status
professionals—were disproportionately represented in these new positions
of power (Useem & Karabel, 1986), and that upper-class families continued
to transmit advantages to their offspring.
Beyond the corporate world, sociologists examined the role of resources
in maintaining and transmitting elite status. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) insight
into the role of cultural capital was particularly influential. DiMaggio and
Mohr (1985) found that familiarity with “high culture” in high school predicted educational attainment and marital selection. Michèle Lamont (1992)
interviewed successful men in the United States and France, finding that they
defined their social class boundaries based on shared tastes and attitudes.
The men preferred to socialize and conduct business with others who shared
cultural markers.
Elites
5
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent findings suggest that the elite have changed in two important ways.
First, the corporate elite are decreasingly cohesive, and are less consequential as well. In America, Useem’s inner circle of well-connected “corporate
diplomats” has all but disappeared. Chu and Davis (2013) find that the number of individuals serving on five or more S&P 1500 boards declined from 61
in 2000 to 11 in 2010. In 2000, Vernon Jordan served on nine boards. By 2010
no director served on six or more boards. Chu and Davis attribute this decline
to a reversal in the status accorded to directors serving on multiple boards.
Before the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, recruiting such in-demand
directors was a signal of a firm’s quality. After the scandals, multiple-board
directors became seen as stretched too thin to provide an appropriate level
of governance.
Mizruchi (2013) argues that the US corporate elite has become fragmented,
and thus ineffectual at pursuing the group’s collective interests. Corporate
leaders successfully united to confront labor and government in the 1970s,
but then were forced to focus on short-term shareholder value after the
takeover wave of the 1980s. In the twenty-first century, they lack both the
willingness and the ability to unite behind solutions to issues of concern to
both business and the larger society.
Similar changes have been observed in Europe. Beyer and Hoppner (2003),
David, Ginalski, Rebmann, and Schnyder (2009), and Heemskerk (2007)
have found evidence of declining network density in Germany, Switzerland,
and the Netherlands respectively. Corresponding to the decline in density,
Heemskerk (2007) has also found a decline in class consciousness among
Dutch elites.
The second important change is the disappearance of exclusively elite
cultural activities and tastes. Although elites in both the United States and
Europe have traditionally sought to set themselves apart by monopolizing
consumption of highbrow culture (Levine, 1988), today’s elite are increasingly inclusive in their cultural tastes (Peterson & Kern, 1996). Shamus
Khan (2011) argues that such eclecticism is what now sets elites apart from
nonelites. In his ethnographic study of an elite prep school, Khan finds
that students there are provided exposure to a variety of cultural experiences that others with less privileged backgrounds would find difficult to
emulate.
Cultural capital gained from school-age experiences is consequential in
launching elite careers. Lauren Rivera (2012) illuminates the mechanisms
behind this relationship in an ethnographic study of hiring at elite professional firms (law firms, investment banks, and management consultants).
She finds that cultural matching processes played a large role in hiring
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
decisions, with applicants being evaluated on how well their experiences,
leisure pursuits, and presentation styles matched the preferred culture of
the firm and its incumbent employees.
Rivera’s study is one example of a promising wave of recent scholarship
that examines mechanisms related to elite status. Another example is Rider
and Tan’s (2014) paper on lateral partner hiring at large US law firms. Their
study suggests that high status firms are able to generate increased profits by
attracting partners from lower-status but high profit firms. Conversely, lower
status but high profit firms purchase status by hiring partners from high status firms with lower profits. Rosette and Tost (2013) examine a microlevel
mechanism in their study of individuals’ perceptions of privilege. They find
that highly successful individuals are less likely than less-successful individuals to view social inequity as the result of privilege. This tendency to be
blind to privilege is tempered, however, when an individual is low status
on at least one dimension of social hierarchy. White women, for example,
are more likely to perceive the advantages of white racial privilege than are
white men.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The changes noted above beg the question of whether a cohesive, distinct,
and consequential elite still exists in the United States. If the corporate elite
is no longer capable of collective political action (Mizruchi, 2013), has another
cohesive elite arisen to take its place? Davis (2009) has argued that the corporation is no longer the center of economic power, and that instead finance and
financiers determine the conditions of the American economy. Today’s financial firms, however, do not seem interested in using their power to control or
influence nonfinancial firms. Although commercial banks from the late 1940s
through the early 1980s filled their boards with prominent corporate executives, this practice declined in the 1980s, as the banks lost their role as both
holders and providers of capital (Davis & Mizruchi, 1999).
