民族地区新农村建设的推动力量:乡村精英——以湖北省巴东县为个案

本文将乡村精英分为外出精英、回归精英和留守精英三类,探讨了乡村精英对民族地区新农村建设的正负面影响,并就如何利用乡村精英的优势资源来建设民族地区的新农村提出三点建议:即提升乡村吸引力和凝聚力以吸引资金和精英的回归,改善村干部待遇以提高乡村精英的参政热情,整合精英与群众的力量以共建新农村。     

村民自治制度下少数民族乡村精英的心态与行为分析--以湖北西部土家族地区农村为例

本文以鄂西少数民族地区农村田野调查资料为基础,对村民自治制度下少数民族农村治理精英与非治理精英的心态、行为及与乡镇政府间的互动关系进行了分析,认为以乡镇政府为代表的国家力量对少数民族农村村民自治的影响和控制力还非常强,治理精英与非治理精英在村庄政治中自主活动的空间不大,村民普遍缺乏参与热情,但乡村精英的影响正与日俱增.     

From Cyber-Libertarianism to Neoliberalism: Internet Exceptionalism,Multi-stakeholderism,and the Institutionalisation of Internet Governance in the 1990s

Although it is often taken for granted that Internet governance should employ the principle of multi-stakeholderism and that existing governance structures are not suitable for the regulation of the Internet, this article places the emergence of such principles in the context of the 1990s. Drawing on international political sociology and neo-Gramscian scholarship, it explores how different elites were able to coalesce around basic principles of Internet governance to create the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). These principles were the common elements of distinct discourses and were instrumental in the unification of a power elite. They also helped to create a hegemonic discourse that was acceptable to a broader public. Based on the study of policy documents produced during the debates that led to the creation of the ICANN, this article outlines five different discourses on Internet governance and focuses on the principles of multi-stakeholderism and Internet exceptionalism as basic elements of a hegemonic discourse. The study of the origins of these principles in the 1990s can shed light on their status in current debates.     

Sustaining corporate class consciousness across the new liquid managerial elite in Britain

This article asks: how is class consciousness and cohesiveness amongst the UK business elite maintained in the twenty‐first century? Elite studies traditionally sought to account for the construction and circulation of dominant ideology through exclusive education systems, institutional board interlocks and club memberships. The problem is that business elite membership of all these institutions has been steady declining in recent decades. Contemporary corporate elites now appear more mobile and fragmented in an age of globalization. However, class cohesion amongst business leaders appears as strong as ever after decades of neoliberal policy hegemony. So, how are such ideas, norms and values circulated and maintained? This study tried to answer this question drawing on a set of 30 semi‐structured interviews with top UK CEOs and a demographic audit of current FTSE 100 CEOs. The findings suggest that three additional means of achieving business elite coherence have become more significant: professional business education, semi‐formal but regular meeting sites, and specialist business media.     

Gouverner l’environnement dans les villes européennes: des configurations d’acteurs restructurées pour la production des politiques urbaines

This article focuses on the evolution of the actors involved in environmental decision-making at the urban scale covering a period from the early eighties up to the present. Through the cases of Manchester (United Kingdom) and Saint-Étienne (France), we aim at showing that the shift in discourse from “local environment” to “sustainable development” lead to a dramatic change in the actors involved in the production of urban environmental policies. This evolution will be explained by a transformation of the sources of legitimacy of local political elites (with the rise of output-oriented legitimacy) and a transformation of the political resources they mobilised. This evolution could be analysed as a stronger investment of urban political elites in the “policies” dimension of their work.     

