A League of Gentlemen: The Institute of the Motor Industry

The article first examines how a Victorian discourse of gentlemanliness has been used by the professions to support a claim to moral and intellectual superiority. In Bourdieusian terms, this allowed an emerging professional class to accumulate a stock of cultural capital that differentiated them from entrepreneurship and commerce. However, there has been dramatic increase in occupational groups claiming professional status. This includes the use of signifiers of gentility and respectability such as charters, coats of arms and prestigious headquarters. The particular artefacts produced by the Institute of the Motor Industry (IMI), a professional body that represents car dealers and repair shops, are examined and related to Theodor Adorno’s concept of the culture industry wherein social markers have become manufactured effects that can be exchanged. They have thus been emptied out of meaning as a claim to gentlemanly status has been reduced to the possession of certain objects rather than a set of particular behaviours.