It is too easy for those of us babyboomers inclined to toil away in isolation – like me, I confess – to miss out on: (a) the full talent and contributions of our peers, and (b) the emerging input of the next generation of sociologists. Well, occasionally, serendipitously, I hit on stuff that impressively feeds my interests. I’m writing now about Aeron Davis’ Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment, hitting the shelves in 2018.
As it happens, what I take from Davis’ book affords detail to, rather than rebuffing or occasioning amendments to, my unfolding thesis. Class, for me, remains by some distance the most potent driver of structures and structurally induced change. For me, it is a small fraction of 1%, the ‘capital monopolists’, who hold sway, and do so by virtue of the structures they surf to their advantage. Thus, post-1970s financial capitalism’s class/command dynamic – capital buys the power to fashion policy to facilitate its further accumulation, the more so in financial than in post-WW2 welfare capitalism – survives intact.
So what do I take from Davis’ intriguing, long-term, Lakatos-like research programme? Most ‘leaders’ – among, beholden and allied to the ‘capital executive’ in general and the capital monopolists in particular – are it seems not notably talented or ‘special’. One reason for this is that leadership has become increasingly technocratic and functional. Expertise per se limits leadership capacity and is best bought in, thus compelling a risky reliance on trusting others. Innovation is typically shunned because it too is risky. Leaders ‘follow rather than lead’.
Relatedly, it is metrics (valid, meaningless or otherwise) that count, and in the short-term. It is ‘narrow, codifiable and verifiable targets’ that matter. Increasingly the core elite – for me, class – protagonists offer themselves for personal rewards by engineering, courtesy of their hired experts, short-term gains for shareholders. Then they move on: mission accomplished. Jump before icebergs are hit. One leadership role is typically substituted for another. Elite leadership is characterised by short-termism.
Davis also found that elites are more fragmented than hitherto. No longer do they share a common class background or pedigree (though this is a ‘relative’ decline). Can we continue to write of the ‘Establishment’? Leaders are bound instead, Davis contends, by a commitment to ‘neoliberalism and globalisation’: ‘they all agree that states should be smaller, markets and trade freer, and individuals choosier and more calculating’. Thus:
‘large corporations, markets and the super-rich depend on states to function; but their crippling of national institutions, in order to free such ‘wealth creators’, jeopardises the very systems they rely on. Equally, the focus on individualism, self-interest and harsh competition pushes each leader to put themselves above the Establishment collective.’
Leadership, Davis asserts, is precarious (so precarity, if of a different degree and order characterises leaders too). But it tends to be a well-insured and remunerated precarity. Short-termisn is accompanied by high rates of mobility, either by choice or necessity. Often, leaders skip from one of Bourdieu’s fields or domains to another. ‘In effect, elite existence has become ‘solitary, rich, nasty, brutish and short’’.
Very much to his credit in my opinion, Davis proffers some remedies. We need to address:
- Transparency: so, register lobbyists and party donations, publish top organisational salaries and the ratio of highest to lowest paid staff, property ownership and financial accounts held abroad etc.
- Conflicts of interest: for example, accountancy firms that both audit a company’s accounts and sell tax advice to them; media owners who regularly meet senior politicians; etc.
- Checks and balances: the PM and senior politicians largely escape ‘balances’ on their exercise of power, and elites struggle to hold other elites to account.
- No self-policing: why do so many elites get to police themselves?
- Sticks: leaders are not held personally to account.
- … and carrots: scrap bonus systems and halt systems that are short-termist, metric-based and ‘easily gamed’.
- Neutral, public information: address the fact that public ‘information’ is filtered through the lens of corporate – via lobbyist, thinktank etc- interests.
- ‘Forget social mobility, its inequality stupid!’: active fiscal policies ‘on everything from higher rate tax to property ownership and inheritance duties’ are required; plus, private schools and health care providers should not have charity status; and pay, for example for premiership footballers, might be capped.
- More markets are not the solution: certain businesses are better, more cost-effective, in public hands.
- Culture and ethics are poor mechanisms: move beyond elite self-regulation!
- Reform the intermediary professions: public affairs, lobbyists, accountants and parts of the legal profession who countenance corruption need curtaining: ‘they are at the heart of elite power or pay of elites’ (there are my allies and co-optees of the capital executive).
- Ideas and innovation: the (short-termist, risk-averse, cash-in) lack of imagination and creativity among extant elite leaders needs reversing (look at Finland?).
What I find enlightening about Davis’ research programme, to reiterate, is the detail. The essence of my own contribution is meta-reflective: I want to build bridges between theory and empirical research in sociology (as well as projecting it into, and defending it, in the public sphere, via an emboldened action sociology). To my mind, Davis’ professional output fuels this project. If the findings of professional sociology and allied disciplines cause me to rethink, then so be it … but so far … I’m open.