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Canvassing conversations: obstinate issues in studies of elites and elite education

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Adam Howard at Colby College
Adam Howard
Jane Kenway at Monash University (Australia)
Jane Kenway
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Abstract

Studies of elites and elite education have largely not involved rigorous debate, either with regard to the conceptual resources deployed or methodologies adopted. Even the concepts elite and elite schools have not been problematized much. Further, there is a tendency for people to cite, rather than engage or dispute each other. So while the number of published studies increases and the field grows in size, and expands in focus, it is not necessarily growing through spirited dialog and critique. The first part of this paper considers the ways in which the methodological scope in the study of elites and elite education has been restrained and limited through the repetition of particular methodological frameworks and practices. Drawing on the work included in this special issue and other recent research, we then suggest some methodological possibilities for expanding this scope. In the second main part, we offer some provocations about the theoretical resources that are conventionally deployed. We argue that scholars need to be much more critically self-conscious about their uses of elite theories and class theories and much more aware of the ideological implications of their research.
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Elite Schools in Globalising Circumstances
Elite Schools in Globalising Circumstances
New Conceptual Directions and Connections
New Conceptual Directions and Connections
Edited by
Edited by Jane Kenway
Jane Kenway,
, Cameron McCarthy
Cameron McCarthy
Routledge – 2016 – 1 62 p ages
Routledge – 2016 – 1 62 p ages
Purchasing Options:
Purchasing Options:
Hardback
Hardback:
: $155.00
$155.00
978-1-13-810093-0
978-1-13-810093-0
October 18th 2015
October 18th 2015
Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of scholars
seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary scholarship on schooling.
Based on a 5-year extended global ethnography of elite schools in nine different countries—countries defined by colonial pasts linked to England—
the contributors make a powerful case for the rethinking of elite schools and elite class formation theory in light of contemporary processes of
globalization and transnational change.
Prestigious, high-status schools have long been seen as critical institutional vehicles directly contributing to the societal processes of elite
selection and reproduction. This book asserts that much has changed and that these schools can no longer rest on their past laurels and
accomplishments. Instead they must re-cast their heritages and tradition in order to navigate the new globally competitive educational field
enabling them to succeed in a world in which the globalization of educational markets, the global ambitions and imaginations of school youth, and
the emergence of new powerful players peddling entrepreneurial models of curriculum and education, have placed contemporary schooling under
tremendous pressure. This insightful and though-provoking volume provides a well-researched perspective on the nature of contemporary
schooling in the globalizing era. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.
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Name: – Routledge
Description: Edited by Jane Kenway, Cameron McCarthy. Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of
scholars seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary...
Categories: Educational Research, International & Comparative Education, Social Class, Curriculum Studies, Teaching & Learning, Globalization
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... According to the articles of Adam Howard and Jane Kenway, due to the understanding of the research topic, the methodology issues are often ignored in the research on elite and elite education, and researchers pay more attention to the application of theoretical resources, while the discussion of research methods and techniques is insufficient .Researchers tend to reuse familiar methodological frameworks and practices, and this repetition limits methodological vision and innovation. At the same time, researchers studying elite and elite educational institutions face challenges at all stages, from entering the field of research to disseminating results [9]. Therefore, this paper employs both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to examine the data from the article. ...
... Population flow has a strong effect on the dissemination and enhancement of elite culture, so the relationship between population flow and elite culture should be further discussed. There are also articles that do not focus on the transmission path but on the methodology of elite cultural studies, for example, in the work of Adam Howard and Jane Kenway, Certainly, a rare few papers in the field of elite studies in education have focused on methodology itself [9].This may be caused by the particularity of cultural issues research itself. ...
