Elite Institutions Research Articles

The Quest to Increase Diversity at the University of Oxford

In this paper, an understanding of how an elite institution pursues diversity initiatives is explored. Research afforded a better understanding of strategies adopted for recruitment and retention whereby positive results were reported after implementation. Removing barriers that may prevent marginalized populations from enrolling were critical towards these efforts. Oxford has taken steps to increase diversity, and it appears they are having modest success. One method that has been an asset is to invite students to spend time on campus through residential programs. Additional efforts underway to increase diversity include an intensive urban recruitment initiative and securing school/parent/community buy-in. Venturing into private partnerships with non-profits and fostering better community relationships with inner-city London neighborhoods are a few of the steps being taken to increase representation from first-generation, minority, and socio-economically disadvantaged students. This new approach to diversity will hopefully lead to more students applying and ultimately enrolling into the prestigious institution.

Moving ‘out’ to be ‘in’: the suburbanization of London Jewry, 1900–1939

AbstractBetween 1900 and 1939, Jewish Londoners departed the East End for the suburbs. Relocation, however, was not always the result of individual agency. Many Jews became the object of institutional strategies to coerce and persuade them to disperse away from inner-city areas. Simultaneous to this was the emergence of a dominant pro-suburban rhetoric within and beyond Jewish cultural circles, which aimed to raise aspirations towards middle-class lifestyles. This striking suburban ‘urge’ amongst London Jewry, managed by the community's elite institutions and leaders, was far more than a phenomenon running parallel to wider British society. As this article argues, it was a decisive response to an insidious culture of intolerance and antisemitism.

The ambivalent role of Urdu and English in multilingual Pakistan: a Bourdieusian study.

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world’s fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world’s second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by people in Pakistan, although the only two official languages are Urdu and English. After its Independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, it took much deliberation for the country to make a shift from its monolingual Urdu orientation to a multilingual language policy in education in 2009. This entailed a shift from the dominant Urdu language policy for the masses (and English exclusively reserved for elite institutions), to a gradual and promising change that responded to the increasing social demand for English and for including regional languages in the curriculum. Yet English and Urdu dominate the present policy and exclude regional non-dominant languages in education that themselves are dynamic and unstable, and restructured continually due to the de facto multilingual and plurilingual repertoire of the country. Using Bourdieu’s (Outline of a theory of practice Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977a, The economics of linguistic exchanges. Soc Sci Inform 16:645–668, 1977b, The genesis of the concepts of habitus and field. Sociocriticism 2:11–24 1985, Language and symbolic power Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991) conceptualization of habitus, this study analyzes letters to the editor published between 2002–2009 and 2018–2020 in a leading English daily of Pakistan. The analysis unveils the linguistic dispositions that are discussed in the letters and their restructuring through market forces, demonstrating a continuity between the language policy discourse and public aspirations. The findings also indicate the ambivalences towards Urdu and English in relation to nationalistic ideologies, modernity and identity.

Why is party-based autocracy more durable? Examining the role of elite institutions and mass organization

