Humanitarian health care practitioners working outside familiar settings, and without familiar supports, encounter ethical challenges both familiar and distinct. The ethical guidance they rely upon ought to reflect this. Using data from empirical studies, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of two ethical models that could serve as resources for understanding ethical challenges in humanitarian health care: clinical ethics and public health ethics. The qualitative interviews demonstrate the degree to which traditional teaching and values of clinical health ethics seem insufficient (...) for addressing all the realities of health care practice during humanitarian missions. They equally suggest that greater good orientations of public health ethics can thwart the best intentions of health care professionals wanting to attend to the interests of individual patients. Even though neither is complete on its own for helping guide health professionals on field missions, taken together these models have much to offer. At the same time, the narratives of the humanitarian health care workers illustrate how some of the crucial differences between public health ethics and clinical ethics generate tensions in humanitarian health practice. We offer an analysis of some of the complexities this creates for humanitarian health care ethics, and consider ways of adjudicating between the two models. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of Canadian-trained health professionals working in humanitarian and development organizations who considered not treating a patient or group of patients because of resource limitations. In the narratives, not treating the patient(s) was sometimes understood as the right thing to do, and sometimes as wrong. In analyzing participants’ narratives we draw attention to how medications and equipment are represented. In one type of narrative, medications and equipment are represented primarily as scarce resources; in another, they are (...) represented as patient care. In the contexts respondents were working, medications and equipment were often both patient care interventions and scarce resources. The analytic point is that health professionals tend to emphasize one conceptualization over the other in coming to assert that not treating is right, or wrong. Rendering tacit ethical frameworks more explicit makes them available for reflection and debate. (shrink)

In this article, we present an ethics framework for health practice in humanitarian and development work: the ethics of engaged presence. The ethics of engaged presence framework aims to articulate in a systematic fashion approaches and orientations that support the engagement of expatriate health care professionals in ways that align with diverse obligations and responsibilities, and promote respectful and effective action and relationships. Drawn from a range of sources, the framework provides a vocabulary and narrative structure for examining the moral (...) dimensions of providing development or humanitarian health assistance to individuals and communities, and working with and alongside local and international actors. The elements also help minimize or avoid certain miscalculations and harms. Emphasis is placed on the shared humanity of those who provide and those who receive assistance, acknowledgement of limits and risks related to the contributions of expatriate health care professionals, and the importance of providing skillful and relevant assistance. These elements articulate a moral posture for expatriate health care professionals that contributes to orienting the practice of clinicians in ways that reflect respect, humility, and solidarity. Health care professionals whose understanding and actions are consistent with the ethics of engaged presence will be oriented toward introspection and reflective practice and toward developing, sustaining and promoting collaborative partnerships. (shrink)

Health care professionals who travel from their home countries to participate in humanitarian assistance or development work experience distinctive ethical challenges in providing care and services to populations affected by war, disaster or deprivation. Limited information is available about organizational practices related to preparation and support for health professionals working with non-governmental organizations. In this article, we present one component of the results of a qualitative study conducted with 20 Canadian health care professionals who participated in international aid work. The (...) findings reported here relate to expatriate clinicians’ experiences and perceptions of ethics preparation, training and support. The strategies examined include pre-departure training and preparation, in-field supports and retrospective debriefing of ethical issues. Participants experienced a range of training and supports as beneficial for addressing ethical challenges in humanitarian assistance and development work. Participants also expressed ambivalence or scepticism about the benefits offered by specific modalities. This analysis can contribute to informing discussions of how organizations and individual practitioners can best develop, implement and utilize ethics training and support for international aid work. (shrink)

It is clear that in the eyes of a growing number of humanitarian fieldworkers and decision-makers, palliative care is something humanitarian organizations should strive to provide as they address the needs of populations affected by crises. What remains less clear are the moral justifications underlying the push to do so. This chapter dives beneath surface prescriptions of what “ought to be” the place of palliative care within humanitarian response. It presents and analyses a series of evocative statements made by 24 (...) humanitarian healthcare actors about why, on what bases, and with what caveats, care for the dying deserves more attention within humanitarian healthcare response. Embedded in these statements are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit ideas about what it means be a human and a humanitarian, and what humans need and deserve. Clarifying the experiences, practical considerations, understandings of care and responsibility, and norms and values underlying these feelings renders these available for more thorough reflection, discussion, and debate. (shrink)

