Pathways to the power elite: The organizational landscape of elite careers

Abstract

To capture elites, we must map out the organizational landscape through which they pass during their careers. This organizational landscape moulds the character of elites, tells us about the prestige of organizations that are elite incubators and provides valuable indicators about how different sectoral experiences serve to accumulate capital for the elite. Unpacking the organizational experience challenges theoretical and methodological understandings of the elite character, calling for a renewed focus on the organizational embedding of elites after school. By analysing the occupational history of 416 highly central individuals in a Danish elite network, what we term ‘the power elite’, a very distinct set of career trajectories, running through a subset of large, well-established, interconnected organizations, is mapped and analysed. To understand the different ways in which the members of this power elite accumulate ‘organizational capital’ in different fields, sequence analysis on six distinct channels, sector, subsector, size, level, rhythm and geography, is applied. Through this multi-channel sequence analysis, 10 distinct clusters of career trajectories are identified, distinguishing primarily between four private sector clusters: corporate ambassadors, industrial inner circle, bankers and landed gentry; and six public sector clusters: state nobility, professional politicians, lobbyists, scientists, unionists, and education and local politics. Analysing the careers, private sector careers are shown to be more homogeneous than public sector careers, while careers based on positions with a democratic mandate, mainly politicians and union leaders, are more turbulent and unpredictable. We link pathways to social backgrounds, showing preference for pathways for the natives in the upper class.

The interaction of elite networks in the Pinochet regime's macroeconomic policies

“…This life-course institutional approach leads us to engage with contributions on transnational elite careers (Henriksen and Seabrooke 2017;Seabrooke and Nilsson 2015). In summary, we were able to provide a new analytical and conceptual step that allowed us to attach the conceptual premises of field theory to the study of organizational networks (Serino et al 2017) and, to some extent, to the study of institutional careers (Ellersgaard et al 2019), to describe and understand elite power relations, coordination and circulation.…”

Revolving doors in international financial governance

“…In the context of movement between professional ecologies this cost is a measure of risk and effort, with higher costs assigned for riskier, more effort-intensive transitions. Sequence analysis has been applied to a range of cases, including, among others, musicians' careers (Abbott and Hrycak 1990), the rise of female executives in finance (Blair-Loy 1999; Nygaard 2017), careers in economics and engineering (Bühlmann 2008), business school deans (Biemann and Datta 2014), social movement activists (Fillieule and Blanchard 2013), experts in sustainability networks (Henriksen and Seabrooke 2016), national power elites (Ellersgaard et al 2019), consultants for intergovernmental organizations (Seabrooke and Nilsson 2015), and international medical professionals (Nilsson 2017).…”

“…Once they can be differentiated, the sequences then undergo a cluster analysis to locate different types, and can then be visualized in R with TraMineR (Gabadinho et al 2011). For this study, we use a very simple form of matching sequences to identify patterns, while other studies have provided multi-channel sequences to dig into individual life courses and careers (Blanchard et al 2014;Ellersgaard et al 2019).…”

Prosopography, Networks, Life Course Sequences, and so on. Quantifying with or beyond Bourdieu?

“…Bourdieu, 1988), it is not always clear if he and his team had made their data collection in an equally rigorous manner as historians usually do. Nonetheless, a large group of Bourdieusian scholars have since then used prosopography in a thoroughly rigorous way and it has become one of the "classical" collection strategies to study fields (see for example: Denord et al, 2018;Ellersgaard et al, 2012Ellersgaard et al, , 2019Timans and Heilbron, 2018;Karády and Nagy, 2019;Hjellbrekke and Korsnes, 2018;Dalberg, 2019;Lunding, 2017; as well as all the works using the Swiss elite data cited earlier). However, proposography in itself only allows basic statistical features, such as counting the absolute or relative shares of certain properties.…”

“… 20. Occurrences of use of SA within Bourdieu’s framework are, amongst others (Bühlmann, 2008, 2010; Toft, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; Araujo, 2018; Ellersgaard et al, 2019). …”