Is the Corporate Elite Fractured, or is there Continuing Corporate Dominance? Two Contrasting Views

This article compares two recent analyses of continuity and change in the American power structure since 1900, with a main focus on the years after World War II. The first analysis asserts that the “corporate elite” has fractured and fragmented in recent decades and no longer has the unity to have a collective impact on public policy. The second analysis claims that corporate leaders remain united, albeit with moderate-conservative and ultra-conservative differences on several issues, and continue to have a dominant collective impact on public policies that involve their major goals. After comparing the two perspectives on key issues from 1900 to 1945, the article analyzes the fractured-elite theory’s three claims about the postwar era: an activist government constrained the corporate elite, the union movement negotiated a capital-labor accord; and bank boards created policy cohesion among corporations. Finally, it compares the two perspectives on tax issues, health-care policies, and trade expansion between 1990 and 2010

The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming

A comprehensive neurocognitive theory of dreaming based on the theories, methodologies, and findings of cognitive neuroscience and the psychological sciences. G. William Domhoff's neurocognitive theory of dreaming is the only theory of dreaming that makes full use of the new neuroimaging findings on all forms of spontaneous thought and shows how well they explain the results of rigorous quantitative studies of dream content. Domhoff identifies five separate issues—neural substrates, cognitive processes, the psychological meaning of dream content, evolutionarily adaptive functions, and historically invented cultural uses—and then explores how they are intertwined. He also discusses the degree to which there is symbolism in dreams, the development of dreaming in children, and the relative frequency of emotions in the dreams of children and adults. During dreaming, the neural substrates that support waking sensory input, task-oriented thinking, and movement are relatively deactivated. Domhoff presents the conditions that have to be fulfilled before dreaming can occur spontaneously. He describes the specific cognitive processes supported by the neural substrate of dreaming and then looks at dream reports of research participants. The “why” of dreaming, he says, may be the most counterintuitive outcome of empirical dream research. Though the question is usually framed in terms of adaptation, there is no positive evidence for an adaptive theory of dreaming. Research by anthropologists, historians, and comparative religion scholars, however, suggests that dreaming has psychological and cultural uses, with the most important of these found in religious ceremonies and healing practices. Finally, he offers suggestions for how future dream studies might take advantage of new technologies, including smart phones

An invitation to a four-network theory of power: a new viewpoint compatible with elite theory

"Starting with the multinetwork theories advocated by C. Wright Mills, Michael Mann and Richard Lachmann, and drawing on work by specialists in anthropology and social psychology, this article presents a history of social power from hunting and gathering societies to the present. Collective power, based on cooperation, came first in human history, with distributive power coming much later. With the rise of permanent hierarchical organizations at the dawn of civilization, the issue of distributive power became paramount, making it necessary to resolve distributive power conflicts among leaders before collective power could expand any further. At this point the rank-and-file lost their ability to replace organizational leaders, who then became 'political elites' or 'power elites'. The result was the kind of top-down societies analyzed by John Higley and Michael Burton in Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy, which provides a provocative new challenge to traditional theories of democracy." (author's abstract

The Elusive Rentier Rich: Piketty's Data Battles and the Power of Absent Evidence

The popularity of Thomas Piketty?s research on wealth inequality has drawn attention to a curious question: why was widening wealth inequality largely neglected by mainstream economists in recent decades? To explore and explain that neglect, I draw on the writing of the early neoclassical economist John Bates Clark, who introduced the notion of the marginal productivity of income distribution at the end of the nineteenth century. I then turn to Piketty?s Capital in order to analyze the salience of marginal productivity theories of income today. I suggest that most of the criticism and praise for Piketty?s research is focused on data that are accessible and measurable, obscuring attention to questions over whether current methods for measuring economic capital are defensible or not. My overarching aim is to explore how ?absent? data in economics as a whole help to reinforce blind spots within mainstream economic theory

The policy-planning capacity of the American corporate community:Corporations, policy-oriented nonprofits, and the inner circle in 1935–1936 and 2010–2011