In this article, we present an ethics framework for health practice in humanitarian and development work: the ethics of engaged presence. The ethics of engaged presence framework aims to articulate in a systematic fashion approaches and orientations that support the engagement of expatriate health care professionals in ways that align with diverse obligations and responsibilities, and promote respectful and effective action and relationships. Drawn from a range of sources, the framework provides a vocabulary and narrative structure for examining the moral (...) dimensions of providing development or humanitarian health assistance to individuals and communities, and working with and alongside local and international actors. The elements also help minimize or avoid certain miscalculations and harms. Emphasis is placed on the shared humanity of those who provide and those who receive assistance, acknowledgement of limits and risks related to the contributions of expatriate health care professionals, and the importance of providing skillful and relevant assistance. These elements articulate a moral posture for expatriate health care professionals that contributes to orienting the practice of clinicians in ways that reflect respect, humility, and solidarity. Health care professionals whose understanding and actions are consistent with the ethics of engaged presence will be oriented toward introspection and reflective practice and toward developing, sustaining and promoting collaborative partnerships. (shrink)

The financial crisis, and associated scandals, created a sense of a juridical deficit with regard to the financial sector. Forms of independent judgement within the sector appeared compromised, while judgement over the sector seemed unattainable. Elites, in the classical Millsian sense of those taking tacitly coordinated ‘big decisions’ over the rest of the public, seemed absent. This article argues that the eradication of jurisdictional elites is an effect of neoliberalism, as articulated most coherently by Hayek. It characterizes the neoliberal project (...) as an effort to elevate ‘unconscious’ processes over ‘conscious’ ones, which in practice means elevating cybernetic, non-human systems and processes over discursive spheres of politics and judgement. Yet such a system still produces its own types of elite power, which come to consist in acts of translation, rather than judgement. Firstly, there are ‘cyborg intermediaries’: elites which operate largely within the system of codes, data, screens and prices. Secondly, there are ‘diplomatic intermediaries’: elites who come to narrate and justify what markets are ‘saying’. The paper draws on Lazzarato’s work on signifying vs asignifying semiotics in order to articulate this, and concludes by considering the types of elite crisis which these forms of power tend to produce. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Elites and Power after Financialization’. It is presented in three parts. The first sets out the original Weberian problematic that directed the work of Michels and Mills, in the 1910s and 1950s respectively. It then discusses how this framework was appropriated and then cast aside as our understanding of capitalism changed. The second section makes the case for a reset of elite studies around the current capitalist conjuncture of financialization. It is explained (...) how this unifying theme allows for a diverse set of approaches for answering old and new questions about elites and power. The third part identifies four key themes or sites of investigation that emerge within the nine papers offered here. These are: new state-capital relations, innovative forms of value extraction, new elite insecurities and resources in liquid times and the role of elite intermediaries and experts. (shrink)

The number of International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) schools has increased rapidly in China in recent years. However, access to schools offering the IBDP remains restricted to a relatively elite minority of China’s population due to enrolment barriers for Chinese nationals and relatively high school fees. An implication is that students potentially remain in physical, cultural and socio-economic isolation from host communities. Within this context, this study explored how, and the extent to which, two core components of the IBDP (...) – namely, the Learner Profile and Creativity, Action, Service – help foster inter-cultural understanding between students and other communities within Chinese society. To this end, in mid 2013 interview data were gathered from IBDP teachers, IBDP administrators, and IBDP students from five elite IBDP schools in Beijing and Shanghai. Findings revealed a perception that the Learner Profile could provide a strong theoretical appreciation of the norms and values of other cultures, while Creativity, Action, Service could break down physical divides by offering students an opportunity to interact with people of different cultures and socio-economic groups. Nevertheless, interviewees also noted tensions with the implementation of these components in the context of results-oriented elite IBDP schools in China. (shrink)

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations (...) of normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

This essay demonstrates that the management and contestability of power is central to Dewey's understanding of democracy and provides a middle ground between two opposite poles within democratic theory: Either the masses become the genuine danger to democratic governance (à la Lippmann) or elites are described as bent on controlling the masses (à la Wolin). Yet, the answer to managing the relationship between them and the demos is never forthcoming. I argue that Dewey's response to Lippmann for how we ought (...) to conceive of the relationship between citizens and elites if power is not to become arbitrary is located within a larger framework that avoids the problematic distinction Wolin draws between the demos and representative government. For Dewey, the legitimacy of decision-making, and, indeed, the security of freedom, is determined not merely by our actual involvement, but the extent to which non-participation does not preclude the future contestability of power. (shrink)

The paper aims to explore the relationships that exist between party structure, party system, patronage, and the appointments of the political elites. It is focused on the extent to which political parties can control the allocation of jobs as well as find out which are the institutions over whom the political parties can exercise power; the extent to which historical legacies influence patronage patterns; the extent to which party patronage is exercised in a ‘majoritarian’ as opposed to a more ‘consensual’ (...) manner across the spectrum of political parties; and the relationship that exist between the structure of the party, the appointment of political elites and patronage. The conclusion is that the party in public office and its allies in the coalition cabinet control the post of ministers and vice-ministers. While these last ones control the posts of their subordinates, it is hard to understand whether they select the employees from the party pool or from their personal networks. The other finding is that the structure of the party creates strong links between patronage and appointment, these last ones done with the scope of having control over government resources and distribution of resources. On the other hand, the research didn’t prove any link between historical legacies and patronage and party system and patronage. (shrink)

1. This paper contributes to the broader debate about how elite school institutions manage to remain alert and responsive to changing education market conditions, locally and globally, by explicitl...

Issues concerning technological risk have increasingly become the subject of deliberative exercises involving participation of ordinary citizens. The most popular topic for deliberation has been genetically modified foods. Despite the varied circumstances of their establishment, deliberative “minipublics” almost always produce recommendations that reflect a worldview more “precautionary” than the “Promethean” outlook more common among governing elites. There are good structural reasons for this difference. Its existence raises the question of why elites sponsor mini-publics and if policy is little affected by (...) the results of deliberations, questions the possibility of deliberative legitimation of public policy. We make this argument by looking at mini-publics on GM foods in France, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland. Deliberative legitimation becomes plausible if elites can attenuate their Promethean outlook. This is possible if ecological modernization discourse pervades their politics; Denmark provides an illustration. (shrink)

In this article we examine elite formation in relation to money power within the city of London. Our primary aim is to consider the impact of the massive concentration of such power upon the city’s political life, municipal and shared resources and social equity. We argue that objectives of city success have come to be identified and aligned with the presence of wealth elites while wider goals, of access to essential resources for citizens, have withered. A diverse national and (...) global wealth-elite is drawn to a city with an almost unique cultural infrastructure, fiscal regime and ushering butler class of politicians. We consider how London is being made for money and the monied – in physical, political and cultural terms. We conclude that the conceptualization of elites as wealth and social power formations operating within urban spatial arenas is important for capturing the nature of new social divisions and changes. (shrink)

Examining in detail the work of consecration carried out by elite education systems, Bourdieu analyzes the distinctive forms of power—political, intellectual, bureaucratic, and economic—by means of which contemporary societies are governed.

Urban elites and their relative income levels are windows on the emerging socioeconomic order in China. We add to the research literature a new view that economic sectors are the institutional contexts in which different elites seek their material gains. Conducting a trend analysis with 1988 and 1995 national surveys of urban China, we found that political, administrative, and managerial elites maintained consistently higher levels of income relative to professional elites, but this applied mainly to a monopoly sector of industries (...) that were restricted to state operation. Managers in the open industry sector that allowed for free entry and exile experienced income declines relative to professionals within the sector, even though the former had moderately higher income levels than the latter in 1988 and 1995. All elite groups in the monopoly sector retained higher incomes than their counterparts in the open sector in 1995, but not necessarily in 1988. (shrink)

Western élite groups’ moralities and actions can and should be studied empirically. Contrary to belief held in the 1980s in mainstream social anthropology that fieldwork in the classic anthropological fashion could not be done among the western élite, the findings of long-term research in this field have yielded key ethnographic insights leading to academic and public debate. In this article I draw on ethnographic research on legitimacy, power, and governance among key Neapolitan élite groups to offer reflections on a style (...) of governance that has at once engendered and thrived on the blurring of the dividing line between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate in public life. The discussion focuses on powerful, tightly networked groups that, inspired by an elitist philosophy of power, have been hard at work to gain and maintain power, while losing trust and authority. The analysis builds towards an understanding of their implosion and of the corresponding erosion of the relationship between citizenship and governance. (shrink)

In this book, author David N. Levy uses Machiavelli’s conflict between the elite and the people as the lens through which to understand the other major features of his republicanism. Through analyzing his Discourses on Livy, Levy shows that Machiavelli’s principles can provide support for, and constructive criticism of, modern liberal democracy.

In this book, author David N. Levy uses Machiavelli’s conflict between the elite and the people as the lens through which to understand the other major features of his republicanism. Through analyzing his Discourses on Livy, Levy shows that Machiavelli’s principles can provide support for, and constructive criticism of, modern liberal democracy.

Se parte de la hipótesis que el Estado nacional cubano es el resultado de la acción de una serie de elites que siempre se han considerado revolucionarias. La construcción del Estado cubano abarca tres experiencias que explican el ejercicio del poder político por elites específicas en el siglo XX. Es la capacidad de agencia de estas elites la que explica la historia política del Estado, independientemente de las intervenciones externas de las que puede ser objeto. Lo que definimos como Revolución (...) cubana, es un proceso que puede distinguirse en dos fases, la insurreccional entendida como la toma del poder político, y la construcción de los mecanismos que permiten la reproducción de la nueva elite como elite de poder, es decir, a través del aparato del Estado. En este proceso particular se observa la importancia de un líder carismático como Fidel Castro, quien logra aglutinar a un conjunto de personas en torno de su liderazgo. (shrink)

Diogenes, Ahead of Print. Western élite groups’ moralities and actions can and should be studied empirically. Contrary to belief held in the 1980s in mainstream social anthropology that fieldwork in the classic anthropological fashion could not be done among the western élite, the findings of long-term research in this field have yielded key ethnographic insights leading to academic and public debate. In this article I draw on ethnographic research on legitimacy, power, and governance among key Neapolitan élite groups to offer (...) reflections on a style of governance that has at once engendered and thrived on the blurring of the dividing line between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate in public life. The discussion focuses on powerful, tightly networked groups that, inspired by an elitist philosophy of power, have been hard at work to gain and maintain power, while losing trust and authority. The analysis builds towards an understanding of their implosion and of the corresponding erosion of the relationship between citizenship and governance. (shrink)

Elite sport is both worshipped disparaged. It is adored because athletes embody an ethical act of courage, self-sacrifice and fair play; it is criticized for too many scandals that plague and discredit it. Too often, athletes seem trapped in and crushed by a system much bigger than they are, a system that also compels them to do wrong, in a way that seems to instrumentalize them. But what is the real status of elite athletes? Does the system treat (...) them with dignity in a manner that allows them to accept freely and voluntarily the end purpose of the record to be beaten that demands enormous sacrifices? This article considers how an analysis of the concept of human dignity can help us better understand the place of the athlete in this complex reality of elite sport. (shrink)

This essay demonstrates that the management and contestability of power is central to Dewey's understanding of democracy and provides a middle ground between two opposite poles within democratic theory: Either the masses become the genuine danger to democratic governance (à la Lippmann) or elites are described as bent on controlling the masses (à la Wolin). Yet, the answer to managing the relationship between them and the demos is never forthcoming. I argue that Dewey's response to Lippmann for how we ought (...) to conceive of the relationship between citizens and elites if power is not to become arbitrary is located within a larger framework that avoids the problematic distinction Wolin draws between the demos and representative government. For Dewey, the legitimacy of decision-making, and, indeed, the security of freedom, is determined not merely by our actual involvement, but the extent to which non-participation does not preclude the future contestability of power. (shrink)

At IAPS Ljubljana conference (September 2007) Dag Vidar Hanstad and Sigmund Loland presented a paper on elite-level athletes' duty to provide information on their whereabouts, to decide between two opposing positions: is this WADA demand justifiable anti-doping work or an indefensible surveillance regime? They concluded that on moral grounds this regime is conditionally acceptable, the condition being the acceptability of a general framework and objectives embodied in anti-doping global legislative foundations (the World Anti-Doping Code). But, as they said, principled (...) objections against the system have more universal relevance, which has to be taken seriously . To take this ambiguous and intriguing conclusion a step further, I propose a legal rather than ethical approach, from the aspect of constitutional and international human rights law, and the possible clash of two legally acknowledged values - the concept of elite sport without doping, and the concept of individual human rights. This conflict between ideological or moral values and the legality of individual rights is not a novelty. This paper presents three instances of this conflict: Bernard de Mandeville's differentiation between public and private values; Eug ne Sue's parallel legal and civil morals; and the contemporary moralisation of law which conflates legality into morality. The subordination of legality to morality has potentially dangerous consequences: here, Agamben's 'state of exception' comes to mind, with his analysis of potestas and auctoritas. However, in the case of sport and the war against doping, the origin of power is not in the nation state; it originates in civil society's non-governmental national and international bodies recognised as autonomous sources of legal order. (shrink)

