Organization Studies

http://oss.sagepub.com/ Masters of the Universe: Power and Elites in Organization Studies

Michael I. Reed Organization Studies 2012 33: 203 DOI: 10.1177/0170840611430590 The online version of this article can be found at: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/33/2/203

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OSS33210.1177/0170840611430590ReedOrganization Studies

Article

Masters of the Universe: Power and Elites in Organization Studies

Michael I. Reed
Cardiff University, UK

Organization Studies 33(2) 203221 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0170840611430590 www.egosnet.org/os

Abstract
Elite analysis has re-emerged as a central theme in contemporary organization studies. This paper builds on recent contributions to this revitalized field by developing a distinctive theoretical approach and substantive agenda for the study of power relations and elite ruling in organization studies. By drawing on a realist/ materialist ontology and a neo-Weberian analytical framework, the paper identifies the idea of command situations as the key concept for identifying changing mechanisms and forms of elite domination and control in contemporary socio-political orders. Three case histories are subsequently discussed in order to provide illustrative examples of the way in which this analytical framework can enhance our understanding of the complex interplay between institutional and interstitial power as it shapes the emergence of hybrid governance regimes through which contemporary regimes of elite domination and rule become organized.

Keywords
command situations, domination, elites, hybrids, power, realism

Introduction
This paper sets out a distinctive theoretical approach and substantive agenda for the study of power relations and elite ruling in organization studies. It draws on a realist ontology (Reed, 2009) and a neo-Weberian analytical framework (Mann, 2006) to inform the development of its core analytical conceptualizations and their deployment in three illustrative case histories of changing forms of elite power and control (Aly & Heim, 1991; Oreskes & Conway, 2010; Soldatov & Borogan, 2010). In the course of developing this analysis, the paper initially provides a sympathetic critique of the central arguments outlined in Zald and Lounsburys (2010) recent re-articulation of a neoinstitutionalist approach to elites, expertise and command posts. The paper also responds to the latters call to arms to re-engage organizational studies with fundamental questions about elites and the organizational infrastructure that they operate and use to wield influence (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010, p. 964). But it does so in a way that attempts to go beyond their, essentially programmatic, field perspective on command posts by developing a more elaborate conceptual
Corresponding author: Professor Michael I. Reed, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK. Email: reedm@cardiff.ac.uk

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architecture in which the idea of command situations becomes the key concept for identifying the generative mechanisms shaping and reshaping changing forms of elite power and control. In this way, the paper provides an integrated set of analytical tools by which we can more deeply penetrate the structural dynamics of elite domination and rule. As Zald and Lounsbury clearly recognize, organization studies desperately needs to develop more sophisticated treatments of power in its various guises (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010, p. 983). Consequently, this paper will outline a set of core explanatory concepts through which the complex interplay between power as domination and power as network can be more fully understood and its implications for analysing hybridized forms of elite rule more clearly appreciated. By mapping out the complex zones of manoeuvre (Clark, 2000) between institutionalized power hierarchies (power as domination) and interstitial power matrices (power as network), organization studies will be better equipped to explain the dynamics of elite rule and the hybrid governance regimes that they generate.

Wizards of Oz
For Zald and Lounsbury (2010, p. 970), the very notion of elite seems to be in flux. Most of this is due, they contend to the fact that the dominant directions of intellectual change in much of organizational sociology have been to downplay the role of elites and hierarchical power in analysis, and turn away from the pressing policy choices and problems facing contemporary society (2010, p. 968, emphasis added). Yet, key aspects of what they propose to correct this lacuna in organization studies seems to reinforce, rather than reverse, this underlying trend towards an intellectual fascination with horizontal, culturally based forms of power and control, with its consequent neglect of hierarchical forms of power that is, with structures of domination and their crucial importance for understanding, much less explaining, elite formation, reproduction and elaboration. The central concept that Zald and Lounsbury advance to reverse this continuing neglect of hierarchical power and elite control in much of contemporary organizational theorizing and analysis is that of command posts and its re-articulation within a neo-institutionalist field approach. The latter, they contend, can be conceptually revivified and reformulated in a way that re-awakens our interest, as organizational analysts and as citizens,
[in] traditional centres of societal power (e.g. varied governmental agencies, the military and other formal bodies of governance such as NATO, United Nations, World Bank etc.,) that regulate, oversee, and aim to maintain social order in society and economy, both at regional, nation-state and inter-state levels. (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010, p. 964)

From an organizational analysis perspective, they continue, this will demand a sustained analytical and substantive focus on the complex asteroid belt of bureaucratic positions and personnel that have varying degrees and forms of institutional jurisdiction over critical policy-making domains and which play a strategic role in producing and reproducing power centres of elite expertise and control. Yet, throughout Zald and Lounsburys programmatic project for reviving elite analysis within organization studies, there remains a highly ambivalent, if not contradictory, attitude to culturally based and horizontally focused neo-Foucauldian approaches in which representations, discourses and narratives move to centre stage [and] stratification, power and domination become secondary considerations (Zald & Lounsbury, p. 969, emphasis added).