Using a combination of network analysis and descriptive statistics, this study examines the extent to which six important and longstanding policy-oriented nonprofit organizations — foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups — were connected via their directors with the 250 largest corporations in the United States in 1935–1936 and 2010–2011. The results demonstrate that the six nonprofit organizations included in the study were well integrated into corporate networks in both periods, and had an even greater integrative role in 2010–2011 than they did in 1935–1936. This finding supports the hypothesis that policy-oriented nonprofit organizations allow the corporate community to develop proposals, and to reach consensus, on major policy issues. This hypothesis is further supported by an overview of existing studies that illustrate the success of these organizations in shaping policy outcomes on a range of issues. Based on the overall results, the longstanding claim that corporations influence government primarily or solely at the “interest-group” level can be supplemented by the conclusion that policy-oriented nonprofits support a policy-planning process that links the corporate community to government on general issues. In addition, the findings cast doubt on the claim that the corporate community has lost its capacity for policy cohesion in recent decades, due primarily to a “fracturing” caused by a decline in bank centrality. Since general policies have been created within the policy-planning process since at least the mid-1930s, the decline in bank centrality is irrelevant to the corporate community’s ability to formulate general policy proposals

Corporate Political Power and US Foreign Policy, 1981-2002: The Role of the Policy-Planning Network

Recent empirical work has offered strong support for ‘biased pluralism’ and ‘economic elite’ accounts of political power in the United States, according a central role to interest groups as a mechanism through which corporate influence is exerted. Here, we propose an additional channel of influence for corporate interests: the ‘policy-planning network,’ consisting of corporate- dominated foundations, think tanks, and elite policy-discussion groups. To evaluate this assertion, we coded the policy preferences of one key policy-discussion group, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), on 295 foreign policy issues during the 1981-2002 period. In logistic regression analyses, the preferences of economic elites and the CFR were positive, statistically significant predictors of foreign policy outcomes while interest group preferences were not. These findings were further supported with a qualitative investigation of the patterns of CFR ‘successes’ and ‘failures.’ We conclude that ‘biased pluralism’ models should include corporate influence exerted through the policy-planning network

C Wright Mills, power and the power elites ? a reappraisal

This paper revisits and presents a critical appraisal of Mills's analysis of power and the power elite. There are signs of a revival of interest in Mills, but recent commentators have shown little interest in the intellectual, social or political context of his analysis. Setting Mills's thesis in its historical context, we consider an element of his project that has been particularly neglected in recent discussion: Mills's search for possible ways of redistributing power and his attempt to forge an ethico-political stance. Reflecting on recent discussion of contemporary elite formations, we comment on what critics might take from Mills in our own time in relation to the analysis of elites and the politics of critical management studies

The Trump foreign policy record and the concept of transformational change

While there has been debate about the extent to which US foreign policy has been transformed since President Trumpfirst took office in 2017, the concept of transformational policy change has not been defined with any degree of precision. The purpose of this article is, primarily, to establish such a definition. It does this by drawing upon a number of the literatures that address domestic policy processes, in particular the work of Karl Polanyi, to suggest that transformational change rests upon paradigmatic shifts, the reconfiguration of interests, large scale institutional re-ordering and changed logics. Application of the definition to the Trump foreign policy leads us to conclude that while the Trump foreign policy owes much to the militant internationalism of the Bush years its understanding of nations and“globalism”and abandonment of a defining moral purpose represent, although incipient, partial and variegated, the beginnings of transformational change

Integration and isolation in the global petrochemical industry: A multi-scalar corporate network analysis

The global petrochemical industry has long been characterized by stable patterns of Western corporate and geographic leadership, but since the early 2000s, the global playing field has changed significantly. China has overtaken the United States and Europe as the world’s largest petrochemical producer, and other emerging economies have emerged as global petrochemical players. Combining insights from scholarship on global corporate elites, world city networks, and relational economic geography, this article examines patterns in the corporate networks of leading petrochemical corporations. The research is based on a multi-scalar corporate network analysis, applying social network analysis to identify board interlocks, joint venture interlocks, and spatial interlocks between corporations. Through analyzing corporate networks across multiple scales, the research reveals patterns of both integration and isolation within the petrochemical industry. Isolation is evident in disconnected regional corporate elite networks, where the established North Atlantic corporate elite is interconnected through board interlocks, while corporate networks in Asia and other emerging economies remain disconnected. However, high levels of integration within the industry are also evident in an interconnected international company system formed through joint venture collaborations, and in overlapping subsidiary networks centered on petrochemical hubs around the world. The article argues that the results demonstrate a combination of resilience and change, or path dependence and contingency, in patterns of corporate power and collaboration. Western company networks still form the social and spatial backbone of the industry, but these have been challenged by emerging strategic centers and isolated elite networks in other parts of the world. This paper contributes to debates on industrial corporate elites, multiple globalizations, and the multipolar global economy