Power, Distinction, Display: Excavating Elites
Introduction
This project explores Chicago’s elite from 1860 to 1940. Elites are those individuals who have disproportionate access to the most scarce and useful resources in society: wealth, political power, signs of cultural legitimacy, and valuable social ties. The history of capitalism is characterized by sharp and durable inequalities between social classes. But the structures of this inequality has taken distinctive shapes at different times and places.
Through detailed reconstruction of social networks, “Power, Distinction, Display” excavates the social and cultural dimensions of elite power. Following in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, (Bourdieu, 1984) dominant social classes succeed in reproducing their position by accumulating not just economic capital, but cultural and social capital as well. The networks examined here show the changing structures of social capital accumulation and the shifting sites where cultural capital could be displayed and recognized.
By formally constructing networks of participation in a variety of organizations, gatherings, clubs, and social events at three moments (1860, 1900, 1940) we can visualize measure the changing structure of elite social and cultural capital, map how more closely connected social neighborhoods clustered together, and measure changes in the participation of different kinds of individuals (men and women, various occupations, etc.) as well as a changing terrain of organizations, gatherings, clubs, and social events structured the pathways through which capitalist elites accumulated social capital.
For each year, 1860, 1900, and 1940, you can explore the changing structure of social nieghborhoods in general and according to gender, using two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3D), or virtual reality (VR)-based tools.
Why Study Inequality? Why Study Elites?
For much of the twentieth century, most social scientists who were concerned about the distribution of wealth and power in society studied the most disadvantaged. From the Progressive reformers of the 1910s to the sociologists and economists of the 1990s, most assumed that poverty was the primary social problem that modern capitalist societies had to tackle. By focusing on poverty, this work too often made the poor the problem. Relatively little attention focused on the ability of the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected to retain and reproduce their dominant position.
Although there were important studies of elite power in the 1960s to 1970s, by the 1990s, neo-liberal capitalism appeared to be triumphant and research on elites dried to a trickle (See for instance, Zeitlin, 1974; Roy, 1983; Mizruchi and Koenig, 1988).
In the last two decades, research on elites has experienced a new boom. In large part this has been a delayed reaction to the radical redistribution of income and wealth towards the rich in the last 50 years. The concentration of income, wealth, and power has become a major concern in many capitalist democracies, but especially in the most unequal, such as the United States. At the same time, the United States, has fallen behind many European countries in social mobility. Rather than being the land of opportunity for all, in the United States, the income of parents has an increasingly powerful effect on the income of children compared to other countries (Corak, 2012).
Thomas Piketty’s surprise best-seller Capital in the 21st Century (2014) has moved the issue of wealth and income inequality closer to the center of the research agenda and into the public arena. However, simply studying money, income, and wealthy provides only a very narrow perspective on the resources elites use to reproduce their position and power. This project foregrounds social and cultural capital accumulation to get a sense of how Chicago's elite changed between 1860 and 1940.
Social Capital
Social scientists have adopted two distinct uses of the concept "social capital." Perhaps the most famous is given by Robert Putnam in his work Bowling Alone which understands social capital as a metric for assessing communities. While Putnam’s work has gained popular attention and influenced policy makers, social scientists and historians have raised considerable concerns about this community level metric (see Abasi et al. 2014, Fine 2010, Szreter 2002, Fine 2002).
Rather than approaching social capital as an attribute of communities, this project understands social capital as an individual attribute, following the pioneering work of Mark Granovetter (1973) on the “strength of weak ties,” Bourdieu’s work (1984) on the role of economic, social, and cultural capital in elite reproduction, and Ronald S. Burt’s (1997, 2005, 2000) stress on the brokerage opportunities created by structural holes.
Figure 1
In Figure 1, node A occupies occupies a far more powerful position as a broker across a structural hole in the simple example network than node B, on the right, even though both A and B have three ties, to other nodes with similar numbers of ties.
Those individuals favorably placed within a network structure will have access to more diverse and varied sources of information, they will be able to cultivate respect and recognition among a wider range of contacts, and they will be able to broker the flow of information and knowledge between otherwise unconnected individuals.
A network graph for 1900
Network Centrality
Social capital can be understood to correspond with centrality in a network. This can be seen intuitively in a visualization. Nodes and clusters, either individuals or organizations, at the center of the social space of the network visualization are more favorably positioned than nodes and clusters located at the peripheries. Formal network visualizations thus give us a powerful, fast, and intuitive tool for identifying central, powerful actors in social networks.
Social capital and network centrality can also be measured quantitatively through a variety of centrality metrics. The most basic metric is the “degree” of a given node, that is, how many ties it has to other nodes. In this project social capital is quantified using the Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS) algorithm, in particular, the “Hub” score given to individual nodes.
Cultural Capital
Bourdieu, in his essay "The Forms of Capital," (1985) described economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital, and the methods of "conversion" or transformation between these forms of elite capital. Most theorists of cultural capital have focused on elites in the twentieth century in which the education system played a central role in marking out and reproducing legitimate culture.
Yet, in the nineteenth century, formal education was of marginal importance for elite career trajectories. Few completed secondary school, and even less graduated from college. Rather, cultural capital was institutionalized not degrees from elite universities, but rather through the development of a reputation for charity, cultural sophistication, and respectable sociability on the urban stage. Thus, in the bourgeois cities of the nineteenth century, the terrain of social capital also provided the arena and stage on which cultural could be accumulated and displayed.
Social network graph for 1940
A Fragmenting Local Elite: From Urban Bourgeoisie to National Corporate Functionaries
Chicago’s elite in these years transformed from one kind a dominant class to another. Viewed from the local scene, this appears to be a history of fragmentation. The bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth century was primarily composed of merchants and industrialists who operated family firms. They acquired capital and credit by establishing reputations for themselves on a local, urban stage. They participated in specific, local organizations, and these local urban networks were foundational for their power and position in society.
The corporate capitalism of the twentieth century was dominated by a new kind of capitalist elite. Professionally trained functionaries rose to power through leveraging their position in expanding corporate and state bureaucracies, and a nationally integrated corporate business class displaced the old urban based bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Stockholders and managers displaced family proprietors at the peaks of capitalist power, and the relevant networks of elite power moved from the urban to the national stage.
Thus, while the urban level networks traced here were central to bourgeois power in the mid-nineteenth century, these local-level networks were no longer as essential to the construction of elite social capital by the mid-twentieth century. By 1940, national sites of power, such as elite universities, professional associations, and exclusive national leisure locales had displaced the more parochial bourgeois world of urban cultural clubs, charities, and religious reform missions.
As urban-level networks became less central to the reproduction of the capitalist elite, more diverse actors began to gain entry. Women and lower-class social groups gained access to urban-scale networks of social capital as this field lost its relevance to social actors at the peaks of capitalist class power.