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The field approach to command posts, Zald and Lounsbury contend, can facilitate a broader conception of elite power and control that goes beyond the orthodox analysis of elite recruitment, socialization and reproduction in a number of respects. First, it retains a strong interest in state actors that have substantial policy-making power and autonomy. Second, it offers a more flexible, fluid and multidimensional approach to elite power that better equips us, theoretically and methodologically, to understand the more complex forms of expert power and control on which contemporary forms of governance such as polyarchic authority structures and systems (Clegg, Courpasson & Phillips, 2006) are increasingly dependent. Third, it sensitizes us, as researchers and citizens, to more covert efforts to mobilize and coordinate social movements that can work their way into organizations and societies that challenge extant authority structures, and enable the emergence of new and innovative political regimes, selectively combining different structures and mechanisms of elite rule in hybrid forms (Courpasson & Clegg, 2006; Crouch, 2005). Finally, by conceptualizing command post fields as, simultaneously, levels of analysis and organizational units, the neo-institutional approach that Zald and Lounsbury advocate can combine an analytical interest in the cultural/normative/cognitive aspects of elite power and its material/ideological/ political aspects.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Zald and Lounsburys call to arms has much to commend it in that it reaffirms the centrality of elite analysis to an understanding and explanation of major shifts in macro-level power structures and their complex impact on and interaction with micro-level control dynamics as they work their way through changes to organizational policy and practice. But, as they openly admit, their analysis is unsatisfactory, or at least unfinished, in a number of respects and much more needs to be done by way of theory building before the study of elite power and control returns to its centre-stage role in organization studies. Their fitful programmatic attempt to flesh out an institutional approachat best sketches a research direction [and] we have not fully worked-out a conceptual architecture (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010, p. 983). Nevertheless, their analysis does establish a conceptual base camp in a number of respects. First and foremost, it reinforces the need to combine a position-based approach and an actionbased approach in the study of organizational elites (Reed, in press); that is, it properly reminds us that the study of elite power and control must draw on an integrated ontological and analytical framework that is conceptually equipped to understand and explain the complex interaction between institutionalized power structures and emergent power networks as it shapes and reshapes organizational policy and practice. Second, Zald and Lounsburys analysis reaffirms the analytical and substantive significance of centres of power to the understanding and explanation of elite rule and control. In this respect, their analysis theoretically prioritizes that is, in terms of developing conceptual frameworks and analytical tools that facilitate the development of explanatory theory the hierarchically stratified and systemically reproduced power structures on and through which ruling elite groups establish and exercise their domination and control. Third, their analysis also reaffirms the inherently dynamic nature of the domination structures that generate, sustain and transform different forms of elite ruling and the organizational regimes through which the latter are elaborated, mobilized and changed. Thus, their recognition of the re-emergence of new, hybridized polyarchic governance regimes and the relatively novel elite ruling strategies through which they have been developed (of which, more later) reminds us that innovations in political regimes and the domination structures that support them have a long-term continuity with what has gone before as well as presaging new beginnings. Finally, Zald and Lounsburys analysis illustrates the

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dangers of oscillating, ontologically and analytically, between a conception of elites as unified rational actors and as temporary working alliances. The former presumes a level of strategic foresight and calculated continuity in elite behaviour that simply cannot be supported by the historical record or by contemporary accounts of elite domination and rule. In direct contrast, the latter swings to the opposite extreme of presuming that elite ruling strategies and structures are so irredeemably contextually contingent and culturally relative that they are constitutionally incapable of taking on anything more than a minimal degree of organizational coherence and continuity. Instead of this Hobsons choice between neo-rationalism and postmodernist chic, Zald and Lounsbury offer the beginnings of an analysis that accords elites sufficient ideological cohesion, political skill and organizational capacity so as to constitute ruling minority groups embedded in structures of domination that give them the potential corporate power to engage in strategies through which their material and social interests might be systematically pursued. Elites may not be quite masters of the universe but neither are they wizards of Oz nervously hiding behind the flimsiest of protective curtains that can be pulled apart by those brave and determined enough to face the wrath of supposedly powerful individuals and groups who can be unmasked as timid deceivers if only we are prepared to challenge their authority. Indeed, the former metaphor may come closer to encapsulating and conveying the realities of elite domination and control. This is so to the extent that it contextualizes elite power struggles and relationships within a series of complex interactions and situations in which the temporary resolution of elite power conflicts and control struggles are indelibly shaped, but never determined, by privileged access to and skilled deployment of the scarce material and symbolic resources made available by hierarchically stratified power structures and mechanisms that underlie interactional orders (Layder, 1997, 2005). Viewed through this sort of analytical lens, the development of new forms of organizational governance can be seen as the outcome of a highly complex interplay between the incipient decay of institutionalized power hierarchies and the established forms of elite rule which they previously sustained and emerging interstitial power networks that generate the new command situations that come to challenge the political status quo.

Theorizing Elites 1 (Core Assumptions)

Given the analytical bridgehead and programmatic agenda that Zald and Lounsbury have built and constructed, the problem now becomes one of taking this forward theoretically in a way that incorporates the advantages of their neo-institutionalist approach without compromising its ontological and analytical commitment to developing explanatory models of elite ruling that place the dynamics of domination at their conceptual core. Building upon Zald and Lounsburys analysis, the theorization of elite ruling that is subsequently advanced in this paper is based on a number of interrelated presuppositions. The initial premise for this theorization is the belief that the investigation and analysis of elites should be focused on the relations and interactions between corporate agents who have the structural place and organizational power (Archer, 2003) to shape the governing structures and regimes through which the everyday lives of citizens are ordered and managed (Clegg et al., 2006, p. 343). This means that the overriding explanatory priority for the study of organizational elites must be the complex interplay between established structures of domination, the elite ruling strategies and relations that emerge from creative engagement with the latter, and the modes of resistance which they, in turn, engender on the part of corporate agents formally excluded from the process and practice of elite rule.