Another possibility is that the elite reduced its use of corporate boards as
centers of interaction and shifted to other, less-visible fora (Chu & Davis,
2013). In the mid-twentieth century, large bank boards and other corporate
directorships were sinecures, with few expectations for time-consuming
work, little personal liability, and abundant opportunities to socialize with
other elites. Since the 1980s, however, directors’ responsibilities and liabilities have increased, making board service increasingly onerous. Directors
have been increasingly compelled to fill the role prescribed for them in
agency-theoretic formulations of firm governance, acting foremost as stewards of shareholder value. As improved board oversight became the norm
and financial products allowed for easier diversification, elites may have
Elites
7
seen less need to actively monitor their investments by sitting on corporate
boards.
If elites have taken their interactions elsewhere, researchers are again faced
with the problem of gaining data on the elite and access to their interactions.
Researchers will need to investigate new arenas for elite socialization, possibly including private equity boards, nonprofit boards, online communities,
and elite social events.
Regardless of whether elites are losing their cohesiveness, they continue to
bequeath economic, social, and cultural capital to their children—albeit in
qualitatively different ways than in previous generations. Children of elites
have greater opportunities to travel, eat more exotic food, and have more
diverse friends than do children of nonelites (Khan, 2011). They are also likely
to be highly competent in leisure pursuits that require high levels of parental
economic support and investment of time. These cultural markers provide
access to elite careers (Rivera, 2012). However, access to these formative experiences is no longer proscribed by race, gender, or ancestry. The increasing
heterogeneity of the elite may have contributed to the difficulty of unified
political action. (Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 2006).
Yet if elite cohesion has disappeared and elite membership has become
more open, what explains the increasing and durable gap in wealth between
elites and nonelites? In the United States, money is easily transposed into and
from other resources. Khan (2011), Rider and Tan (2014), and Rivera (2012)
all describe mechanisms whereby actors convert economic capital into other
forms of capital and back. The distribution of wealth in the population is thus
a useful proxy for the distribution of other resources—and this distribution
is becoming increasingly skewed. Between 1989 and 2008, the average family income of the top 0.1% more than doubled. During the same period, the
bottom 90% experienced a decrease in average income and the bottom 99%
an increase of only 6.7%.1 Moving between income percentiles is becoming
increasingly difficult, as economic social mobility for men has substantially
decreased (Kopczuk et al., 2010).
Researchers face a paradox of durable dominance: continuous, often
trans-generational control of disproportionate resources by a small group
of actors that persists even though previously identified mechanisms of
elite cohesion have ceased to function. To resolve this paradox we need to
address two broad questions.
First, how and when can elites alter institutions? Although the
mid-twentieth century debates centered on the existence of collective
elite action targeting the state, newer scholarship has examined the actions
1. Data from Emmanual Saez at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/∼saez/.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of actors targeting not just regulative institutions, but normative and cognitive ones as well. Teles (2008), for example, has examined the conservative
legal movement that, beginning in the 1970s, altered the taken-for-granted
norms of discourse within the academic legal community, the federal
courts, and regulatory agencies. This movement helped institutionalize
an economics-driven approach to the law, which laid the foundations
for the rise of the shareholder value paradigm in the corporate world.
Movement leaders included the John M. Olin Foundation and academics
at the University of Chicago, and the movement targeted elite academics,
jurists, and policy makers. Others have examined the role of elites in moving
American political discourse and policy in a more conservative direction
(see Himmelstein, 1990 for an excellent example of this work, and Mizruchi,
2013, Chapter 6 for citations to this literature).
In investigations of elite influence, researchers can benefit from recent
advancements in theories of institutional change and social movements.
Neo-institutionalism has been criticized for bracketing out motivated,
agentic behavior, but scholars have recently begun to bring power back into
studies of institutional change (Lawrence, 2008). Social movement theory
tended to focus primarily on actions of the disenfranchised targeting the
state, but here too attention has turned toward the role of the powerful in
targeting cultural institutions (Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008). Investigations
of elite influence will draw from and contribute to these literatures.
