Elite Mobility Research Articles

Os protegidos de Ceres: produtores, moageiros e política cerealífera nos Açores (1923-1932)

This article departs from the economic and political context of the transition from the 1920s to the 1930s to study the evolution of the cereal policy in Azores. In this dynamic change process, agriculture, in general, and cereal farming, in particular, have been heavily targeted by public policies and governmental decisions. Our main purposes are the analysis of the organization, relations and implications of the activities of the agents involved in the commodity chain of wheat. It was concluded that the forms of public mobilization and pressure of the economic elites, in this case, the millers and agricultural landowners, on the political instances were not far from what occurred in the continental context, although the state has become the ultimate regulatory element.

청대 育嬰의 부속기구 설립과 嬰兒 구제 - 江蘇 지역 사례를 중심으로

In recent years, in understanding the Qing Dynasty in the first half of the 19th century, attempts have been made to criticize the existing research trend that focuses on the decline and to examine the changes and historical implications of the time through more diverse and in-depth research on this period. These studies can suggest a new interpretation of this period by examining various patterns of change in the first half of the 19th century. he retreat of the state at the end of the Qing Dynasty or the rise of the local elite is a continuation of the trend that began before that period, rather than an immediate result of the 'many difficulties and worries inside and outside the country' in the mid-19th century. One of the lack of accumulation of research in the various aspects of change is the relief work. In particular, the orphanage project during the Qing Dynasty was in the realm of representative charity that coexisted between the state and society, and it changed professionally and independently, such as functional differentiation as the types of charitable facilities diversified due to the social mobilization of local elites. Nevertheless, the formation and change of these public spheres during the Qing Dynasty were characterized only by inertia or understood as a historical situation filled with a traditional order without an exit. Instead of simplifying the form of charity in the private sector before modern times and contrasting it with modern changes, this paper reveals that the expansion of the public role of local elites has continued since pre-modern times, and that private-led orphanage projects have sufficient potential social capabilities.

Mechanisms of Resistance: Informal Institutional Impediments to Japanese Postal Privatization

Why has Japan failed to fulfill the mission of its 2005 postal privatization legislation? The answer is informal institutions that empower the postmasters within the electoral system and facilitate the mobilization of elites on behalf of anti-reformist goals. To support this claim, I analyze three such institutions: the postmasters’ ownership of postal facilities; the re-employment of former bureaucrats by the postal system and of top postal employees elsewhere in the system; and sales and vote-mobilization quotas. Theoretically, this study analyzes four sources of informal institutional resilience following formal institutional change: the heretofore understudied participation of officialdom in the introduction, communication, and enforcement of informal institutions; the establishment of such institutions prior to new formal rules; institutional duplication across economic sectors; and institutional complementarities.

‘Artists not tourists’: ethical tensions between creative mobility and migration

ABSTRACT Over the past decade there has been significant increase in artist residencies that provide opportunities for artists to travel internationally, in order to immerse themselves in a place and develop their artistic practice. This essay reflects on a case study of an artist residency program in Berlin, in which 10 international artists were invited to live in a refugee accommodation centre for a month each. Drawing on fieldwork notes, sketches, interviews with participants and the residency facilitators, I reflect on my unease and tensions that this form of creative mobility produces in relation to the visualities of migration. Questions around the role of mobility and exchange for artists, as well as applied mobilities researchers, pose ethical considerations about the privileges of movement and the visualities that such mobility produces. I suggest that the international artist residency model reinforces hierarchies and the injustices of cultural mobilities that are entwined and embedded in elite mobility practices.

Elite mobility and continuity during a regime change.

How does a regime change influence elite mobility? By collecting data on elites after the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868, through which Japan transitioned from a feudal regime to a modern regime, we provide new evidence that the impact of the regime change on elite mobility varies across the stages of the regime change. We analyze the impact of the regime change from two aspects: (1) the composition of elites or elite membership and (2) the internal hierarchy within them. The regime change opened an opportunity for commoners to join the elite group. After the Meiji Restoration, the share of elites whose fathers were commoners in the former regime increased, as did the influence of meritocracy on elite ranks. However, once the new regime was established, the elite hierarchy started to reflect the social stratum of the former regime and the influence of meritocracy declined.