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Once this initial premise is accepted, then a number of inferences necessarily follow in its wake. First, that the radical de-centring of elite theorizing and investigation evident in theoretical approaches which have been highly influential in organization studies in recent years (Callon & Latour, 1981; Clegg, 1989; Hardt & Negri, 2000; Law, 1994; Law & Hassard, 1999; Knights, 2009; Miller & Rose, 2008; Munro, 2009) has gone too far; it has weakened the analytical capacity of organizational researchers to account for the power of the centre to dominate, control and manage lower-level corporate agents effectively excluded from active participation in the strategic policy-formulating process. Thus, the recent fascination, if not obsession, with power without a centre, or rather the multiple centres of calculation and authority that traverse and link up personal, social and economic life (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 20), has led to a corresponding neglect of the indispensable analytical tools required to identify and investigate the dynamic points of intersection between such contingent and temporary horizontal coalitions or alliances and the much more enduring, resilient and obdurate vertical domination structures within which they are embedded. Second, that the re-centring of elite investigation and analysis in organization studies can only be achieved by drawing extensively on philosophical and theoretical resources that are equipped to deal with the hierarchically stratified nature of organizational power as it becomes solidified into institutionalized relations of domination and subordination that persist over time and place but which also contain the generative mechanisms through which their incipient decay and eventual degeneration will be realized (Lukes, 2005). Finally, that this rediscovery of the complex interplay between vertical and horizontal forms of power relations provides the analytical key to understanding the dynamic interrelationships between established structures of dominancy and emergent elite strategies as they shape and reshape the hybridized forms of organizational power and control increasingly prevalent in advanced capitalist political economies and societies (Reed, 2010a, 2010 b). Taken as a complete package, the presuppositions outlined above clearly indicate that state power must return theoretically centre-stage to the investigation of the changing dynamics and forms of elite ruling within a proper appreciation of the underlying strains and stresses that established structures of dominancy have been experiencing in all advanced capitalist political economies and societies since the 1980s. This is not to call for the return to theorizations of state power that fail to recognize the substantial challenges that emerging forms of transnational and indeed, subnational power present to nation-state level governance regimes (Dean, 1999; Stewart, 2001; Thrift, 2005). Indeed, it is clearly evident for example, in areas such as the regulation of professional services and occupations (Faulconbridge & Muzio, 2008; Standing, 2010) that there has been an underlying dynamic of long-term institutional change within which globalized transnational firms and the concentrations of elite power that they reproduce and service have challenged the organizational capacity and ideological legitimacy of the nation state and its regulative agencies to govern emerging centres of expert authority. As a result, the governance of expert services and the power relations that it generates and reflects have become more complex, multi-layered and contested as sedimented forms of state-based regulation and emerging forms of supranational firm-based regulation vie for control within and dominance over expert jurisdictional domains. But if, as Haugaard and Clegg (2009, p. 22) recently suggest, state power is an institutionally mediated condensation of the changing balance of forces, then this holds true for all other forms of power relations and the structures of dominancy through which they are generated, interpolated and transmitted. In this respect, we need to be aware that institutionally mediated condensations [of power] can take a range of organizational forms that cannot be explained in isolation from the positional power relations that is, to use Webers (1978) term, the structures of dominancy within which

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they are located and from which elite groups mobilize scarce authoritative and allocative (Giddens, 1979) resources in pursuit of their strategic mobility projects as they engage in control struggles with other elite and non-elite groups. But state power takes on a particular significance for explaining changing forms of elite rule and the contested terrain on which it is unavoidably mobilized and, however imperfectly, realized. It provides the overarching structures of dominancy and centres of strategic control within which inter-elite, intra-elite and contra-elite struggles are fought out at different levels of socio-political organization. By generating and sustaining the ideological legitimacy and operational capability of the overarching institutional architecture through which state power becomes condensed into organizational forms available to elite corporate agents engaged in control struggles over access to and mobilization of scarce (material and symbolic) resources, the bureaucratic-democratic state remains the dominant condensation of concentrated and centralized infra-structural power available in advanced capitalist political economies and societies (Schroeder, 2006). It remains the dominant source and mode of political power as centralized, territorial regulation of social life. As Mann (2006, pp. 3523) insists:
Only the state has this centralized-territorial spatial form [and] a monopoly of institutionalized violence. Infrastructural power is the essence of the routinized powers of states, while the exercise of despotic power is a sign of a weaker state. The part of social life which is intensely, routinely regulated and co-ordinated in a centralized and territorial fashion concerns networks of political power. In these senses political is the very opposite of military power.

Given the theoretical presuppositions outlined above, the rest of this paper draws on a number of analytical resources to construct an integrated theoretical framework for analysing changing forms of elite rule and its subsequent application in the interpretation of three case histories on the emergence of new technocratic and scientific elites that challenge the power and control of established administrative elites. In the next section of the paper a neo-Weberian conception and typology of elites is adumbrated and is followed by a brief excursion into a realist/materialist historical sociology of elite rule as reflected in the work of Mann (1986, 1993, 2006). The penultimate section of the paper provides an overview of three case histories that illustrate the explanatory potential of the integrated theoretical framework previously developed. A concluding section summarizes the wider implications of the papers core arguments for the study of organizational elites.

Theorizing Elites 2 (Key Concepts)

The major analytical and methodological controversy shaping the development of elite theory in recent years has been the relative conceptual coherence and explanatory merits of a structural or positional theorization of elites as opposed to a behavioural or strategic theorization. Over 30 years ago, Pahl and Winkler (1974) argued strongly in favour of an action-based theorization of elites over a structurally-based theorization; the former, they contended, facilitated an analytical focus on the dynamics of elite formation and mobilization across institutional fields that could not be accommodated within the latter because of its obsession with relatively fixed and static hierarchical authority structures. For them, the focus of explanatory interest must be on the decision-taking arenas in which elite power struggles over authoritative control that is, the organizational capacity to assign scarce material resources to strategic policy initiatives are fought out, rather than persisting with a fixation on the positional structures through which allocative control that is, the operational management of such scarce resources is routinely secured. Who elites are, how