The Dynamic Connection Between Elite Culture and Cultural Dissemination
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  • Mar 2025
Elite culture is the culture created, disseminated and shared by the humanistic and technical intellectuals in the intellectual class. Cultural communication refers to the communication and interaction between different cultures and social members with different cultural backgrounds. The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamic relationship between elite culture and different cultural communication, and to elaborate on the development of elite culture in different times and cultural backgrounds, as well as the two-way influence between elite culture and cultural communication. Most of the articles at home and abroad discuss the evolution of elite culture and mass culture, or the relationship between mass culture and cultural communication. However, there is no direct link between elite culture and cultural dissemination. This paper adopts a qualitative research method, classifies 20 articles according to time, research method and research topic, and finds that the research trend is 2014-2024, and the research content shifts from elite culture to mass culture. It is found that elite culture has a direct impact on mass culture over time, and thus has a dynamic interaction with cultural communication.
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... Let us count the ways. First, most of the educational research, published in the English language, has been about schools in England, the USA, Canada and Australia, although over recent times, and at long last, this is changing as studies from a diverse range of countries are now included in various English language edited collections (Gunter, Apple & Hall, 2016;Maxwell & Aggleton, 2016;Ball, van Zanten & Darchy-Koechlin, 2015;Kenway & McCarthy, 2014;Kenway & Koh, 2015;Howard & Kenway, 2015). Even so, the Anglophone literature is restricted in its overall purchase without access to that published in languages other than English. ...
Introduction: Reading the dynamics of educational privilege through a spatial lens
Chapter
Full-text available
  • Mar 2016
Elite schools are contentious institutions and elicit intense debate. They are seen to either represent schooling's gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places at the apogee of all the institutions that matter. Or they are seen as socially isolated, luxury enclaves that breed and feed privilege and power and entrenched educational and social inequality and division. No matter where one stands in relation to such debates it is difficult to disassociate 'privilege' from elite schools. To ask in what ways elite schools are privileged invariably attracts predictable replies. They express privilege, it is frequently argued, through their high fees and thus their wealthy clientele, the grandeur of their grounds and buildings, their state-of-the-art learning facilities, their curricula and extracurricular range, their legions of famous alumni, and their powerful connections to elite universities and other significant institutions. And the list goes on especially when the focus shifts beyond such material and symbolic facets of privilege; what Daloz (2010, p. 94) calls "vicarious display". For then we get into the subtleties that researchers have been teasing out for some time. They show, not just how privilege is material and materialised, but how it is produced through an intricate array of practices, which adjust, over time, to suit changing economic, socio-cultural, and geo-political circumstances. Even so, privilege is a slippery term often mobilised to speak to all sorts of individual and group advantage. The notion of privilege has been well explored and debated as Adam Howard, Aimee Polimeno and Brianne Wheeler (2014) illustrate in a useful overview of the literature where they link discussions of class privilege to other forms. They go on to show how affluent young people variously experience and express their privilege and the identity work involved. Interestingly quite a number of recent publications on elite schools have made the concept 'privilege' their leitmotif. Take another example. Utilising the concepts, "affect"
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... The elite is a nebulous social category having no specific parameters to isolate its members who manipulate the destiny of a country (McCartney & Zaidi, 2019). The conceptual complexity of the elite poses an issue (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017) and predisposes it to numerous descriptive ways of analysis (Howard & Kenway, 2015). It is specifically so in the context of "…space (global versus local), time (old versus new), or field (political versus cultural)" (Hoyer, 2022, p.2). Hafner-Burton et al. (2013) define the elite as "the small number of decision-makers who occupy the top positions in social and political structures" (p. ...
Elite Governance, Development, and Public Safety in NigeriaEnglish: EnglishEnglish
Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2024
Governance defines how political actors use ethical or corrupt practices to influence mass participation in political decision-making in public affairs. This article interrogates the implications of the elite monopoly of power for development and public safety in Nigeria. We anchored the study on Pareto’s circulation of elite theory. It adopts a qualitative method to collect secondary data which are content and thematically analyzed. Results indicated that the gap between the elite and the citizenry threatens the development and public safety in Nigeria. This article concludes that elitism should not only socially engage with the citizenry, but it should also reproduce egalitarian political values and actors for inclusion in Nigeria’s democratic destiny. Drawing on the values of the conceptual lions (oselu) of Pareto to scare his conceptual foxes (ojelu) vices out of political domination through electoral re-socialization could neutralize elite conspiracy against the majority and boost the capacity of vulnerable Nigerians to initiate and implement development and public safety defenses. It suggests that a true fiscal federalism predicated on ethical reorientation in politics could reinvent Nigeria, and relieve her of the burden of underdevelopment and insecurity into which elite avarice has plunged the country.
