The fortunes of the wealthy are soaring across the globe. Economists have demonstrated that the lion's share of economic growth over the past decade benefits the richest people: the top 1% took 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, whereas the bottom 50% captured just 2%. But there is more to this phenomenon than money. The social composition of elites, their cultural profiles, and political importance are just as significant, but less widely understood. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Global Elites addresses this gap by providing comprehensive portraits of who elites are and how they wield power.
The chapters offer perspectives from all leading regions of the world, notably Latin America and Africa, and countries ranging from India, China, the USA, to the UK. Contributors-many of whom are leading scholars in this field-explain how elites are increasingly exercising political influence, challenging liberal democracy, and undermining meritocratic beliefs. Elites cannot be seen as throwbacks to older aristocratic formations, such as 'Old Boys Networks'. This volume illustrates how contemporary elites vary across the globe, how they often fly 'under the radar', and how their wealth threatens to short-circuit democratic public life. Elites are now dynamic forces shaping social life in many areas, including racial, gendered, and classed dimensions. By unveiling elites, this Handbook helps readers understand myriad conflicts that abound in contemporary social life.
María Luisa Méndez is Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Director of the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). She previously served as Director of the Department of Sociology at Diego Portales University (UDP). Her research explores social mobility, urban inequality, and elite reproduction in Latin America. She is the author of Upper Middle Class Social Reproduction and The Politics of the Elite. Her work has appeared in leading journals including Urban Studies, Urban Geography, and The Sociological Review.
Mike Savage has written extensively on the sociology of class and inequality. He has been Professor at the Universities of Manchester and York and was founding co-Director of the LSE's International Inequalities Institute, one of the world's premier interdisciplinary centres for the study of inequality. His best-selling (co-authored) book
Social Class in the 21st Century made a major impact in insisting on social class as a key contemporary divide.
The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past has been translated into three languages.
Annette Lareau is the author of the award-winning books
Unequal Childhoods,
Home Advantage, and
Listening to People. With Blair Sackett, she authored
We Thought It Would be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America. She is currently writing a book, to be published with the University of California Press, on the blessings and challenges of wealth for family life. Lareau is Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Past President of the American Sociological Association.