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they institutionally reproduce themselves, and the positional structures through which this is made possible are, for Pahl and Winkler (1974), much less interesting than what elites do and how their collective action impacts on organizational outcomes. Yet, 30 years or so later, researchers such as Whitley (2003), Clegg et al. (2006), Scott (2008) and now Zald and Lounsbury (2010) are insisting that contemporary elite theory must analytically differentiate between organized minorities occupying positions of command and control located at the higher levels of domination structures from which they can exercise strategic authoritative and allocative control and those organized minorities that are formally and substantively excluded from effective participation within such institutionalized power relations. In this way, contemporary elite theorists and researchers calling for an analytical refocusing and substantive reorientation around structurally or positional-based theorizations of organizational elites are suggesting that legitimate minority rule through occupancy of formal command posts within domination structures and the organizational capacity that it generates to control strategic policy initiatives must remain at the centre of elite analysis. If the focus of elite analysis shifts exclusively towards a field-level or culturally based approach in which the interstitial power networks that emerge from the complex mosaic of horizontal interactions and interrelations between coalitions or alliances of expert groups become the overriding explanatory priority then the underlying structural mechanisms that generate and sustain the wider set of vertically stratified elite power relations within which the latter are embedded will be lost from analytical view and substantive concern. It is all very well to guard against the tendency towards totalizing hegemony that some commentators (Savage & Williams, 2008, pp. 1517) associate with more structurally based approaches to elite research and analysis. But this may entail a fundamental underestimation, if not systemic avoidance, of the explanatory significance of hierarchically stratified power structures and the strategic role that ruling minorities play in reproducing them. Indeed, within this field or culturally based approach to elite analysis there is an underlying ontological and analytical presumption in favour of domain-specific horizontal networks of elite influence and control that is theoretically incapable of engaging with domain spanning domination structures and their key role in generating and sustaining different forms of elite rule across a wide range of field-level domains. This is because the whole focus of attention is shifted decisively away from the latter in favour of the inherently fluid and contested field domains in which various forms of capital symbolic, discursive, ideological and political are made available to expert elites in their struggles to monopolize control over the highly complex rules of the game that shape such struggles and their outcomes (Bourdieu, 1996; Foucault, 2003; Golsorkhi, Lounsbury & Ramirez, 2009; Ho, 2009). Domination relations and their strategic role in generating and reproducing institutionalized forms of elite power and control cannot be understood exclusively, or even primarily, as cultural phenomena that is, as structuring cultural practices that socially construct and discursively represent the privileged subjectivities and biographies of elite groups such as investment bankers (Ho, 2009, pp. 295324). Rather, the former need to be theorized as underlying socio-material relations and conditions that are ideologically legitimated and operationally sustained through various forms of organized elite rule and the collective political interests that they mobilize and protect. Building on older and more recent work in elite theory (Derber, Schwartz & Magrass, 1990; Domhoff, 1967, 1971; Mills, 1956; Rothkopf, 2008; Scott, 1996, 2001, 2008; Useem, 1984), it is possible to develop a neo-Weberian theorization of elite power and control that avoids the totalizing tendencies of some structurally based approaches while properly accessing the inextricable analytical and substantive link between domination and elite rule. The explanatory focus for the theoretical development of this neo-Weberian approach must be on the underlying stratification

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mechanisms as the key generative mechanisms through which power relations are organized into structures of domination (Scott, 1996, p. 189) and the strategic role that elites play in generating, reproducing and transforming the governance regimes that emerge from these domination structures. As Scott (1996, pp. 1912, emphasis added) contends:
They [stratification mechanisms] are complex structures that are characterized by fissures, faults, folds and intrusions, and that involve complex metamorphic processes. Strata do not simply lie on top of one another in neat layers like a jam sandwich. They are compressed and distorted into complex shapes that can be understood only through painstaking research and with an analytical imagination that is able to reconstruct the processes through which they have been formedSocial strata reflect the complex processes through which the underlying power situations that people occupy operate, in both reinforcing and contradictory ways, to generate their life chances and life styles Each [power situation] is to be understood as an aspect of the distribution of power within a society, and as arising from the structuring of power into relations of domination.

He further suggests that of the three main ideal types of power situations which people occupy class situations, status situations and command situations command situations are the least analytically developed in that they require a theoretically and methodologically sophisticated sociological analysis of political command and its implications for strata formation (Scott, 1996, p. 193). As generic structural mechanisms for organizing power relations into structures of domination, command situations are complex institutional formations consisting of hierarchically stratified configurations of interorganizational and intraorganizational positions and relations that are shaped and reshaped primarily, but not exclusively, through the offensive and defensive political command strategies deployed by elite groups located at different levels of such configurations. In their struggle for monopoly access to the scarce economic, political, social and cultural resources that such command situations make available and the marked advantages that such monopoly access gives to some elite groups over others elite groups strive to control the stratification mechanisms through which the latter are generated, reproduced and transformed. Thus, the formation, operation, reproduction and transformation of the stratification mechanisms through which power relations become organized into domination structures have to be analysed as the contested institutional outcomes of complex political struggles within and between ruling minorities as they strive to gain long-term advantage over other elite groups collectively engaged in the quest to control the trajectory of social change. Contra Pahl and Winkler (1974), we need an historical sociology of organizational elites that will conceptually and methodologically integrate the study of positional elites with action elites to provide the analytical and substantive basis for the analysis of domination structures as complex formations that stand in hierarchical relation with each other, but are rarely formed into simple hierarchies. They are multidimensional social structures that intersect and overlap with one another and that may be fragmented into distinct factions (Scott, 1996, p. 194). Considered in this way, the domination structures through which elites generate, sustain and contest organized power relations are inherently dynamic institutional formations, inevitably subject to cross-cutting stresses and tensions which ensure that their long-term resilience and continuity are always exposed to pressures and challenges of varying degrees of porosity and intensity. Such a conceptualization of elites also theoretically combines an interest in what Scott (2008) calls the storage and holding of power with the exercise and mobilization of power insofar as it necessarily links the organization of power relations into domination structures, with the command strategies mobilized by contending elite groups as they struggle to retain monopoly access to and control over the resource distributions that such structures institutionalize.

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Table 1. Four Ideal Type Elites Type Coercive elites Allocative elites Expert elites Authoritative elites Strategy Monopoly control over means/mechanisms of correction Monopoly control over means/mechanisms of accumulation Monopoly control over means/mechanisms of acculturation Monopoly control over means/mechanisms of regulation Domains

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Military, security, law enforcement Corporate business, finance, industry, communication Professional fields, media, academia, professional service firms Central and local government, representative agencies

