Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power


Book Description

This book, prepared under the auspices of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Elites, focuses on the interpenetration between various types of elites. The contributions to this book reveal contrasting patterns of recruitment and selection in terms of career paths, visibility, influence, and power of different elite circles.




Elite Recruitment and Coherence of the Inner Core of Power in Finland


Book Description

The book outlines the approaches of classical elite theory and democratic elitism for the study of national power structures. The book displays different research methods for elite study as well as the power conceptions included within these methods. An elite structure typology is derived from the elite theory and applied to chart the changes in the elite structure of one country, Finland. The data of this work is unique in international comparison: postal surveys were conducted among the elites and the citizenry in 1991, 2001, and 2011. The study explores empirically the changes occurring in the elite structure from the early 1990s to the present day¾a period that has been characterized by important societal upheavals, such as the great recession of the early 1990s, Finland’s accession to the European Union in 1995, and the international financial crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis in the 2000s. The main focus is on how the elite structure has changed in terms of vertical social mobility (i.e., openness) on the one hand and horizontal mobility (i.e., coherence) on the other. With regard to vertical social mobility, the research interest focuses on changes in elites’ social background and various factors advancing their recruitment and career into elite positions. As for horizontal mobility, the study focuses on the elites’ different channels of contact with other influential groups in society, networking with various societal institutions, the attitudinal unanimity within various elites and between the elites and the citizenry, mobility between different elite groups (i.e. circulation), the accumulation of power positions, and the retention and loss of elite positions. The findings are compared with previous international studies, especially Scandinavian elite studies. Finally, the study considers what the results tell us about the state of democracy.




The Shariatisation of Indonesia


Book Description

This book is a succinct and critical account on the shariatisation of Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. It comes with an important conclusion that the change of such a non-theocratic state like Indonesia into a theocratic state is highly possible when its law is penetrated by those who want to change the state system.




Public Leadership


Book Description

'Leadership' is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in the media and in everyday conversation. Despite all this talk, there is surprisingly little consensus about how to answer basic questions about the nature, place, role and impact of leadership in contemporary society. This book brings together academics from a broad array of social science disciplines who are interested in contemporary understandings of leadership in the public domain. Their work on political, administrative and civil society leadership represents a stock-take of what we need to know and offers original examples of what we do know about public leadership. Although this volume connects scholars living in, and mostly working on, public leadership in Australia and New Zealand, their contributions have a much broader scope and relevance.




The Anthropology of Elites


Book Description

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.




Restructuring of the Economic Elites after State Socialism


Book Description

The collapse of the former socialist states has led to the transformation of their political, economic and social systems as well as a major change in international orientations. In this context, new economic and political elites of the former state socialist societies have emerged. How they have emerged from state socialism is a major component of this book which has two major themes. First, we consider the recruitment patterns of the new elites, among others the extent to which the new leaderships have been reconstituted from the former cadres of state socialism. Second we outline the consequences of transformation on the institutions, particularly the formation of markets and privatisation in the context of the dynamic of the enlargement of the European Union and the entry of the new states into the world system.This collection of papes is based mostly on two conferences out of six serial conferences under the general responsibility of David Lane, Cambridge University. The first conference was held in Budapest on 4-5 September 2004 at Corvinus University of Budapest (Institute of Sociology and Social Policy, Centre for Empirical Social Research) and organized by György Lengyel, the second on 13-14 May 2005 at University of Bremen (Institute of Sociology/Institute Labour and Economy) led by Jochen Tholen.




The Role of Local Political Elites in East Central Europe


Book Description

How does the elite continue to affect the evolution of local communities in the developing region of former Sovietized Europe? This book is concerned with the issue of local leadership in the countries of East-Central Europe. It is an attempt to examine, with a comparative method, the profile and the role of the local political elites (members of the Municipal Councils) in six towns in six transitional democracies of the region.




Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance


Book Description

This global encyclopedic work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration, public policy, governance, and management. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the above fields and their numerous subfields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields and subfields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge. Expanded and updated, the second edition includes over a thousand of new entries representing the most current research in public administration, public policy, governance, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, and management covering such important sub-areas as: 1. organization theory, behavior, change and development; 2. administrative theory and practice; 3. Bureaucracy; 4. public budgeting and financial management; 5. public economy and public management 6. public personnel administration and labor-management relations; 7. crisis and emergency management; 8. institutional theory and public administration; 9. law and regulations; 10. ethics and accountability; 11. public governance and private governance; 12. Nonprofit management and nongovernmental organizations; 13. Social, health, and environmental policy areas; 14. pandemic and crisis management; 15. administrative and governance reforms; 16. comparative public administration and governance; 17. globalization and international issues; 18. performance management; 19. geographical areas of the world with country-focused entries like Japan, China, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America; and 20. a lot more. Relevant to professionals, experts, scholars, general readers, researchers, policy makers and manger, and students worldwide, this work will serve as the most viable global reference source for those looking for an introduction and advance knowledge to the field.




A Social Theory of Corruption


Book Description

A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.




New Directions in Elite Studies


Book Description

Since the financial crisis, the issue of the ‘one percent’ has become the centre of intense public debate, unavoidable even for members of the elite themselves. Moreover, inquiring into elites has taken centre-stage once again in both journalistic investigations and academic research. New Directions in Elite Studies attempts to move the social scientific study of elites beyond economic analysis, which has greatly improved our knowledge of inequality, but is restricted to income and wealth. In contrast, this book mobilizes a broad scope of research methods to uncover the social composition of the power elite – the ‘field of power’. It reconstructs processes through which people gain access to positions in this particular social space, examines the various forms of capital they mobilize in the process – economic, but also cultural and social capital – and probes changes over time and variations across national contexts. Bringing together the most advanced research into elites by a European and multidisciplinary group of scholars, this book presents an agenda for the future study of elites. It will appeal to all those interested in the study of elites, inequality, class, power, and gender inequality.