ABSTRACT A number of studies show that autocracies with ruling parties are more long-lived than those without. Much of the literature attributes this to party institutionalization at the elite- level, which is said to reduce elite schisms. Others point to the ability of grassroots party organizations to mobilize mass support. There is very little empirical research that examines these different mechanisms. This paper fills that gap using new data from the V-Party database, which provides detailed expert-coded information on the attributes of all autocratic ruling par- ties between 1970 and 2019. I find that both mass-based organization (e.g. well-developed networks of local branches and strong ties to social organizations) and elite-level institutionalization (e.g. depersonalized, collective control over candidate nominations) are associated with regime longevity, but the findings for mass organization are stronger and more robust. The findings suggest that mass organization is one of the main factors that makes party-based autocracy so durable.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism Han Zhang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Eric Li gives a TED Talk in 2013. (TED/YouTube) [End Page 48] In late 2019, as the first COVID-19 cases were emerging in Wuhan, the Chinese venture capitalist and media figure Eric Li went for lunch with a Financial Times correspondent in Shanghai. Over a $640, eleven-course meal, Li, who is a founder of Guancha, a leading nationalist online media outlet, took the opportunity to proclaim the end of liberalism in China. For decades, people had been “debating what kind of government and society they want,” Li said. “That debate is over.” There were “leftover liberal phrases” and “liberal thoughts” held by academics and other holdouts, but he predicted they would soon change their minds. These kinds of statements are common today in China, where anti-liberal nationalism has become increasingly mainstream. Li is a notable figure in this sphere, in part because of his deep ties to the West. A graduate of Berkeley and Stanford, he is affiliated with the Aspen Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Li’s Western education and experience with elite institutions gives him a unique platform for espousing nationalist opinions outside China; he has contributed to various English-language publications, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and the Economist. In a 2013 TED Talk, he delivered a full-throated defense of China’s one-party system and argued that electoral democracy doesn’t work (a point he punctuated with a photo of former President George W. Bush in front of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner). The talk has attracted over 3 million views. Born in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Li was raised by his grandmother in Shanghai while his academic parents weathered the storm in the capital. He is proud of his roots in the city, which emerged as a center of modern glamor and Western sophistication in the first decades of the twentieth century. When Li moved to the United States for college in the 1980s, he became, according to his TED Talk, a “Berkeley hippie.” (If that was the case, his counterculture days were short-lived; he worked on Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign.) After almost a decade in the United States, he moved back to China. In 1999, Li helped launch Chengwei [End Page 49] Capital, a venture fund that manages about $2 billion and has invested in many companies that are household names in China. The Financial Times compared Li to Steve Bannon, and over the expensive lunch Li himself expressed admiration for Trump’s crusade against “global elites.” Like Bannon, Li wears a flashy erudition on his sleeve. He likes to sprinkle quotes by John Locke, Abraham Lincoln, and Bhikhu Parekh into arguments, to contrarian effect. He has also mastered the vernacular of American liberalism, using terms like “broadening,” “pluralizing,” and “diversity” to promote authoritarianism. From Li’s perspective, if you take a big step back and squint your eyes, “autocracy” can be seen as a form of “democracy.” As he put it in the Economist, he thinks democracy should be measured “not by procedures but by outcomes.” In a conversation in Guancha, Li tried to get Francis Fukuyama to sign on to his idea that informal information collection conducted by the party as an alternative to elections “have been effective.” Fukuyama was unmoved: “It depends on your measure of effectiveness.” Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, nationalist ideas have thrived in China. The government has encouraged a sense of national pride and tightened censorship and regulations over domestic media and the internet, suppressing any news that may reflect badly on the party-state. Xi has also pushed propagandists to publish and broadcast overseas in order to influence arguments outside the country. Li is no doubt seen as an asset in this strategy—a sleek, Western-educated capitalist as a face of the new Chinese nationalism. His success should be seen in the context of a broader effort to cement the transformation of nationalist politics from a grassroots insurgency into a state-supported ideology. From the Angry Youth to the Little Pinks...

To endow or not to endow? A question of Shakespearean proportions facing higher education today

Just as Hamlet asked the existential question: ‘To be or not to be?’ community colleges are asking a similarly challenging question when it comes to securing long-term financial stability: To create significant endowments or not? Increasingly, this is the interrogative that colleges are engaging with donors as they strive to make their institutions financially sustainable. Because of the transformational roles that endowments can and do play in the complicated puzzles that are higher education budgets, these funding mechanisms have taken on nearly Shakespearean proportions — while at the same time generating Shakespearean-like drama — for a number of institutions trying to defend their endowments or hoping to acquire them in significant amounts. This paper focuses on the role of endowments in higher education institutions, with a particular emphasis on community colleges, which according to the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), currently educate 41 per cent of all undergraduates in the USA. Undoubtedly, endowments have generated advantages for institutions fortunate enough to have secured them in significant amounts. For the relatively small number of institutions with significant endowed assets, the advantages have been staggeringly disproportional. According to the National Association of College and University Budget Officers (NACUBO), approximately 750 of the nation’s 4,000 degree-granting higher education institutions hold endowed assets totaling more than US$635bn. While these funds are generally viewed favorably because of the critical role they play in keeping universities and colleges operational, there is a growing chorus of criticism aimed at endowments. This is especially true for those so-called elite institutions that hold immense endowed wealth and structural power. As these questioning voices have broken through the din of higher education critique, many institutions hoping to generate significant endowments of their own believe it is becoming very difficult to fundraise for endowed support. They say the elite schools and colleges have essentially sucked the oxygen out of the room, and that has had a dramatic impact on institutions trying to fulfill their missions, especially serving marginalised, non-dominant communities. The criticisms over endowments, coupled with changing views about how endowments should be established and their income distributed, are requiring institutions to look at these long-established funding tools very differently. This paper will explore endowments and how institutions are wrestling with the best ways to create financial stability — especially for community colleges that are taking on more of a responsibility educating and training individuals who have traditionally been left behind.