“We are One People”: White Papers as a Tool to Promote National Unity in the PRC

This article studies the role of "white books" in the system of ethnic propaganda in the PRC, as well as their significance in the mechanism of indoctrination of the bureaucracy. This topic has been little studied in the domestic historiography, and few works have been published in the Western literature. China has established a ramified system of propaganda organs, both vertically subordinated and not directly subordinated to the central party-state organs. Ethno-ethnic propaganda organizations have been set up within the overall system, primarily the United Front Department and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, using both internal and external propaganda channels. “White papers” are an important link in external ethnic propaganda. These materials present the territories of non-Han nationalities as regions that have been part of the Chinese empire and later the modern PRC since ancient times. The Chinese state actively protects the rights of ethnic minorities, develops the institution of ethnic minorities’ regional autonomy and promotes social and economic development of ethnic areas. Only minor extremist groups and religious radicals, supported from abroad, seek to undermine inter-ethnic unity in order to divide China. Hence the need to strengthen the unity of the nationalities. Another purpose of publishing “white papers” is to indoctrinate the bureaucracy, which has lost its "fighting spirit" during the years of reform, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. With a certain pluralism of approaches to the assessment of PRC ethnopolitics and the institution of ethnic minorities’ regional autonomy in the academic environment, the confirmation of the invariability of the official party doctrine contributes to the mobilization of ethnic elites and ganbu.

Civil War Secularity Talk

Despite important advances in the study of war and religion, the role of the secular remains under-analyzed. This article develops a theory of secularity talk in civil wars, examining two instances where actors have made religion and sect salient. In comparing patterns of secularity talk among non-elites found in oral history sources from the Syrian civil war and the Northern Irish Troubles, this article contributes to the recent peace turn in the religion-and-conflict literature. Greater attention to religion’s borderlands, to how actors distinguish religion from other arenas of human life can tell us more about what happens to the secular when people are under extreme pressure, including during war. This approach also sheds light on non-elite ambivalence towards elite mobilization of religion to fuel conflict, a common but as-yet under-theorized phenomenon.

Who Has the Right to the Coworking Space? Reframing Platformed Workspaces as Elite Territory in the Geomedia City

Current research suggests that coworking spaces (CWS) both respond to and legitimize work precarization. This is an important critique. Less acknowledged, however, is the fact that CWS also (re)produce eliteness. Thus, to the aim of offering perspectives that remain underrepresented in CWS research, I here scrutinize CWS as promotors of class privilege. I build my case on the premise that class privilege has to do with more than merely economic superiority and seek to dismantle, in particular, the role of geomedia technologies in the (re) production of CWS eliteness. With clues derived from a literature review as well as analyses of real-life cases, I here recognize CWS as places of elite (non-)consumption, as hubs of elite mobility, as nodes in elite networks, and, ultimately, as elite territories in the (super-)gentrified geomedia city. I end my article by reflecting on the dialectics of CWS eliteness, thereby suggesting how precariousness and eliteness are interlinked.

Elite Mobility and Conversions of Different Forms of Capital: An Investigation of Patterns of Study Abroad amongst Elite Graduates from Peking University in China

ABSTRACT This article extends Bourdieu’s convertibility of different forms of capital to understand the patterns of study abroad by elite graduates from Peking University, China. We draw upon empirical data from a first-hand survey study involving 1,417 graduates from Peking University. The statistical analyses suggest a pattern of the conversions from political and economic capital to cultural capital. Students from leading cadres and managerial families up the prestige game by actively pursuing study abroad opportunities, thus creating a ‘hard currency’ which combines elite status at home and abroad. This prestige game locks out even elite graduates without adequate economic resources. The formation of the new ‘hard currency’ reveals the inherent inconsistencies between the State’s meritocracy discourse and its ambition of competing for global talents. We argue that the State’s recent pursuit of global talents effectively excludes the working class and agricultural families without providing an inclusive and convincing meritocratic rationale.

Sinews of politics: State Grid Corporation, investment coalitions, and embeddedness in the Philippines

China's overseas energy projects have expanded significantly in the last decade. While there is considerable literature on energy-related construction contracts and ownership of power generation projects, China's power grid investments have been underexamined. Power grid investments can arguably be more contentious not only due to the vexing security context that surrounds Chinese investments in strategic sectors, but also because of the geographic coverage of such projects, which cut across provinces in host countries. This paper examines the State Grid Corporation of China's (SGCC) investment during Philippine President Gloria-Macapagal Arroyo's (2000–2010) administration, a strategic case to examine the completion or cancellation of Chinese investments in strategic sectors. This paper finds that the SGCC built an investment coalition with major Philippine economic elites in order to protect its investments from opposition politicians. Philippine economic elites or oligarchs hold considerable structural and instrumental powers, and thus exercise significant influence over political elites. In contrast, Chinese state-owned enterprises and private firms who worked with Philippine politicians - Arroyo herself, her administration, and mayors - experienced significant elite mobilization. These findings demonstrate that local gatekeepers and deeply embedded social relations are essential, contributing to the debates on the internationalization of Chinese capital in the world.

