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Elites, Nonelites, and Power

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Political Power and Social Theory

Series Editor: Julian Go

Political Power and Social Theory is a peer-reviewed journal committed to advancing the interdisciplinary understanding of the linkages between political power, social relations, and historical development. The journal welcomes both empirical and theoretical work and is willing to consider papers of substantial length. Publication decisions are made by the editor in consultation with members of the editorial board and anonymous reviewers. For information on submissions, and a full list of volumes, please see the journal website at www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/tk/ppst

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• Ronald Aminzade

• University of Minnesota, USA

• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

• Duke University, USA

• Michael Burawoy

• University of California-Berkeley, USA

• Nitsan Chorev

• Brown University, USA

• Diane E. Davis

• Harvard University, USA

• Peter Evans

• University of California-Berkeley, USA

• Julian Go

• The University of Chicago, USA

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• London School of Economics, UK

• Daniel Slater

• University of Michigan, USA

• George Steinmetz

• University of Michigan, USA

• Maurice Zeitlin

• University of California-Los Angeles, USA

Title Page

Political Power and Social Theory Volume 41

Elites, Nonelites, and Power: The Critical Legacy of Elite Theory from Marx to Lachmann, and Then Beyond

Edited by

Rebecca Jean Emigh

University of California, Los Angeles, USA

And

Dylan Riley

University of California, Berkeley, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL

First edition 2025

Editorial matter and selection © 2025 Rebecca Jean Emigh and Dylan Riley.

Individual chapters © 2025 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83797-584-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-583-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-585-3 (Epub)

ISSN: 0198-8719 (Series)

Dedication

To Richard Lachmann, our brilliant colleague and friend

About the Editors

Rebecca Jean Emigh is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She authored numerous prize-winning books and articles on comparative and historical sociology, focusing on long-term processes of social change in topics such as capitalism, knowledge, music, news, and censuses. Her article, “The Power of Negative Thinking” (Theory and Society 26:649–684), was recently translated into Chinese. She was chair of the Comparative/Historical Section of the American Sociological Association and was a coeditor of Social Science History. She is the incoming chair of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association. She is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Comparative and Historical Sociology and writing a book on epochal analysis.

Dylan Riley is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in broad comparative and historical perspective. He has authored or coauthored six books and has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. He is also at work on two larger book projects: a collection of essays provisionally entitled Science, Ideology, and Method and a comparative-historical analysis of democratization in Germany, Italy, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States from c1200 to c1950 provisionally entitled Special Paths.

About the Contributors

Patricia Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and criminology at South Dakota State University. Her research interests include comparative/historical sociology, cross-cultural sociology, globalization, and deviance. Her recent publications include works on census categorization in Puerto Rico and the sociology of knowledge (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Dylan Riley), and on interdisciplinary collaboration (with Erin Miller et al.) published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association.

Patricia A. Banks (Harvard University PhD and A.M./Spelman College BA) is the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Poetics and Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. Banks is the author of four books, including Black Culture Inc: How Ethnic Community Support Pays for Corporate America (Stanford University Press 2022); Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption: A Sociological View (Routledge 2020); Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums (Routledge Research in Museum Studies 2019); and Represent: Art and Identity Among the Black Upper-Middle Class (Routledge 2010). Banks is the Chair of the Section on the Sociology of Consumers and Consumption at the American Sociological Association and serves on the boards of the American Sociological Review, Cultural Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Black Trustee Alliance and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. She has been in residence at Stanford University as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and at Harvard University as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. In 2023, Banks' book Black Culture, Inc. received three national awards.

Colin J. Beck is a Professor of Sociology and affiliate of the International Relations Program at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is the author of Radicals, Revolutionaries and Terrorists (Polity, 2015) and coauthor of On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary Era (Oxford University Press, 2022). His prior works on revolutionary waves in Social Science History and Theory & Society have won article awards from the American Sociological Association. He has also published articles in Sociological Theory, Mobilization, Socius, International Sociology, various edited volumes, and other venues.