Political Settlements and the Management of Cocoa Value Chain in Ghana

This paper relies on literature review and primary data collected through in-depth interviews with 21 respondents to examine the political economy dynamics of the cocoa value chain in Ghana. The historical analysis, which was based on the political settlements framework, has shown that the policies implemented in the cocoa sector went through four periods. The colonial era was characterised by a fairly corporate governance system and struggle between European traders and farmer cooperatives for monopoly over internal marketing of cocoa. This was followed by the early post-independence era (1957–1980), which was characterised by neopatrimonialism and over-taxation of cocoa farmers. The third phase (1980–2000) witnessed economic reforms and liberalisation. The fourth phase (2000 to present) saw increased public–private partnerships aimed at empowering women and promoting environmentally friendly farming activities. The paper concludes that the policies in the cocoa sector have, historically, created more benefits (rents) to political elite and their crony capitalists. Given that rent-seeking behaviour is a threat to the sustainability of the cocoa sector, the paper urges international development partners and civil society groups to demand greater accountability and transparency from the political elite and state institutions in the cocoa sector.

The Myth of Oxford and Black Counter-Narratives

AbstractThe myth of Oxford, which echoes and replicates the ideology of an unchanging world of privileged white youth, is a common trope in many films and literary works. This vision is, however, overlaid and underlaid with counter-traditions that decenter Oxford and instead insert Oxford upside down into other epistemologies, geographies, and networks. Some attempts at the transformation of elite institutions such as Oxford inadvertently serve to continue the centering of these same institutions. Coetzee argues that, instead of focusing on the histories of ascendant Black/black excellence and achievement at Oxford University, a more powerful way to relativize and decenter the institution is to document and emphasize histories and accounts of Black marginalization, failure, and disconnection.

Freedom, Rights, and Vaccine Refusal: The History of an Idea.

We analyzed how activists opposed to vaccination have used arguments related to freedom, liberty, and individual rights in US history. We focused on the period from the 1880s through the 1920s, when the first wave of widespread and sustained antivaccination activism in this country occurred. During this era, activists used the language of liberty and freedom most prominently in opposition to compulsory vaccination laws, which the activists alleged violated their constitutionally protected rights. Critics attacked vaccination with liberty-based arguments even when it was not mandatory, and they used the language of freedom expansively to encompass individuals' freedom to choose their health and medical practices, freedom to raise their children as they saw fit, and freedom from the quasicoercive influence of scientific and medical experts and elite institutions. Evidence suggests that in recent years, vaccine refusal has increasingly been framed as a civil right. We argue that this framing has always lain at the heart of resistance to vaccination and that it may prove consequential for the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):234-241. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306504).

Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Educational credentials and career success of CEOs of Latin American firms

This study investigates the influence of education (highest degree acquired, major field of study and awarding institutions) on the time taken by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) to reach that position. For this purpose, we considered 169 CEOs of Latin American firms and employed multiple hierarchical regressions. The results do not support the influence of a high educational level on the time that took CEOs to be appointed to the position (time to the top). Furthermore, in family firms, it delays the appointment to the CEO role. Elite institutions do not exert an influence on 'time to the top'. Our findings offer partial support to the human capital theory - education variable - in Latin America, highlighting the importance of cultural, socio-economic and institutional factors.

Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology by Annika A. Culver

Reviewed by: Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology by Annika A. Culver Miriam Kingsberg Kadia Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology. By Annika A. Culver. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 328 pages. ISBN: 9781350184930 (hardcover; also available as e-book). On the surface, few activities seem as apolitical as birdwatching. In 2020, however, the pastime became a national flashpoint when a white woman, Amy Cooper, spuriously accused Christian Cooper (no relation), an African American birdwatcher in New York City's Central Park, of harassment. As feathers flew in the wake of the incident, journalists did not fail to remark upon the long-standing absence (some argued, exclusion) of people of color from the hobby. Did Christian Cooper's participation reflect changes in the traditionally white-dominated, elite ranks of avian enthusiasts? In her latest monograph, historian of East Asia Annika A. Culver unveils the complicated racial and class politics behind the human study of birds through the case of Japan. Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology joins a burgeoning body of literature tracing, as its title suggests, both continuity and change across the chronological watershed of Japan's defeat in World War II. The book proceeds forward in time, beginning with the origins of Japanese ornithology (the scientific study of avian species) following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Early investigations of birds melded enduring Japanese enjoyment and interrogation of avian life with the importation of zoological knowledge and research methods from the West, particularly Great Britain and the United States. Japanese [End Page 352] ornithology initially developed primarily in the hands of "gentleman-scientists," typically men of great wealth with ties to the imperial house and former shogunate. At home, these scholars hunted and collected specimens on their vast estates; abroad, they rubbed shoulders with members of their class at elite institutions such as Harvard and Cambridge, raising Japan's international profile and transforming Euro-American scientific networks into truly transnational circuits. Museums emerged to display not only bird skins and taxidermies, but also the symbolic power of their collectors over the human and natural worlds. Culver draws a provocative comparison between early Japanese ornithologists and "otaku"—predominantly male, contemporary Japanese youths who exhibit a single-minded commitment to their subject of choice: video games, Pokémon, media, trains, and so on. Then (as now), men drew together in homosocial enjoyment of "masculine" pastimes that largely excluded women or relegated them to supporting roles such as typists, research assistants, and caretakers. While Nakanishi Gotō (1895–1984) supervised meetings of the Yachō no Kai (Wild Bird Society), his wife cleaned up after his pet owls. Within the miniscule world of prewar ornithology, Marquess Hachisuka Masauji (1903–1953) loomed large. A "main character" of sorts for the book, he exemplifies the imbrication of avian science, masculinity, and political and social transformation. After fatefully disappointing his illustrious father by breaking his engagement to a Japanese princess for reasons that remain intriguingly vague, Hachisuka departed for a period of study at Cambridge. His experiences at the university, Culver argues, reveal the limits of prewar racial tolerance and the predicament of "honorary whiteness" within the Anglo-American scientific world. During his time in Europe, Hachisuka came to know French aristocrat Jean Théodore Delacour (1890–1985), a noted ornithologist and president of the Ligue pour la protection des oiseaux (League for the Protection of Birds). Some evidence suggests that the pair's shared passion for avian species may have awakened amours of another kind: throughout his life, Hachisuka's most emotionally satisfying relationships appear to have been with men. In any case, Culver concludes, "in terms of contemporary Japanese society's expectations for men [Hachisuka and his peers] could be considered 'queer' to the degree by which birds defined their lives" (p. 63). In the 1930s, Hachisuka built his scholarly reputation on the strength of a five-volume study, published under the title Contributions to Birds of the Philippines, that was based on research conducted during a 1929 expedition to the American colony. While in the field, he formed connections with US ornithologists that were to prove useful during the postwar...