The Growth Paths and Mechanisms of Chinese Private Enterprise

During the past forty years of reform and opening up, China’s private economy has made remarkable strides. This paper introduces start-up organizational processes into the study of elite mobility in emerging markets, exploring the relationship between the social origins of entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial outcomes. Our research finds that the initial scale, growth rate and current size of enterprises established by elite entrepreneurs are larger than those of grassroots entrepreneurs. With the deepening of economic reform and the growth of the private economy, the social origins of large business owners generally tend to be elitist and the scale advantage of the enterprises set up by elite entrepreneurs, especially endogenous or inside-track entrepreneurs, is ever more striking. The expansion of such enterprises’ superior position is mainly due to their initial advantages of scale; after the start-up period, the advantage conferred by their pace of growth does not increase synchronously. In order to promote the further development of the private economy and release its innovative potential, it is necessary to give full play to the government’s function of regulating market operations and correcting market failure, and thus actively creating a good business environment.

Review: The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America, by Bernard L. Fraga

Review: <i>The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America</i>, by Bernard L. Fraga

Imams and Businessmen: Islamist Service Provision in Turkey

Islamists have a reputation for winning over citizen support through service delivery. This reflects a worldwide trend in the use of service provision by non-state actors to gain political support. Existing works attribute the notable local-level variation in such provision to strategic choice or low state capacity. Focusing on the Gulen Movement, the largest Islamist group in contemporary Turkey, we find no evidence that state weakness increases Islamist service provision. Rather we show that service allocation is highly dependent on a group’s ability to marshal local resources, specifically through the associational mobilization of local business elites. For our inferences, we exploit spatial variation in Islamist service delivery across Turkey’s 970 districts and use data on the Erdo˘gan government’s purge of thousands of non-state education institutions and bureaucrats, along with original data on business associations, endowments, public service infrastructure, and early Republican associations.

Elite Mobilization: A Theory Explaining Opposition to Gay Rights

Media and scholastic accounts describe a strong backlash against attempts to advance gay rights. Academic research, however, increasingly raises questions about the sharply negative and enduring opinion change that characterizes backlash among the mass public. How can we reconcile the widespread backlash described by the media with the growing body of academic research that finds no evidence of the opinion change thought to be its hallmark trait? We argue that rather than widespread opinion change, what appears to be backlash against gay rights is more consistent with elite-led mobilization—a reaction by elites seeking to prevent gays and lesbians from achieving full incorporation in the polity. We present evidence from what is widely considered to be a classic case of anti-gay backlash, the 2010 Iowa Judicial Retention Election. Analysis of campaign contribution data in Iowa versus other states between 2010 and 2014, and voter roll-off data exploiting a unique feature of the 2010 retention election supports this argument. The results simultaneously explain how reports of backlash might occur despite increased support for gay rights, and an academic literature that finds no evidence of backlash.

Inns And Elite Mobility In Late Georgian Britain*

Abstract This paper considers the significance of the spaces and material culture of the ‘principal inn’ as the centre of a distinct world of elite mobility in eighteenth-century Britain. Inns were central to the expansion and improvement of the travel network that brought the British Isles closer together through the long eighteenth century. The turnpike system introduced improved surfaces to old and new roads while new coach-building technology allowed faster movement on those roads. However, it was the national network of inns, regularly and reliably punctuating Britain's roads, that made fast and efficient travel a practical, everyday reality from London to York, Bristol to Holyhead, Edinburgh to Inverness. On arrival the inn provided food and accommodation for travellers, hay and stables for horses and grease for carriage axles. From cross-country travel to crossing the inn-yard, finding a table in the parlour or climbing the stairs to bed, the inn served the traveller across different scales of space and mobility. Moreover, for the elite traveller, inns were not simply blank containers for travel-related activities; they were material constructs that gave those activities form and meaning. Within the principal inn refined interior spaces and well-made, fashionable things placed the elite traveller in a reassuringly familiar cultural space, a bubble of comfort, luxury and good taste which they did not leave from one inn to the next.