试论我国乡村精英研究的范式转换

中国传统社会的＂皇权止于县政＂为乡村治理留下了相当的＂自治＂空间,乡村精英人物顺势担负起了这一职责。随社会历史的发展变革,国家权力逐渐深入下沉到乡村社会基层,加强了国家对乡村的控制和资源获取,因循这一现实,乡村精英人物也不断受历史的裹挟发生演变分化。学者们从不同角度对这一问题进行了大量研究,一百多年来,乡村精英研究的范式经历了如下转换：从乡村精英地位和功能的研究到乡村精英角色的分类研究再到乡村精英的结构及其变迁趋势研究等逻辑嬗变过程。     

The Elevation of the Elite: Historical Trends and Complicity of the Masses

A small group of citizens wields significant influence in the corporate, political, and military realms of American society. This group is known in the literature as the elite. Looking at the disparity between the elite and the masses of society in terms of education, wealth, and political power, one might surmise a conspiracy against fundamental democratic principles of equality, justice, and economic fair play. This article addresses non-conspiratorial cultural-contextual factors of history, social structure, media, psychology, education, and the marketplace contributing to the elites existence. It is concluded that non-conspiratorial factors play a primary role in their rise to global influence.     

Consecration and meritocracy in elite business schools: The case of a Swedish student union

Sociologists are paying increasing attention to the business and financial elites that control today's global economy; indeed, there's a great need to understand who these elites are, what they do, and what makes them tick, as individuals, and as a class. But we also need to understand how the economic elites aremade in the current social and economic system, and one significant way of doing this, is by examining elite business schools, that is, the institutions that aim to train and prepare people to assume important leadership and decision-making positions in business, finance and related sectors of critical importance to the management of modern capitalism. Based on the notion of consecration, I empirically examine how the student union of Sweden's premier business school, The Stockholm School of Economics, offers its members a learning environment partly separated from the school, and how this semi-independent organization contributes to making undergraduate students socially, morally and esthetically meritorious for elite jobs in primarily management consulting and finance; a process that is largely shaped by corporate actors that participate formally and informally in the student union activities. The paper contributes to the sociological literature on business schools and higher education and elites, both theoretically through the twin notions of meritocracy and consecration, and empirically through its unique focus on student union activities in an elite business school setting.     

From local champions to global players: A long-term perspective on Swiss companies’ connections across territorial scales

Corporate interlocking at the national and transnational scale has received substantive scholarly attention. Less is known about companies’ ties to the cities and regions in which they have their seats. In this paper, we conduct a long-term analysis of the multilevel ties that companies maintain with the local and the national context they are embedded in. To do so, we adopt a positional approach and identify the directors of the major companies in the three largest Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) and study company directors’ ties to local and national organizations in seven benchmark years between 1890 and 2020. Our analysis documents the rise and fall of company directors’ ties to national organizations over the course of the 20th century, and it highlights the continued persistence of companies’ ties to the local level and their region until the new millennium, when companies’ ties with national and local organizations vanish, coinciding with the transnationalization of company boards.     

Continuing complexity: The university careers of a scientific elite in relation to their class origins and schooling

We report on continuing research on the UK scientific elite, intended to illustrate a proposed new approach to elite studies and based on a prosopography of Fellows of the Royal Society born from 1900. We extend analyses previously reported of Fellows' social origins and secondary schooling to take in their university careers as under- and postgraduates. The composite term ‘Oxbridge’, as often applied in elite studies, is called into question, as members of the scientific elite prove to have been recruited more from Cambridge than from Oxford. Particular interest then attaches to the relation between Fellows' social origins and schooling and their attendance at Cambridge. Among Fellows whose university careers were made at Cambridge, those of more advantaged class origins and those with private schooling are over-represented, although in this, as in various other respects, including Fellows' field of study, family influences persist independently of schooling. One suggestive interaction effect exists in that being privately educated increases the probability of having been at Cambridge more for Fellows from managerial than from professional families. Private schooling leading on to both undergraduate and postgraduate study at Cambridge can be identified as the educational ‘royal road’ into the scientific elite; and Fellows coming from higher professional and managerial families alike have the highest probability of having entered the elite in this way. But the most common route turns out in fact to be via state schooling and attendance at universities outside of ‘the golden triangle’ of Cambridge, Oxford and London; and this route is far more likely to have been followed by Fellows of all other class origins than higher professional. The relation between the degree of social skew in the recruitment of an elite and the degree of social homogeneity among its members can be more complex than has often been supposed.