Scotts (1996) analysis leads him to suggest that we need more organizationally fine-grained institutional maps of the highly diverse and complex administrative systems through which various forms of command situation are sustained. One way in which this form of analysis might be progressed is by constructing a more analytically developed typology of elite groups and the stratification mechanisms that they rely on to generate and sustain monopoly control over scarce resources vital to their success in the struggle for political power and the command situations that it generates. In turn, this typology can be deployed in pursuit of an historical sociology of organizational elites as exemplified in the work of Mann (1986, 1993, 2006, 2011). Table 1 provides a modified version of Scotts (2008) original typology of elites. The typology identifies four types of elite groups and the monopoly strategies which they pursue within and across institutional domains in order to maintain their positional power within established domination structures and the political advantage which this gives them when they are engaged in control struggles with other elite and non-elite groups. Coercive elites pursue a strategy of monopoly control over the primary means and mechanisms of correction and punishment through which socio-political order is sustained in the face of any overt or covert threats to its continued institutional existence and operational viability. Such elite groups tend to be located, primarily but not exclusively, in the military/industrial complex, and in the law enforcement and security apparatus through which a wide range of threats to established law and order are counteracted and contained. Allocative elites pursue monopoly control over the means and mechanisms through which continuous capital accumulation is sustained and any obstacles to its structural demands and technical requirements social, political, cultural or material are removed. Such elite groups tend to be located primarily in the corporate business sector and retain centralized strategic control over the organizational processes through which major decision-making agendas are set and maintained. Expert elites pursue monopoly control over the means and mechanisms of acculturation within modern societies in which the level of organized complexity in institutional environments and their supporting logics requires organizational forms that can reflexively monitor and manage themselves as well as the specific institutional sectors for which they are functionally responsible (Reed, in press). This higher-level or double reflexivity both for specific functional domains or fields and for their own operational viability requires expert theoretical and technical knowledge of a very specialized and advanced kind that becomes rationalized into various forms of expert systems on which contemporary organizations become increasingly dependent. Expert elites tend to predominate in professional institutional networks and the increasingly complex organizational forms through which they are generated and maintained.

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Authoritative elites pursue monopoly control over the means and mechanisms of regulation that are deployed to ensure that relatively stable and well-organized accumulation processes can be sustained in the face of any emergent developments that threaten to undermine their ideological legitimacy and operational viability. They tend to be located in the upper reaches of a wide range of bureaucratic hierarchies through which various governmental activities are coordinated and controlled. Also, they play a strategic functional role in framing and servicing the command situations through which political power becomes institutionalized in the form of governance regimes that are able to maintain themselves in the face of threats and challenges to their operational effectiveness and institutional longevity. All four types of elites are involved in the organization and control of command situations. But, as previously discussed, the latter are primarily derived from differentials of power in the sphere of authoritycommand situations are rooted in authority, but achieve their fullest expression with the establishment of systems of bureaucratic administration (Scott, 1996, p. 41). As Scott (1996, pp. 407) argues, clusters of overlapping command situations generate and sustain social blocs or power centres of elite groupings that not only occupy key positions within the stratified structures of power relations that the former institutionalize but are also linked to one another through demographic processes of interaction and circulation (Clegg et al., 2006). Within these social blocs/power centres and the clusters of overlapping command situations through which they are generated and sustained, authoritative and expert elites are likely to play the central roles in structuring the relational networks through which they are socially reproduced as relatively well-organized and strategically focused corporate agents (Archer, 2003). As socially overlapping and interconnected networks of corporate agents, authoritative and expert elites will have the political and cultural capacity to develop moral vocabularies of discourse (Scott, 1996, p. 44) through which they will seek to legitimate their dominance and to organize the governance regimes through which the latter is maintained in the face of challenges to its authority. In particular, such moral vocabularies of discourse will be deployed by authoritative and expert elites to ensure continued access to key centres of state decision-making power and governmental control, through which their claims to occupy advantageous positions within domination structures and the rewards, both material and symbolic, that flow from them can be secured. Such a form of elite analysis can also help us to develop a better understanding of what Mann (2006) calls the dialectical relationship between institutionalized power that is, power as domination and interstitial or emergent power that is, power as network. Mann (2006, p. 343) insists that social and organizational change is always and everywhere generated by the dialectic between institutionalization and the interstitial emergence of power networks. He also advocates a form of organizational materialism as the most appropriate ontological and analytical tool for developing an historical sociology of the complex and dynamic dialectic between power as domination and power as network. By analytically focusing on four power networks (military, economic, political and ideological) as hybrid combinations of material resources and political practices, Mann concentrates on the wide range of organizational forms through which different types of power resources are stored, nurtured and mobilized by elite corporate agents (coercive, allocative, expert and authoritative in Scotts terminology) in pursuit of monopoly control over the means and mechanisms of domination. This leads him to construct and evaluate a series of analytically structured narratives focused on the elite control struggles that emerge from the dialectic between institutionalized and interstitial power as it indelibly shapes and reshapes the domination structures within which elites are embedded. Viewed in these terms, bureaucratization that is, the gradual extension and institutionalization of bureaucratic modes of domination and means of control was a move in the struggle between

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whoever was the paramount lord at any particular moment and his allies and rivals among other great patrimonial households (Collins, 2006, p. 28). Once they become more firmly embedded in relatively centralized state administrative structures facilitating the effective coordination and control of extended geopolitical configurations released from the restrictive constrictions imposed by feudalistic dynastic households, emergent bureaucratic modes of domination and means of control become incrementally dispersed throughout modernizing societies and economies in ways that mobilize more effective elite interventions in intra-state and interstate power struggles. But, inevitably, gaps, fissures and breaks emerge within the interstices of these institutionalized structures of power sustained by bureaucratic modes of domination and control because the latter are unable to deal with the ever-present, if uneven, threat to the established political order. It is within these interstices of institutionalized power that more dynamic and inherently destabilizing power networks emerge and develop in ways that, eventually, threaten the relative cohesion and resilience of established domination structures (a theme explored in more detail in the next part of this paper). As a general rule, Mann (2006) suggests that the stronger the supporting organizational infrastructure of power relations underpinning the rule of dominant elites, the less dependent they are likely to be on coercive powers to maintain their hegemonic positions within prevailing domination structures. Thus, the relative political stability and continuity facilitated through effective institutionalization and reproduction of elite power and control counterbalances the endemic tendency towards coercive and regressive modes and means of ruling if and when established domination structures are undermined and threatened in any substantial way (Reed, in press). Nevertheless, Mann argues, even the most well-integrated and stabilized domination structures and the systems of elite ruling that they materially and ideologically support will inevitably be subject to destabilizing shocks and ruptures that begin to unstitch the very fabric of organizational coordination and control through which they are authorized. Nowhere is this more clearly the case than when established domination structures and the systems of elite ruling that they facilitate begin to decay and offer the opportunity to established and emergent elite groupings to exploit the intensifying power struggles that crystallize around the gaps and tears in the institutionalized power relations that such decay inevitably generates. It is out of these interstitial power relations which strengthen, as chinks and crevices within decaying institutionalized power relations widen and deepen as a result of the weakening organizational infrastructure of power relations that such decay necessarily entails that new arenas of intra-elite, inter-elite and contra-elite power struggle emerge and begin to impact upon the control regimes through which elite domination is authorized and legitimated.