EARLY MODERN TRAVELLERS IN THE AEGEAN: ROUTES AND NETWORKS

This study uses the collection of fifteenth- to twentieth-century travel literature from the BSA library to consider issues of (elite) mobility in the Aegean Sea. These texts contain a wealth of information on the routes chosen by travellers between various islands and mainland ports, and on the navigability of the Aegean basin. By using a combination of computational Proximal Point Analysis and Social Network Analysis, these routes are visualised, and discussion focuses on how navigation varied both between centuries and according to the traveller's place of origin. It is suggested that travellers were dependent on other sorts of networks, and that routes travelled were shaped greatly by the economics and politics of the day. It is also proposed that methodologies used in this paper offer great potential for engaging broad-scale sets of archive data.

‘Back to the “futur”’: Mobility and immobility through English in Algeria

Based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how global discourses of English as the “international language” are read, reproduced and appropriated in non-Anglophone postcolonial settings, taking Algeria as a case study. English is heralded as the “language of the future”, equated with “moving on” from the colonial past towards new connections, new horizons, and new articulations of a global-national identity. It is both a movement forward, and an attempt at reaching back to a more “authentic” (non-Francophone) past. However, those narratives are also firmly embedded within existing power hierarchies and prevailing language ideologies. Discourses and practices around English reinforce rather than challenge socio-economic stratification by rewarding elite mobilities and reproducing representations of how language indexes authenticity and belonging.

Reading Postemancipation In/Security

This essay examines in/securities through a central focus on strategies for securing livelihoods after emancipation. While the postemancipation period in the Caribbean was marked by clamorous debate about the region’s economic future, this essay is concerned with the quieter practices that shaped the texture of freedom. An engagement with travel narratives, specifically attentive to reading against the grain of elite mobilities, is proposed as a means through which to reveal the everyday negotiation of livelihoods. Offering the market as a case study, the essay argues that everyday negotiations of economic insecurity rested on mobile strategies and that the mobilization of such strategies took on a new significance with the rise of tourism in the decades after emancipation.

Institutionalization of subnational governance in Estonia: European impacts and domestic adaptations

ABSTRACTThe article analyses European impacts on the formation of subnational governance in Estonia and the role of domestic mediating variables in institutionalizing those impacts. We analyse different types of Europeanization at different periods: during post-communist transition, EU accession, and after EU accession, focusing in that period on the implementation of European Union Structural Fund (SF) programmes. Because of the short historical experience of democratic governance in Estonia, horizontal fragmentation of local authorities and weak policy input channels of local interests to central institutions, the pillarized administrative hierarchy and deconcentrated agencies started to prevail over subnational governance. This structural pattern ensured a perfect top-down implementation of EU policies by central government agencies and achievement of EU SF programme’s operational outputs. But it constrained the mobilization of subnational elites, their active involvement in multilevel governance arrangements and development of policy ownership of EU policy implementation at the local level.

English

This study explains chief causes of covert and overt conflict between indigenous and non-indigenous ethnic groups of Metekel zone, since 1991. For the sake of convenience, however, particular emphasis is given to the conflict between Agew and Gumuz. The study employs relational ethnography research design. The data collected through in-depth interview, observation, informal conversation, and review of available documents is analysed thematically. The conflict between the two ethnic groups in the period is explained based on the assumption of horizontal and longitudinal deprivation. The paper demonstrates that coincidence of relative deprivation with ethnic line is creating favourable conditions for violent conflicts in the study area. In the period, Agews felt deprived of political resources in contrast to their history and Gumuz. On the other hand, though Gumuz are politically empowered, the socio-economic status of the people is hardly comparable with the Agew and other non-indigenous ethnic groups. The salience of ethnicity in the period has also been providing opportunity for elites to mobilize the mass for violence. But, the study argues the transformation of dormant conflicts into violence is determined by cost and benefit analysis of the action rather than by a mere mobilization of elites. Accordingly, in the period instigating violence seems persuasive for Gumuz than Agew. The finding implies that when the underlying conditions of relative deprivation are eliminated, the motive to use violence as a political instrument can also be minimized. Key words: Ethnicity, ethnic conflict, relative deprivation, ethnic federalism, indigenous ethnic groups, non-indigenous ethnic groups.