Mlada Bukovansky is a Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She is the author of Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton University Press, 2002), a coauthor of Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power (Cambridge University Press, 2012) a coauthor of On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2022), and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has published articles in the journals International Organization, Review of International Studies, Review of International Political Economy, and International Politics, and contributed to a number of edited volumes in the field of international relations.

Abhishek Chatterjee is an Associate Professor of political science at the University of Montana. His research interests include the origins of states and markets, and the philosophy of the social sciences, especially the relationship between ontology and research methods. He is the author inter alia of Rulers and Capital in Historical Perspective: State Formation and Financial Development in India and the United States.

Lígia Ferro teaches at the Sociology Department, Faculty of Arts and Humanities – University of Porto. She has received her European PhD from the University Institute of Lisbon, ISCTE-IUL (2011). She was a Visiting Scholar at several universities in Europe, the United States, and Brazil. Lígia Ferro is the President of the European Sociological Association and is a member of the board of the European Network of Observatories in the Fields of Arts and Cultural Education – ENO. She is the author and editor of several publications in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French. Lately, she has been working on cultural practices, arts education, migrations, and action research, especially in urban contexts.

Beatriz Lacerda has a degree and a master's degree in Sociology from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. She has experience in artistic and community intervention projects in the city of Porto, where she crosses the fields of sociology and cinema, using ethnography and participatory visual methodologies. Among the projects in which she has participated are “Travessia” (2021), “Campanhã Cinema Club” (2021–2023), “Rising Cinema” (2023), and “Inflatable Cinema” (2021–2023). She is currently on a PhD scholarship for the “Pericreativities” project, coordinated by Otávio Raposo (ISCTE) and Lígia Ferro (IS-UP), where she will have the opportunity to deepen her research in the areas of territory, youth and creativity, migration and colonialism, ethnography, and processes of co-participation.

Lydia Matthews is a Brooklyn- and Athens-based critical writer, contemporary art curator, educator, and cultural activist who currently serves as a Professor of Visual Culture in the Fine Arts program of Parsons School of Design and Director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab at The New School. Trained as a contemporary art historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of London's Courtauld Institute, her work focuses on the intersection of current art/craft/design practices, diverse local cultures and global economies. Thus far, she has been invited to design participatory curatorial ventures in New York, Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. https://www.lydiamatthews.com/

Susan Meiselas is a New York-based documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation. As the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora's Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room of Their Own (2017), and Tar Beach (2020), Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles. Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present, was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, Kunst Haus Wien, among other international venues. https://www.susanmeiselas.com/

Caroline Virginia Reilly is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and has earned MAs in Sociology from the University of Memphis (2020) and the University of California, Los Angeles (2022). Her interests include comparative-historical sociology, gender, and race, ethnicity, and racialization. She is the first author of “Critical Mass and Critical Representation: Economic Transition, Workplace Cultures, and Women CEOs in China” (with Dr Junmin Wang, University of Memphis) in Sociology of Development and the second author of “Gender Bias, Institutional Predicaments and Innovativeness of Female CEOs in China” (with Dr Wang [first author] and Kaniz Fatema, PhD student, University of Iowa) in the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship. Reilly is currently working on her dissertation project, which examines income and ethnoracial disparities in access to and quality of prenatal and postpartum care in the United States.

Tod S. Van Gunten is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, United Kingdom) and held previous positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne, Germany) and the Carlos III-Juan March Institute (Madrid, Spain). He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of research include Latin American political elites, the social and political role of the economics profession, and social processes in financial and other markets. Current research projects include the effect of elite networks on career processes in the 20th century Mexican state.

Yuni Wen is a Teaching Fellow in the International Business Group at Oxford Saïd Business School. Her research focuses on the regulatory challenges arising from digital innovation and the reputation risks associated with artificial intelligence.

Lori Qingyuan Yue is an Associate Professor at the Management Division in Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on the relationship between business and society, especially regarding how organizations respond to contentious social environments and regulation uncertainty.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Michelle Marinello and Johanna Hernández Pérez for their research assistance. Funding from the UCLA Dean of the Social Sciences and a UCLA Faculty Senate Grant supported this work.