Cet article s’attache à définir la nation, en Afrique, par la notion de « révolution », c’est-à-dire d’une transformation totale de conditions anciennes – aussi bien précoloniales que coloniales – en vue de fonder des structures nationales progressistes et démocratiques. Usant de l’exemple des pays du Sahel, en particulier le Burkina Faso, le Mali et le Niger, l’article analyse cette révolution nationale comme un phénomène de cycle long, qui se déploie dans une contradiction entre un leadership politique de moins en (...) moins en adéquation avec elle, et des peuples de plus en plus conscients et exigeants quant à leurs droits civiques. Cette contradiction est par ailleurs déterminée différemment par les problèmes politiques propres au cadre urbain et au cadre rural. Elle aboutit à des luttes et contestations opposant peuples et élites qui indiquent que, si la révolution nationale est loin d’être accomplie, elle n’a pas non plus simplement avorté. (shrink)

_Elite Education – International Perspectives_ is the first book to systematically examine elite education in different parts of the world. Authors provide a historical analysis of the emergence of national elite education systems and consider how recent policy and economic developments are changing the configuration of elite trajectories and the social groups benefiting from these. Through country-level case studies, this book offers readers an in-depth account of elite education systems in the Anglophone world, in Europe and (...) in the emerging financial centres of Africa, Asia and Latin America. A series of commentaries highlight commonalities and differences between elite education systems, and offer insights into broader theoretical issues, with which educationalists, researchers and policy makers are engaging. With authors including Stephen J. Ball, Donald Broady, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Heinz-Hermann Krüger, Maria Alice Nogueira, Julia Resnik and Agnès van Zanten, _t_he book offers a benchmark perspective on issues frequently glossed over in comparative education, including the processes by which powerful groups retain privilege and ‘elite’ status in rapidly changing societies. Elite Education – International Perspectives will appeal to policy makers and academics in the fields of education and sociology. Simultaneously it will be of special relevance to post-graduates enrolled on courses in the sociology of education, education policy, and education and international development. (shrink)

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of (...) antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it. (shrink)

Expert athletes are determined to make faster and better decisions, as revealed in several simple heuristic studies using verbal reports or micro-movement responses. However, heuristic decision-making experiments that require motor responses, also being considered as the embodied-choice experiments, are still underrepresented. Furthermore, it is less understood how decision time and confidence depend on the type of embodied choices players make. To scrutinize the decision-making processes, this study investigated the embodied choices of male athletes with different expertise in a close-to-real-life environment; (...) 22 elite, and 22 amateur team handball players performed a sport-specific embodied-choice test. Attack sequences were shown to the players, who had to choose between four provided options by giving a respective sport-specific motor response. We analyzed the frequencies of specific choices and the best choice, as well as the respective decision time and decision confidence. Elite and amateur players differed in the frequencies of specific choices, and elite players made the best choice more often. Slower decision times of elite players were revealed in specific choices and in best choices, the confidence of decisions was rated equally high by both player groups. Indications are provided that elite players make better choices rather slower, instead of faster. We suppose this is due to specific sensorimotor interactions and speed-accuracy-tradeoffs in favor of accuracy in elite players. Our findings extend expert decision-making research by using an embodied-choice paradigm, highlighting considerations of decision time and confidence in future experiments. (shrink)

Critical race theorists and standpoint epistemologists argue that agents who are members of dominant social groups are often in a state of ignorance about the extent of their social dominance, where this ignorance is explained by these agents' membership in a socially dominant group (e.g., Mills 2007). To illustrate this claim bluntly, it is argued: 1) that many white men do not know the extent of their social dominance, 2) that they remain ignorant as to the extent of their dominant (...) social position even where this information is freely attainable, and 3) that this ignorance is due in part to the fact that they are white men. We argue that on Buchak's (2010, 2013) model of risk averse instrumental rationality, ignorance of one's privileges can be rational. This argument yields a new account of elite-group ignorance, why it may occur, and how it might be alleviated. (shrink)