The second question that we need to address involves the mechanisms
that contribute to durable dominance and the conditions under which they
are effective. Rider and Tan’s (2014) study demonstrates how resources can
be transposed and traded to maintain the dominance of elite actors. Elite
law firms can maintain high profitability by attracting profit innovators
from lower status firms. This mechanism works primarily in industries such
as law, in which status and performance rankings are clearly visible and
consequential. High status firms can bill out the same work at higher rates,
and thus more than recoup the costs of hiring high-profit partners from
lower-status firms.
What systems and taken-for-granted institutions buttress the mechanisms
of durable dominance? This is a difficult question to answer. Transparently
pro-elite institutions are likely to become targets of attack by the nonelite
supermajority, and so the links between institutions and their effects will tend
not to be obvious. Consider the deep-rooted American belief in the power of
open markets and fair competition. Critics of large corporations have argued
that industries with high barriers to entry and large economies of scale have
deleterious consequences for society, since elite firms can use their advantages to unfairly lock out would-be challengers, and thus deter innovation as
Elites
9
well as price competition. On the basis of this rationale, policy-makers regulate markets to discourage excessive rent-seeking by market-dominant companies and to create as open and level a playing field as possible (although
the extent to which the state does this varies depending on who is in power).
A thought experiment suggests, however, that measures for open and fair
competition can create an immutable elite/nonelite dichotomy. Consider
an industry or society in which the important resources are scalable (i.e.,
resource levels can differ between actors by many orders of magnitude) and
Matthew effects (Merton, 1968) apply such that each actor’s gain or loss of
resources over a given time period is proportional to the actor’s existing
stock of resources at the beginning of the period. In such a situation, we
expect to see a highly skewed distribution of resources, in which a few
actors control the bulk of total resources—that is, a system of elites. On the
other hand, since each gain sets up the possibility of an even greater gain
in the next time period, over time, lucky or skillful nonelites can grow their
resources to reach elite status—and a streak of bad luck or bad judgment can
cause an elite actor to lose almost all its resources. Although the distribution
of resources is skewed, elite/nonelite mobility is possible and elite status is
not durable.
If policy-makers subsequently enforce restrictions on the use of existing
resources to amass future resources, however, then the Matthew effect disappears. Each actor’s gain or loss of resources over a given time period is no
longer proportional to the actor’s existing stock of resources. The distribution of gains (losses) per time period has a central tendency, and the center
point of this distribution will be many orders of magnitude smaller than the
difference in resource levels between elites and nonelites. Those actors who
had disproportionate resources at the moment of policy implementation will
continue to do so in perpetuity, and no other actors will be able to achieve
elite levels of resources. The result is a dichotomized system where the elite
stay elite and the nonelite stay nonelite. Changing the rules of competition
to be “level” freezes in place the advantages of the elite gained in the prior
period of less-level competition.
The two questions we have posed—one concerning elite influence on
institutions and the other concerning the effect of institutions on elite
mobility—are obviously related. Elites may be motivated to influence
institutions so as to preserve their disproportionate resources over time.
Such conscious self-interest is not necessary for durable dominance to occur,
however. Like everyone else, elites are affected by cognitive and normative
institutions—taken-for-granted common sense. Indeed, as Rosette and
Tost (2013) show, elites may be more susceptible than nonelites to holding
simplistic beliefs about factors underlying their success in life. Durable
dominance may be a natural and inevitable consequence of a society in
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
which personal wealth is unlimited and eminently transposable, and where
meritocracy and open competition are revered.
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JOHAN S. G. CHU SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Johan S. G. Chu is an Assistant Professor of Organizations and Strategy at
the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. His research focuses
on understanding large-scale change and stasis and examines mechanisms
of elite entrenchment and influence. Johan has a PhD in physics from the
California Institute of technology, and a PhD in management and organizations from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. In between
PhD programs, he spent 13 years in the business world as a management
consultant, entrepreneur, and executive search consultant.
MARK S. MIZRUCHI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Mark S. Mizruchi is the Barger Family Professor of Organizational Studies,
Professor of Sociology, and Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the areas of economic, organizational, and political sociology, and the methods of social network analysis.
His book, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013.
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Education for Mobility or Status Reproduction? (Sociology), Karyn Lacy
Political Inequality (Sociology), Jeff Manza
Stratification and the Welfare State (Sociology), Stephanie Moller and Joya
Misra
Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
Class, Cognition, and Face-to-Face Interaction (Sociology), Lauren A. Rivera
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash