Search Results

This chapter considers the full impact of the global auction, as well as the influence of having access to college credentials. It examines the possibility that decreasing returns to human capital will be blamed on the aftermath of an economic crash instead of a secular shift in the global balance of economic power. This is followed by a study of the American corporate elites and those who do not have a college degree. The discussion also looks at earnings, which are part of the total rewards for workers. The chapter also examines human capital, the global middle class, the importance of the national context in shaping the global auction for American workers, and the introduction of new technologies as a source of income inequalities.

From the standpoint of the upper class, the most significant development in the early twentieth century was an organizational transformation that gave rise to the corporate executive. As corporations grew larger and more complex, salaried managers became the cornerstone of modern business enterprises. Senior executives and their families and close associates formed the corporate elite – and New York’s was easily the largest and most powerful in the nation. The mode of life these corporate elites constructed and the ideology they and their successors formulated became the basis of a new upper class that in time would challenge the prerogatives and meanings of the Gilded Age upper class. Corporate elites cared more about managing these gigantic organizations than about social pedigree, and they took pride in their educational and career successes. Their attention to career and their work ethic gave them a middle-class orientation, yet they also wanted to separate themselves from those in the broader middle class who had not reached their level of wealth and status. They did so by means of their elite suburban residences, their membership in country clubs, and the preparatory schools where they sent their children.

The legislative deliberations of Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative also supported elite theories of the state and showed that corporate campaign contributions and the reciprocal relationships between corporate elites and the federal government also influence American counternarcotic aid flows. This chapter uses the Heckman selection estimator to ascertain whether these outcomes are also generalizable. First, it uses principal component factor analysis to create an index to operationalize C. Wright Mills’ concept of an interlocking directorate, which measures the interconnections among corporate board of directors for the corporations in the data set and their interconnections with policy think tanks and the U.S. government. The statistical findings provide evidence that corporate campaign contributions, corporate inter-locks with think tanks and the federal government, and an interlocking directorate systematically increased U.S. counternarcotic aid to eighty recipient countries. And since drug enforcement policy making toward Colombia and Mexico also demonstrated that congressional funding for the drug war is a source of corporate revenues, the chapter concludes by utilizes a time-series cross section statistical analysis that shows that increasing levels of counternarcotic aid flows increases corporate capital accumulation again confirming that the case study findings are generalizable.

This chapter examines the extent to which the global powerful networks of international corporate elites have influenced and changed the landscape of higher education in Indonesia via the enactment of the government policies and programmes. Using illustrative empirical data from Indonesian universities, it is argued that the government policies and programmes on higher education reform in Indonesian universities have been very much influenced by the economic rationalism of neo-liberal agendas promoted by the global powerful networks of international corporate elites. Consequently, this economic-oriented reform has impacted on the reorientation of academic life into corporate-like manners.

This chapter sets out to summarise the key messages and trends in the research reported in the essays in this book. We take forward the idea of corporatised governance, where we examine what the data and analysis has to say about the privatisation of public service education, and the particular contribution of corporate elites. Specifically we identify the movement of educational issues from the public to private domains; the relocation of public education issues from government institutions to particular private organisations and individuals; and the redesign of the meaning and conduct of professional practices, and teaching and learning. We examine what public education means, and how research has a role in making the case.

This book reports on primary research into the role and influence of corporate elites in regard to the reform of public education. This introductory chapter outlines this purpose, with a focus on corporatised governance. We outline the trends in reform, and the role of elites and corporate elites in particular, and we then provide an over view of the book and the main contributions of the reported research.

The cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s created problems and opportunities for elites. In these decades the upper- and middle classes went from being seen as the wellspring of social virtue in Victorian culture to being perceived as repressed, stuffy, and out of touch; after all, they were the prime beneficiaries of a status quo that was now found wanting. From lording it over commoners in the eighteenth century, to loathing the dangerous classes in the nineteenth century, many elite New Yorkers came around to romanticizing African-Americans and other lower-class groups as exemplars of human spirit and social justice. These actions were in many cases genuine, yet in espousing civil rights causes and tackling discrimination and poverty, in exposing the falseness and superficiality of genteel society, upper-class New Yorkers also established their own heightened sensitivity as anti-elitists and their own legitimacy. Corporate elites thus championed achievement and diversity as the foundation of a more democratic, anti-elitist elite.

Corporations in the twentieth century were generally premised on economies of scale. Control of assets and employment was centripetal, becoming more concentrated over time, while ownership was centrifugal, becoming more dispersed. Corporate power was vested in the executives and boards at the tops of corporate hierarchies, whose control of economic resources could often translate into political influence. Since the 1980s, these two trends have reversed: control of assets is more dispersed, while ownership is more concentrated in the hands of a few financial institutions. The ability to rent rather than buy productive capacity means that pop-up businesses are replacing large incumbents in many industries. This chapter describes some of the consequences of these recent developments for power and trust around the corporation.

This chapter aims to address the question of who controlled the introduction of electronic data processing (EDP) systems into the federal bureaucracy. Here the technicians were clearly treading upon managerial terrain, employing their knowledge of computers to justify the study of government bureaucracy. While data processing may sound like a mundane topic requiring little research or technical expertise, early computers had to be reengineered to meet the needs of administrators as opposed to scientists. Moreover, bureaucrats welcomed the input of technicians. Amid a climate of government reform, EDP systems offered a technological solution to the mounting scale of federal paperwork and the associated politics of accountability. What remained to be worked out was the relationship between experts of technical and managerial inclinations. The chapter begins by presenting Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, in which he called upon engineers to bring about a social revolution by ending the exploitations of the corporate elite.