“Power Structure” Is No Abstract Phrase
On methods for studying elites
Over a decade ago I read an article about a research conference on the study of elites held at an ivy league university. A political science professor in attendance noted that with wealth concentrated in relatively few hands, it is important to understand what those at the top are doing. Another attendee, a sociology professor, remarked that it is relatively easy to study poor people, as they have less power than elites. My agreement with both points informed why, in 2022, I co-conceptualized and co-organized a methods workshop series, called “Document Analysis for the Datafied State,” for Data & Society. In short, I wanted to be better trained to study elites.
Like many of my fellow sociologists, I study oppression and inequality. Our sociological research often examines how social mobility is shaped by the possession or absence of human capital (formal education, certification, and skills), cultural capital (cultural knowledge and practices favored by elites), and social capital (resources derived from social networks and obligations from social ties). As a discipline, US sociology tends to focus on human, cultural, and social capital more than capitalism and capitalists. This tendency runs the risk of making capital appear more readily accessible, and therefore less exclusive, than when we understand it as being the means of production.
I am not trying to disparage research on human, cultural, and social capital, to which I have contributed my own work. Rather, I am interested in how our focus on these three types of capital might be related to a scholarly preoccupation with the behaviors, habits, and “cultures” of poor and working-class people, who, as noted, are relatively easy to study. In the process, elites — whose activities and politics organize our lives — remain comparatively invisible.
Along with the issue of research access to elites, we are in a political era in which the term “elite” has taken on a cultural significance far removed from how sociologist C. Wright Mills understands it in his 1956 book The Power Elite. For Mills, the power elite is those “in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure…” More, they “need not merely ‘meet the demands of the day and hour’; in some part, they create these demands, and cause others to meet them.”
In our current political climate, the word elite is used to critique a range of groups and activities. By conservatives, elite is used to condemn a so-called anti-populist agenda supposedly being imposed on American culture and institutions by a liberal-left continuum, which often gets depicted in anti-Black terminology as “woke mobs.” Those who reject conservatism, including leftists, can also strip elite of its relationship to power in our uses of the term — reducing it to a critique of privilege or vibes if someone is perceived to be acting pedantic, “rad lib,” or douchey. Both the right and the left can, in their criticisms of elites, romanticize those they depict as non-elites as knowers of a “hidden truth,” or as people “already aware” of what needs to be politically known about society and its institutions based on personal experiences or grievances. But being oppressed, whether imaginarily (as in conservative rhetoric), or for real (as in some leftist rhetoric), does not automatically make us well-informed about elites and how they create the “demands of the day and hour.” Indeed, many of us know little about who elites are, how they operate, who they work with, what they own, what they want to own, what policies they fight for and seek to oppose, and how they are ideologically and materially mapping and designing our quality of life. These are all things to know if we want to politically stop them.
Our methods workshop series
My need to sharpen my methodological skills for studying elites became more apparent when I researched credit scoring. I was struck by how US credit scoring companies insulate themselves from demands by regulators and consumer advocates to be transparent about how they calculate scores. Regulators simply accept the lack of transparency, if begrudgingly. Researchers then fill the governance gap by seeking to identify how to demonstrate algorithmic discrimination in credit scoring and lending systems, wading through the lack of transparency sanctioned by the federal government. This scholarship on algorithmic discrimination is vital, and its necessity tells a larger story about the state’s willingness to concede to the US credit scoring industry, and to outsource the responsibility for anti-discrimination measures to researchers — who have no enforcement power. Yet this story was one I did not have the methodological tools to tell.
I discussed this issue in one of my weekly meetings for the Faculty Fellows cohort I was a part of at Data & Society from 2021–2022. The director of the Fellows program, Sareeta Amrute, suggested I hire a tutor to train me how to read documents like Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. I thought this specialized training was a great idea and wondered if it might also be useful for other D&S researchers. I asked Jenna Burrell, D&S Director of Research, about the possibility of a methods workshop series, and she told me she had been considering doing something similar for D&S’s The Datafied State initiative. Over the next few months, we met and discussed our vision for the series, the topics we wanted to cover, and who might serve as instructors and attend as participants. Siera Dissmore, D&S Program Manager for Research, joined us as a co-organizer of the series.