Changing Forms of Elite Power and Control: Case Histories

In the penultimate section of this paper three case histories in changing forms of elite power and control are discussed as providing empirical illustrations of the explanatory potential of the theoretical framework for developing an historical sociology of the dialectic between institutionalized and interstitial power developed in previous sections. Each of these case histories although covering very different socio-temporal locations and institutional domains shares common analytical features insofar as they identify and explain the decay of pre-existing command situations and the domination structures through which they were maintained and exploited by established authoritative and expert elites. In particular, they focus on the mobilization of innovative moral vocabularies of discourse and the emergence of new elite political alliances and coalitions around interstitial power relations that challenge established domination structures and strive to exploit the opportunities that the latter open up. Each of the cases

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documents the reordering of power relations between established and emergent groupings within and between authoritative and expert elites consequent upon the decay of pre-existing command situations and the strategic redeployment of a range of material and ideological resources in order to ensure that such a reordering leads to fundamental change in the distribution of rewards. They also highlight the emergence of hybrid political regimes out of this reordering of power relations that take on a polyarchic or polycratic form in which the structural contradictions between the recombinant institutionalization (Crouch, 2005) of elite rule and stakeholder pluralism generate underlying tensions that drive new phases of dynamism and upheaval. In all of these respects, they provide dramatic illuminations of what Mann (2006) calls the dialectical interplay between institutional (power as domination) and interstitial (power as network) power as it opens up new zones of manoeuvre that are exploited, with varying degrees of strategic vision and tactical skill, by hierarchically stratified elite groups as they strive to shape and control the governance regimes emerging from the new command situations that such innovative structural mechanisms generate.

Architects of Annihilation: Expert Elites, the Final Solution and a New European Order
Aly and Heim (1991) analyse the incremental decay and eventual dissolution of the domination structures which had emerged from the command situations that had governed post-Weimar Germany. While traditional authoritative elites occupying key positions within the bureaucratized command situations that had developed in post-Weimar Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s seemed relatively secure in their dominance, their power had waned during the 1930s as the result of a deadly combination of economic depression and political disintegration that undermined the institutional foundations of their power and control. During the course of the 1930s a new group of expert elites, coming predominantly from middle-class, rather than aristocratic and upperclass, backgrounds, became increasingly powerful and incrementally displaced established authoritative elites from the key bureaucratic positions that they occupied within the prevailing institutionalized power structures. These expert elites formed a new technocracy that fundamentally reconstructed pre-existing command situations and the moral vocabularies of discourse through which the new regime was legitimated and regulated. Once they had purged the state and local bureaucracies of any remaining regressive elements, such as ethnically proscribed groups, socialists and intellectuals, they set about implementing a radical, racially based, ruling ideology that was intended to transform East Germany and beyond over the next 25 years. They did not adopt Nationalist Socialist ideology as a personal creed but it provided them with the maximum freedom of action in the pursuit of their policy ambitions. As Aly and Heim (1991, p. 287) put it:
[this] was the youngest and most flexible academic elite that had ever come to power in Germany. They swept away outmoded structures, and in the first five years of the Third Reich they acquired considerable freedom for manoeuvre and scope for the exercise of authority and the seats of political power became ever more tightly interwoven.

Much of their collective time and effort was spent translating the relatively abstract ideological principles and claims articulated by party elites and cadres into practical programmes that could be implemented through various organizational and technological innovations. In turn, the latter facilitated the upward social mobility of this new and rising expert elite who possessed the required specialist expertise and technical skills to overcome the old command situations and domination
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structures through which semi-feudalistic and socially backward authoritative elites had managed to stem the tide of modernity. Thus, by the outbreak of the Second World War, the German state turned decisively away from the anti-Semitism of the street and the mob and delegated its Jewish question to state institutions, placing it in the hands of experts from a wide range of disciplines (Aly & Heim, 1991, p. 289). A rising cadre of technocratic elites, armed with a radical ideology, came to occupy the key power positions within the command situations and domination structures of the German state; they played the key role in ensuring that authoritative elites left over from the old regime would not stand in the way of the rapid organizational and technological modernization required to make genocide a necessary requirement for long-term domination and economic subjugation (Aly & Heim, 1991, p. 290). These expert elites
inhabited a world characterized by a common technocratic culture of rational calculation, broad consensus, close personal ties and continuityThanks to the efforts of a clever technocratic elite, what was originally a racist programme with populist appeal now made sense in economic policy terms as well. (Aly & Heim, 1991, 2902)

As Browning (2005) has also noted, conservative landed elites and bureaucratic elites in postFirst World War Germany may have had little enthusiasm for, much less commitment to, the radical policies and programmes of an increasingly powerful, not to say dominant, technocratic elite that saw the long-term potential of the visionary ideological imperatives that carried their party leaders forward. Yet, both this new technocratic elite and Nazi party leadership, he also argues, were forced to operate within a polycratic political regime in which protracted decision-making processes, involving a complex plurality of elite groups and their operational managers, could only be properly prosecuted if they were constantly supported by a process of continual bureaucratic momentum that permeated down and through the central and local state apparatus. Thus, an emerging bureaucratic machinery of destruction had to be continually revitalized and supported by an elite of professional experts who had to overcome the doubts, and even downright opposition, of established conservative and bureaucratic elites. The polycratic regime that had emerged and taken institutional root in 1930s Germany was riven by highly competitive and wasteful power struggles within and between both authoritative and expert elites who were determined to establish control over the strategic policy-making agenda and the substantive outcomes that it would produce. But expert elites, working in concert with key members of the party leadership and bureaucracy, eventually ensured that the German official state bureaucracy, with its notions of legal authority, due process and paternalistic responsibility, was swept aside to make way for new command situations and emergent domination structures that would support the implementation of radical population and social policies requiring the unrestrained mobilization of the cultural, technological and organizational means and mechanisms dedicated to the realization of a new European order. They were to be the architects of annihilation that would impose a top-down revolution that would radically transform the whole of Europe and establish a new order in which Germany became the dominant force.