L’étude de 110 histoires de nominations individuelles dans l’administration publique au Gabon permet d’analyser l’importance des solidarités sociales situées en dehors d’une logique ethnique. Les relations individuelles qui prévalent au sein des réseaux des futures élites administratives montrent que la relation ethno-communautaire est latente dans le processus de sélection des élites de l’administration publique. Le lien ethnique devient actif dans le processus de nomination individuelle dès que s’ajoute un lien supplémentaire situé en dehors de l’affinité ethnique, comme les relations d’anciens (...) camarades de « fac », les relations avec les notables locaux et les liens engendrés par l’appartenance à des entités collectives. Cet article étudie la complexité des solidarités ethniques et les dynamiques relationnelles dans les nominations individuelles.A review of the process that led to the appointment of 110 Gabonese civil servants makes it possible to analyze the importance of social solidarity as well as ethnic solidarity factors. A close study of how future members of the elite connect within networks shows that ethnic relations act as a backdrop to the selection process of civil service elites. Ethnic relations are revived as soon as an additional factor is involved : old schools ties, relations with local prominent citizens, as well as connections resulting from memberships of political parties and freemasonry. The article assesses the complexity of ethnic logics and the relationship dynamics in the appointments reviewed. (shrink)

_Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances_ foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of scholars seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary scholarship on schooling. Based on a 5-year extended global ethnography of elite schools in nine different countries—countries defined by colonial pasts linked to England—the contributors make a powerful case for the rethinking of elite schools and elite class formation theory in light (...) of contemporary processes of globalization and transnational change. Prestigious, high-status schools have long been seen as critical institutional vehicles directly contributing to the societal processes of elite selection and reproduction. This book asserts that much has changed and that these schools can no longer rest on their past laurels and accomplishments. Instead they must re-cast their heritages and tradition in order to navigate the new globally competitive educational field enabling them to succeed in a world in which the globalization of educational markets, the global ambitions and imaginations of school youth, and the emergence of new powerful players peddling entrepreneurial models of curriculum and education, have placed contemporary schooling under tremendous pressure. This insightful and though-provoking volume provides a well-researched perspective on the nature of contemporary schooling in the globalizing era. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Globalisation, Societies and Education. _. (shrink)

We explore the meaning and implications of Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power and integrate it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Corporate leaders active within the field of power hold prominent roles in numerous organizations, constituting an ‘elite of elites’, whose networks integrate powerful participants from different fields. As ‘bridging actors’, they form coalitions to determine institutional settlements and societal resource flows. We ask how some corporate (...) actors become hyper-agents, those actors who ‘make things happen’, while others remain ‘ordinary’ members of the elite. Three hypotheses are developed and tested using extensive data on the French business elite. Social class emerges as persistently important, challenging the myth of meritocratic inclusion. Our primary contribution to Bourdieusian scholarship lies in our analysis of hyper-agents, revealing the debts these dominants owe to elite schools and privileged classes. (shrink)

In light of the World Anti Doping Agency’s 2013 Code Revision process, we critically explore the applicability of two of three criteria used to determine whether a method or substance should be considered for their Prohibited List, namely its (potential) performance enhancing effects and its (potential) risk to the health of the athlete. To do so, we compare two communities of human guinea pigs: (i) individuals who make a living out of serial participation in Phase 1 pharmacology trials; and (ii) (...) elite athletes who engage in what is effectively ‘unregulated clinical research’ by using untested prohibited or non-prohibited performance enhancing substances and methods, alone or in combination. Our comparison sheds light on norms of research ethics that these practices exacerbate with respect to the concepts of multiplicity, visibility, and consistency. We argue for the need to establish a proper governance framework to increase the accountability of these unregulated research practices in order to protect the human guinea pigs in elite sports contexts, and to establish reasonable grounds for the performance enhancing effects, and the risks to the health of the athlete, of the methods and substances that might justify their inclusion on the Prohibited List. (shrink)

The four books under review form part of a resurgent social science interest in elites as obligatory entry points in understanding changing relations of power and growing inequalities in a post-organized capitalism. All four books demonstrate, in differing but often complementary ways, that in an age of formal meritocracy, rising powers, government outsourcing, weightless information economies, financial deregulation, and increasingly dense digitized networked information and communication systems, elites have changed. Their mobile lives, their ability to feel at ease in almost (...) any situation, and their role as intermediaries connecting different spheres of cultural, economic and political life are defining features of the new, truly global elites. The four books demonstrate the enduring influence of Bourdieu as a theorist of elites and showcase methodological and conceptual innovations to further develop comparative research. (shrink)