Running from June to September of 2022, “Document Analysis for the Datafied State” covered patents, SEC filings, privacy impact assessments, public records requests, lobbying reports, government requests for proposals, municipal contracts, and legislative documents. Instructors included college professors and people working in government, research, and non-profit organizations. As our series focused on document analysis, each instructor was asked to select a relevant document they wanted participants to read before the workshop. Some instructors prepared exercises for us to go through as a group. And there was plenty of time for Q&A.
In these workshops we learned what the documents reveal about elites’ activities, as well as what they hide. Patent documents, for example, often don’t tell us much outright, or obscure crucial details: for one thing, the name of the person granted the patent isn’t always the same as the person making money from it. Another thing we don’t learn simply from studying a patent as a document: patents are sometimes expressions of competition between corporations that have patent offices, where patent applications are constantly churned out. Overall, instructors explained how to read the documents and taught us what is involved in their creation and how they are used by social actors and institutions.
Why targeted methods matter
The methods workshop series made me reflect on how sociological research methods are commonly taught. As someone who earned a BA, MA, and PhD in sociology, and who regularly teaches college-level advanced social research methods, I was unfamiliar with document analysis. And few of the methods I was taught, or that are covered in a standard methods textbook, prepared me to research the activities of elites through the documentation of their businesses, financial and legal activities, and interactions with the state. But like any method, document analysis provides only part of the story. Traditional research methods like interviews, ethnography, and content analysis can greatly complement the study of documents, and be used to research both those at the top and how poor and working-class people are impacted by, resist, and organize against the policies and politics of elites.
While this essay has focused a lot on sociology as a discipline, I do not believe the research of elites should be conducted by only academicians. This type of targeted research is important for anyone who is interested in tracing and challenging inequality and building political power. Many organizers already know this: Labor unions have research departments. Coalitions working to defund the police learn how to analyze city budgets and contracts between cities and surveillance companies. Decades ago, I visited Philadelphia’s City Hall several times to use the computer that stored property records so I could, on behalf of the community organization I worked for, identify who owned properties in Chinatown as we worked with the neighborhood’s residents to address their housing and work conditions. In the 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) also prioritized research. As Julian Bond, who served as SNCC’s Communications Director, notes:
[SNCC] had the best research arm of any civil rights organization before or since. Field secretaries entered the rural, small-town South armed with evidence of who controlled and owned what, and who, in turn, owned them. “Power structure” was no abstract phrase for SNCC’s band of brothers and sisters, but a real list with real people’s names and addresses and descriptions of assets and interlocking directorships, demonstrating how large interests, ranging from Memphis and New York banks to the Queen of England, might own at least partial control of a plantation in Mississippi’s Delta. Knowledge of who owned what was crucial to SNCC’s strategies. From it, we knew that Southern peonage was no accident, but rather the deliberate result of economic policies determined thousands of miles away from the cotton field.
When I first read this passage, Bond’s point that “‘power structure’ was no abstract phrase” stood out. I value abstraction and don’t think everything has to be operationalized or fit into a sociological equation to be politically useful — to suggest as much can stifle our imaginations and narrow our lines of inquiry. But the methods workshop series deepened my appreciation for being able to couple our political critiques with specificity. The way the term elite is thrown around today by both conservatives and leftists, and the way oppressed people can be romanticized as having inherent knowledge about the mechanics of structural violence, do little to help us understand and confront the specifics of what we are politically dealing with.
Strengthening our research methods is not simply about scholarly rigor. The world as organized by elites is a miserable place and I want relief. And sometimes relief involves study. Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out, “…activists throughout the history of liberation struggle have been nerds. Spontaneity has its power and uses, however, the most successful large-scale changes come about because people have figured out what to do and do it.” Knowing who to be mad at is part of the work. Researching elites’ identities, activities, networks, and investments helps us know who we might target with protests, boycotts, strikes, lawsuits, electoral campaigns, cultural work, and organizing. Simply put, research can help us move from abstraction or critique to targeted action. Or, as James Baldwin writes in No Name in the Street, “To study the economic structure of this country, to know which hands control the wealth, and to which end, seems an academic exercise — and yet it is necessary, all of it is necessary, for discipline, for knowledge, and for power.”