Mobilizing Science Against Science: Expert Elites and the Politics of Environmental Degradation
Oreskes and Conways (2010) study focuses on the institutionalization of big science in the United States in the post-Second World War period and the growing power of right-wing scientific and technocratic elites occupying key positions within big science who were determined, with the material and moral support of corporate business elites, to shift the focus of science policy
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on a range of strategic issues such as climate change. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, organized science in the United States had been dominated by scientific and technocratic elites sympathetic to liberal-democratic policies and programmes that would mobilize specialist scientific knowledge in support of state action directed to major public health issues such as smoking-related diseases and longer-term strategic issues such as the ecological threat posed by global warming. However, during the 1950s things began to change as a rising cadre of emergent scientific and technocratic expert elites, many of whom had been originally associated with the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, began to move into key power positions within the domination structures through which organized science was institutionally coordinated and controlled, such as the US Academy of Science and major academic departments at elite universities. They were also financially and ideologically supported by leading neo-conservative institutions in business and government circles such as the Olin Foundation and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, deeply committed to laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberal individualism. Over a period of time, this rising scientific and technocratic expert elite were able to sustain long-term ideological and political opposition to the increasingly influential claims of those professional elites supportive of environmentally sensitive policies and programmes relating to personal and public health, climate change and sustainable economic development. They developed and implemented a series of high-profile campaigns that mobilized science against science; that is, they used whatever scientific knowledge and technical expertise they could lay their hands on to discredit environmentalism and to spread doubt and confusion over government-sponsored policies and programmes that were intended to improve personal and public health, such as antismoking campaigns and safer food production and handling processes. They also ruthlessly exploited whatever real divisions existed between mainstream scientists, or fabricated these where none actually existed. Increasingly, the established scientific and technocratic elite, previously supportive of government intervention and regulation focused on public health improvement and environmental protection, found themselves fighting an ideological rearguard action against this radical, neo-conservative onslaught and increasingly under severe political pressure to vacate the key positions within the domination structures that they had once confidently occupied. Thus, this sustained neo-conservative attack on a previously mainstreamed environmental science was only made possible through the planned strategic infiltration of key positions within the institutionalized power structures of organized science in the United States, and its supporting infrastructure in big business, elite academia and federal government, from the 1950s onwards. This rising neo-conservative expert elite perpetrated an ideological and political strategy whereby the enhanced governmental regulation and control necessarily associated with the expansion of environmentally friendly policies and programmes was reinterpreted as the slippery slope to socialism and the multiple threats which this entailed to individual freedom and the democratic way of life. They managed to smear their opponents within the scientific elite community as coercive utopians and technology-hating Luddites (Oreskes & Conway, 2010, pp. 24865) who were prepared to go to any lengths in order that governments could exercise ultimate control over its citizens lives in the name of saving the environment. This moral vocabulary of discourse would strategically shape the decision-making agenda for environmental policies and programmes in the United States over a period of several decades and would encourage a growing public scepticism over the reality of environmental issues to this day.

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The New Oligarchs: Expert Elites and the Politics of State Security
Soldatov and Borogans (2010) study traces the institutional decay and eventual collapse of the Soviet system in the 1990s, as the established security elite and the technocratic elite infrastructure supporting it both organizationally located within the Committee of State Security (KGB) became terminally incapable of dealing with the much more complex, unstable and uncertain socio-political environment that post-Communist Russia presented. Previously, KGB officials, officers and technocrats had been portrayed as an intellectual elite that were structurally located within the core institutional hierarchies and networks through which the Soviet system was made possible and sustained as a going concern. But, during the 1980s, this public image of an expert elite at the institutional heart of the Soviet system became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to sustain as the imminent collapse of the former revealed an organizational reality characterized by internecine rivalries and structural decomposition. Nevertheless, the KGB had remained under the control of the Communist Party which presided over every section, department and division (Soldatov & Borogan, 2010, p. 4). With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the KGB was radically restructured and denuded of many of its existing organizational responsibilities, such as counterespionage and counterterrorism, which were transferred to the Federal Security Service (FSB). The latter, in time, would come to be regarded as the key security organization protecting the newly emergent Russian state, and its director, Vladimir Putin, would eventually become Russias elected president. Under Putins direction, a new state security and technocratic elite was created that would greatly extend the responsibilities and powers of the FSB in a way and to a degree that they would eventually become the new nobility within the Russian state and its political economy. By the end of the 1990s, the FSB and its authoritative and technical elites had successfully combined the functions of a secret security service and a law enforcement agency, as well as organizationally facilitating the transference of its key personnel into the top echelons of power in the media, education, banking, industry and government. As Soldatov and Borogan (2010, pp. 278, emphasis added) summarize the situation, by the early 2000s:
the members of the KGB were part of an elite. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia plunged into the new capitalism few KGB officers emerged as business leaders. They were outflanked by younger, fleeter hustlers; a new breed of oligarchs. Instead, KGB veterans found their calling in second and third tiers of the new business structures, running the security departments of the tycoons empiresThis army of hidden FSB officers does not identify itself to the rest of society, and they often work in organizations entirely undercover while sending reports to FSB leadership and actively recruiting members.

