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This book surveys the elite state of play in Britain as it is now. It argues that the Establishment, as it has been conceived, is coming to an end. The book looks at how elites, by trying to get ahead, have destabilised the very institutions on which their power is based. It also looks at how leaders have adapted to get to the top. Those most suited to pleasing their assessors get there first. The book reveals some of the ways elites use to stay at the top once they get there. It looks at the secrets and lies that underpin elite power and control. Some are systematic and organised, and some are simply the lies leaders tell themselves. The book shows how leadership has been transformed into a numbers game because numbers can be tallied up in a way that ideas cannot. And because elites co-create the game, they can also change the rules as and when they need to. The book focuses on exit strategies and how canny elites survive when it all goes wrong. It briefly explores what solutions there might be to the current problems of leadership.
Britain, I feel that many of the issues and similarities discussed are more universal across the top tiers. Whenever I give a talk on these issues, inevitably people come up and tell me how it describes their experiences of leaders in other occupations and countries. The book is organised in four parts. Part I surveys the elite state of play in Britain as it is now. Chapter 1 argues that the Establishment, as it has been conceived, is coming to an end. Chapter 2 looks at how elites, by trying to get ahead, have destabilised the very
, institutionalised perspectives rarely managed to move beyond elite, state and institutional level prerogatives, goals and constraints. Moreover, EU crisis intervention is characterised by contradictory trends according to the chapter by Peters, Ferhatovic, Heinemann and Sturm, resulting from turf wars between the different EU foreign and security policy institutions. This means that there is an acute tension
security, with several actors now implicated in the advancement of counter-terror interests – a categorization Earl determines as constituting: state agents with tight ties to national elites; state agents with loose ties to national elites; and non-state, or private agents (Earl, 2011 ) – all with overlapping security interests. Such partnerships are framed as necessities for
activities. Another member of the party elite stated that for us, [Bossi's illness] was a big drama. However, I have to admit that in that period the Lega demonstrated its ability to remain united … Senior party members … were able to come together and discuss … They were able to develop unitary positions. This is the proof that Bossi had contributed to creating a leading class within the party and we could move forward. (Interview with National Representative 1
development. Many such interventions are Keynesian in the extreme and involve large transfers of funds from governments in the global north to states coming out of civil war. These funds, however, rarely go to social welfare and instead are often directed towards national elites, state security apparatus, debt repayment and overseas consultants. Indeed, by tracking the financial flows from national development aid organisations we can argue that they do engage in welfare, but the Peace via social justice and/or security 119 welfare is directed back to the home
into the world market, which increased by more than one billion people since the 1980s. 46 Much of this workforce is unprotected, unregulated, informal and unorganised. Women workers, according to Smith, who are employed by transnational corporations because they are more easily exploited, have far more in common with male workers than with the parasitic coercion of business elites, state authorities and criminal gangs. The fall in labour’s share of wealth throughout the neoliberal era is the result, he argues, of capitalism’s desperate efforts to stave off
relations, distributions and dynamics of power which include both those at work in the interaction of elite state and trans-national actors and those inherent in relations, structures and distributions of power affected by and affecting populations across the world, which may not be traceable to any particular set of actors, elite or otherwise (e.g. class, race, gender). All of the literatures referred to above are interested in making claims about world politics in the sense that they are all concerned with diagnosing and prescribing for political developments that are
expressions of tempered behaviour supplanted the combination of explicit violence with the structuring of economic 37 Currents and perspectives 37 life. Moreover, monetarisation enabled large-scale taxation, a precondition of centralised governance. Each tendency was dependent on the other. The emphasis on process was not all. He developed a relational notion of power well before Foucault or Bourdieu did (Arnason, 2015). Power is not a quantified capacity waiting to be seized, but rather is intrinsic to the interaction and conflict of groups, classes and elites. State
. Focusing on elite/state practices tends to reproduce a world that can only be made by powerful actors, rather than ‘of our making’ (Onuf 1989 ). Why should researchers emphasise practices that are already out there for everyone to see? Is the work of social scientists to make visible what is already dominant? Should the work of security analysts not seek instead to make visible the everyday practices that resist power? For it is by recognising exceptional practices as exceptional and essentially as what is important to study that power is reified and sustained. Drawing