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Elite multilingualism
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This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop
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Hierarchies of Elitism among Urban and Rural Palestinian Students in Israel
Article
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This research investigates Palestinian students residing in both urban and rural areas who are enrolled in an elite high school located in a mixed Arab-Jewish city in northern Israel. We investigate how these divergent backgrounds influence their experiences and perceptions of their elite identities and how elite identities within national minority sub-groups (urban and rural) impact the formation and perpetuation of intra-group hierarchies. We find that elite identities are influenced by geographic positionality, that hierarchies exist within the same minority elite and that these factors shape both personal and collective identities.
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‘A Home Away from Home’: Space, Ritual and Performance at an Elite Boys’ School in England
Article
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This article advances ethnographic understandings of the distinctive micro-practices of the formation of elites taking place within Fortune Park School, a private boys’ school in England. It focuses primarily on two related axes of the elite school environment; the layout, use and presentation of the school’s physical space, and an analysis of school ritual. I argue that the veneer of formality presented by the school is a ‘frontstage’ performance, disguising a network of interactions or ‘backstage’ performances that are characterised by a sense of informality or ease. Therefore, I show that the rituals taking place within the school buildings reflect a constant tension between formal and informal states of being. Learning to navigate this tension becomes part of the everyday experience of a Fortune Park School student, contributing towards the acquisition of valued forms of embodied capital that have been demonstrated as advantageous for those with it in their possession.
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Researching Policy Elites in Education
Chapter
  • Jan 2024
This chapter examines methodological issues associated with interviewing policy elites. There is limited literature in the field of policy sociology in education that engages with the issue of researching policy elites, yet research in this field often involves conducting interviews with officials and senior staff in government and other organisations, including education businesses. These interviews are a socially complex phenomenon in terms of researcher positionality, recruiting and assessing participants, conducting interviews, and analysing and representing interview data. This chapter proffers a comparative analysis of interview research undertaken with policy elites across three cases (government, an international organisation and a multinational edu-business) to highlight common and distinct concerns, challenges and issues. We argue for the necessity to seriously consider interview data, as well as interview processes, as important analytical resources in the development of defensible accounts of education policy development and contexts and the role of policy elites in this work. We advocate for researchers to reject epistemological innocence and to be reflexive in their analyses and representations of interview data.
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The curriculum of privilege: elite private boys’ school alumni’s engagements with gender justice
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Scholars in critical masculinities studies argue that we need men involved and engaged in gender equity movements for gender justice to be realised. Yet we need to know more about how different groups of men are understanding gender equity and what the barriers might be. Amidst significant media interest in elite private boys’ schooling and its possible (re)production of sexist cultures, this paper explores how 13 men who attended such schools in Australia between the 1970s and the 2000s understand gender justice, revealing a diversity of positions and practices across the different generational groups. We argue the men’s engagements with gender justice are shaped by a broad ‘curriculum of privilege’ including school and non-school based experiences that mediates their lives. Further research with both elite boys’ schools and their alumni is needed to better understand generational change in their engagements with gender justice.
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Ethnography “is not what it used to be”: Rethinking Space, Time, Mobility, and Multiplicity
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Ethnography has established itself as a key strategy of qualitative research in education, because it is so versatile, flexible, and ambiguous. Its growing importance coincides with an increasing diversity of »discovered« educational realities. In the process, many basic assumptions have turned into genuine tasks of research. Where are the places and times of learning, education, and social work to be found? Who are the actors and addressees? How are education and learning performed and enacted? The contributions to this volume discuss the multiple challenges that ethnographic research has to confront when exploring the multimodality, plurality, and translocality of educational realities.
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