Computing Education Research Compiled: Keyword Trends, Building Blocks, Creators, and Dissemination

The need for organized computing education efforts dates back to the 1950s. Since then, computing education research (CER) has evolved and matured from its early initiatives and separation from mathematics education into a respectable research specialization of its own. In recent years, a number of meta-research papers, reviews, and scientometric studies have built overviews of CER from various perspectives. This paper continues that approach by offering new perspectives on the past and present state of CER: analyses of influential papers throughout the years, of the theoretical backgrounds of CER, of the institutions and authors who create CER, and finally of the top publication venues and their citation practices. The results reveal influential contributions from early curriculum guidelines to rigorous empirical research of today, the prominence of computer programming as a topic of research, evolving patterns of learning-theory usage, the dominance of high-income countries and a cluster of 52 elite institutions, and issues regarding citation practices within the central venues of dissemination.

Opening the Black Box: The Turkish Military Before and After 15 July 2016

Opening the Black Box: The Turkish Military Before and After 15 July 2016

Globalization, Greed and Glocal Ecology: A Psychological Perspective

Evidently, a globalized society causes global environmental crises. Undoubtedly, survival of human life on the planet Earth is threatened. Is there any connection between globalization, environmental crises and psychological manifestations? What are the psychological perspectives linking the ecological damages from local to the global scale? This article explores such intricate relationships and discusses the implications. The underlying principal cause is human’s unending greed to acquire maximum materials and power to control the planet and entire humanity. The greed is believed to be a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. The greedy people are supposed to have biological, psychological and sociological drives. Evidently, global destruction of the ecosystems and natural environment are directly or indirectly linked to unprecedented chronic human greed and self-indulgence. Undoubtedly, unencumbered chronic greed of a few elite institutions led by top capitalists has put the entire planet in havoc and infiltrated widespread sufferings at the global scale. Conclusively, psychological basis of environmental problems has a sociological and socio-historical scope within the frame of globalization. Psychological account of the environmental crisis is explained subsequently in this article followed by a case study of deforestation of Carpathian Mountains staged by a greedy Austrian man.

“Dream like the Whites”: Disjunctures in Racial Experiences and Interpretations of Low-Income First-Generation Students of Color and Their Parents

Abstract A burgeoning body of scholarship addresses how low-income first generation (LIFG) college students, across racial groups, navigate communication with their families about their experiences of class-based dissonance at socioeconomically elite institutions. Yet, there is scant corollary research addressing how LIFG students of color navigate communication with their families regarding experiences of racial dissonance and racism on campuses that are both socioeconomically elite and predominantly white. This study examines disjunctures in familial perceptions and interpretations regarding race and racism consequent to intergenerational educational mobility for LIFG students of color, whose parents are unlikely to have had analogous experiences of complete occupational and residential immersion in socioeconomically elite and predominantly white institutional environments. This work highlights an important gap in the academic literature on first-generation students at the intersections of race, class, parental educational attainment level, and immigration dynamics. Without a race-conscious analytic lens, class-based understandings of LIFG college students and their families remain incomplete.