Yet, the FSB is itself internally divided and riddled with organizational, generational, ethnic and regional tensions that often break out into open conflicts that have to be managed and controlled in various ways. Even by the middle of the 2000s, reports suggested a relatively high degree of internal dissension, division and fragmentation in which a war of groups within the security services was compromising organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Nevertheless, Soldatov and Borogans (2010, pp. 23942) analysis clearly suggests that the FSB, under Putins tutelage, and its expert elites, have been transformed into a vanguard of stability and order within the 21stcentury Russian state and society. In particular, the strategy of radical organizational expansion and absorption which the FSB followed under Putin entailed a deliberate attempt to roll back civil society and drastically reduced the institutional and ideological space for political debate and public discussion. Thus, in todays Russia,

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the security services appear to have concluded that their interests, and those of the state they are guarding, remain above the law. The mind-set of Russias FSB has been undeniably shaped by Soviet and Tsarist history. It is suspicious, inward looking, and clannish. (Soldatov & Borogan, 2010, p. 242)

This is the moral vocabulary of discourse through which the new technocratic elite that dominates the FSB is determined to legitimate its power and control within the Russian state and beyond into the myriad of power networks that constitute contemporary Russian society and economy.

Discussion and Conclusions

Each of the three narrative case histories discussed above provides a telling illustration of the complex processes through which the dynamics of intra-elite, inter-elite and contra-elite power struggles impact on the development of domination structures, whether in post-Weimar Nazi Germany, post-Second World War American science or post-glasnost security state Russia. They also highlight the crucial explanatory importance of the changing command situations that develop from these elite power struggles coalescing around emerging zones of manoeuvre as they generate and establish the new power positions and relations that will shape subsequent phases of restructuring in forms of domination and the organizational machinery through which they are supported and maintained. Again, we are reminded of Manns (2006) central argument that it is the complex interplay between institutional and interstitial power that is, between power as domination and power as network within and across a wide range of socio-temporal contexts that indelibly configures the material conditions and organizational forms on and through which elite power politics is engaged in, with such fateful consequences for them and the rest of us. This is not simply a matter of elite reproduction or renewal but a highly complex socio-historical process of strategically quashing and tactically undermining the political, economic and cultural dominance of established power elites by emerging power elites that will impact on a societys evolving institutional landscape in a profound and lasting manner. Recently, Barley (2010) has argued that the decline of research on elites is one of the major reasons why organizational researchers have neglected the impact of powerful organizations and, in particular, powerful business corporations, on society. He also builds on Zald and Lounsburys (2010) key concept of command posts as centres of societal power that shape socio-political order in any society and political economy. By focusing on peak organizations as command posts entailing associations or networks of organizations that represent and act on behalf of their collective membership, he uncovers the strategic role that powerful business corporations in the United States have played in legitimating and institutionalizing organizational fields that are ideologically and politically supportive of their corporate interests during the 1970s and 1980s. In tracing the intentional mobilization of material and symbolic resources by corporate elites that would prove to be critical in institutionalizing pro-business organizational fields, Barley identifies the critical role that the dynamics of elite agency plays in creating, elaborating and transforming domination structures. In calling for historical and comparative investigation of the key structural or generative mechanisms through which peak organizations and their incumbent elites shape and reshape the institutional environments in which they are embedded, Barley is suggesting a new direction for contemporary organizational research and analysis entirely in keeping with the arguments developed in this paper. The latter has insisted that in-depth historical and comparative analysis of the structural dynamics of elite domination and rule is of fundamental importance to our understanding of contemporary organizational forms and the power relations through which they are sustained. This is particularly the case at a time when the organizational forms through which power
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resources are contained and mobilized to generate new governance regimes within and across institutional environments are seemingly becoming more complex and hybridized (Clegg et al., 2006; Courpasson, 2006; Courpasson & Clegg, 2006; Courpasson & Dany, 2009; Reed, 2010a, 2010b). By combining selected elements of oligarchical domination and pluralistic stakeholder participation within the same governance regime, established organizational elites seem better placed to cope with the endemic contradictions and tensions that characterize contemporary institutional environments. Thus, hybridized governance regimes, based on command situations that integrate, however imperfectly and contingently, elite domination and sub-elite participation, offer structural mechanisms through which inherently unstable and fragile power relations can be converted into more stable and resilient organizational forms. Such regimes will still contain deep-seated tensions and conflicts within and between ruling elite groups, as well as those groups falling outside the political arenas within which the former operate. These tensions and conflicts are likely to provide the source for subsequent phases of regime development and change as their underlying dynamics begin to corrode and undermine the domination structures that have emerged from previous phases of elite power struggle as revealed in all three of the narrative case histories overviewed in the previous section of this paper. Considered in these terms, the hybridized governance regimes and their supporting command situations that seem to be increasingly prominent in contemporary institutional environments provide effective structural mechanisms for managing and regulating the underlying contradictions and tensions between institutionalized power and interstitial power which are so central, in explanatory terms, to the analysis of the dynamics of elite rule developed in this paper. Yet, as previous discussion has also conveyed, such hybridized governance regimes have been around for a long time (e.g. Nazi Germany in the 1930s) and they are inherently imperfect mechanisms for containing and regulating the structurally based tensions and conflicts that will inevitably emerge to corrode and decompose established domination structures in the fullness of time. Nevertheless, a sustained analytical focus on the generation and elaboration of hybridized governance regimes provides organizational researchers with a vital way in to a better understanding of the dynamics of elite ruling and the complex ways in which they shape the command situations through which contemporary domination structures are sustained and transformed. Elite theory must be developed through conceptualization and model building that is sensitive to the inherently dynamic nature of elite power and control through the design and deployment of hybrid governance regimes that, by their very nature, contain underlying interstitial breaks and tensions that will necessarily generate new sources of change and innovation. But it must also remain analytically attuned to the complex ways in which elite power is institutionally transformed into domination structures that will indelibly constrain and shape the zones of manoeuvre that both established and aspirant ruling groups have available to them as they routinely engage in political struggles to control the agenda for change and innovation. It is the dynamics of domination that must lie at the conceptual and analytical core of elite theory and analysis in contemporary organization studies. Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography
Mike Reed is Professor of Organizational Analysis in Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, UK. His research interests focus on the politics of organizational control from a critical realist perspective. He is a founding editor of the journal Organization.

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