Stories to Tell: Family and Reality in Hip-Hop Autobiographies

Stories to Tell:Family and Reality in Hip-Hop Autobiographies John Paul Meyers (bio) "Hip hop remains a genre largely valued for its seemingly autobiographical nature." –Tricia Rose (136) Autobiography has been a crucial genre of writing for African American culture at least since the publication of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in 1789: one of the first books chronicling North American slavery from the point of view of a former slave and a book whose publication date is heavy with symbolism. Equiano's autobiography was published the same year that George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States under the newly-ratified Constitution, a document which notoriously counted Black people as only three-fifths of a person for the sake of allotting representatives in Congress. One of the Black American autobiographical tradition's earliest defining moments, therefore, coincides with the beginning of the modern United States itself, at a time when the government officially recognizes Black people as something less than fully human. Over the centuries since the publication of Equiano's text, arguably the best-selling and most influential works by Black American writers have been autobiographies, as V.P. Franklin affirmed when he claimed autobiography as "the most important literary genre in the African-American intellectual tradition" in his 1995 study of these texts (11). In the academy, the study of autobiographies has itself come to prominence over the past few decades, as scholars have been increasingly interested in the construction of self through textual and other signifying practices, a development that is related to the rise of new disciplines since the 1960s, as Ricia Anne Chansky explains: "The field of auto/biography studies developed within the space that women's studies, and then area studies (such as African American studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian studies) carved out in the academy for analyzing identity construction" (xx). Franklin's study of Black autobiographies was published at the tail end of hip-hop's so-called "golden age" usually thought to comprise the years between about 1987 and 1994.1 In part due to the legacy of aesthetic achievements and political [End Page 214] consciousness of that golden age, hip-hop is now viewed increasingly with respect and hip-hop musicians as important public figures and, even, public intellectuals—as evidenced by the creation of archives at elite institutions like Harvard and Cornell for the study of hip-hop, the newly-released 9-CD Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and the Universal Hip-Hop Museum, to be constructed in the genre's mythical birthplace in the Bronx. Yet, at a time when much popular press hip-hop discourse is short, motivated most strongly by the desire to promote recording sales or concert tickets, and more concerned with celebrity gossip than in-depth discussion of musical and social issues, autobiographies by hip-hop musicians present a rare chance for musicians to engage in extended explanations of their upbringings, lives, and careers. In this paper, I first discuss how hip-hop autobiographies fit into the Black autobiographical tradition and hip-hop media landscape. I then provide an analysis of two important themes in these texts: the influence of family on musical development and the relationship of hip-hop to lived reality. These themes are analyzed in three contrasting autobiographies by hip-hop musicians: Ice by Ice-T and Douglas Century, Decoded by Jay-Z, and Mo' Meta Blues by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson and Ben Greenman.2 Contrary to some other celebrity autobiographies, all three of these texts move far beyond mere chronology or hagiography in the discussion of their subjects' lives. Lyrical reality has been a frequently debated source of controversy within and outside hip-hop, and Ice and Decoded give a chance for two of hip-hop's most celebrated and controversial rappers to offer their own extended, and conflicted, takes on this issue. Family, on the other hand, is an issue that has received significantly less attention in hip-hop discourse, and my analysis of all three of these autobiographies shows that family is a crucial influence in the development of hip-hop musicians.3 These two themes...

Testing elite transnational education and contesting orders of worth in the face of a pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a test that has disrupted the flow of a particular type of social and physical mobility. It takes pathways embarked upon by students from Asian countries to “prestigious” anglophone universities as its focal point of analysis, considering how the residential, consecratory experience of attending elite institutions has been disrupted when universities go virtual or as students are prevented from travelling to their university’s country destination. Building theoretically on the sociology of conventions and testing, I analyse public institutional responses at the commencement of the outbreak from elite universities in the US and the UK, which have hosted large numbers of students from Asian countries in past decades. This paper focuses on how these universities responded to international students under conditions of uncertainty, examining how they justify their role, purpose and operations, while canvassing for continued support from this student segment. The findings highlight contesting orders of worth between states and institutions, as clashes between market, civic and domestic regimes exert significant pressures on organisational efforts to coordinate and cope during this critical moment, thereby raising questions about how prevailing logics of elite transnational education have been altered in the face of a pandemic.

Economics as symbolic capital: The consecration of elite business schools

AbstractEver since the first elite business schools were founded in Europe and the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they have enjoyed an intimate relationship with economics. Despite some notable analyses of economics’ importance for the successful institutionalization of business schools, an understanding of the relation between economics and elite business schools requires further development. As such, this paper focuses on ‘economics as symbolic capital’ for the consecration of business schools as elite settings, with particular emphasis on the symbolic aspects of economics’ cultural and social capital. Consecration can be seen as critical to the institutionalization of elite business schools; in contrast to the primary focus of previous studies on the material significance of economics in business schools, my chief concern is the discipline’s symbolic power and importance for business schools’ status as elite institutions in many countries today. Data from a study on Sweden’s elite business school, The Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), were based on both historical and contemporary sources, including archival material, biographies, statistics, participant observations, and interviews with faculty and students. The SSE is one of the world’s oldest elite business schools where economics has played a critical role ever since its establishment; the SSE’s economics faculty has a unique relation to the ultimate source of capital for contemporary global economics, namely, The Nobel Prize in Economics, which exerts a significant influence on the discipline’s general standing and status today.