Abstract Mainstream development policies often promote citizens committees to oversee basic social services. Such require influence over, and legitimacy among, service providers perform their roles, which local elites can help or hinder. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyse the situation in 251 health facility Burundi, part of benefited from interventions designed bolster relationship wit...

Nationalism creates and recreates a sense of distinctive identity and autonomy based on the Enlightenment idea of human freedom that enables people to survive in a modern world in which unpredictable change has become the norm. While, in the medieval world, the feudal states invoked religion and cultural resources to make people servile, the modern state invokes identity in a language of servin...

In this paper, we develop an account of the failure of private marketgovernance institutions to maintain market order by highlighting how control of their distributional function by powerful elites limits their regulatory capacity. We examine the New York Clearing House Association (NYCHA), a private market-governance institution among commercial banks in Manhattan that operated from 1853 to 19...

Community-based development has been criticized for its inadequate understanding of power relationships at the local level, which thus leaves room for elite capture. This paper compares and contrasts two case studies, both of which take power seriously in their institutional designs. The solar home system in Bangladesh, represents the ‘counter-elite’ approach and explicitly excludes local elite...

BACKGROUND. Sex-specific differences in attitudes and behaviors, arising from a division of human nature into male and female types, have been core findings of evolutionary psychology and are now among its key investigational presumptions. These differences have largely been ignored by mainstream political and social theories. METHOD. I explored one potential path toward incorporation, using ''...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the recruitment of elites in the Western world leads to social cohesion, or to the opposite -social stratification. We show that the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that m...

Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape th...

This study combines elements of the upper echelons and agency perspectives to resolve some of the ambiguity surrounding how corporate elites affect corporate strategy. We propose and test the notion that while differences in individual characteristics of corporate elites may imply different preferences for particular corporate strategies such as diversification and acquisitions, these basic pre...

The political legitimacy and policymaking influence of the medical profession have greatly declined in American society over the past 30 years. Despite speculation about the causes, there has been little empirical research assessing the different explanations. To address this gap, data collected in 1995 are used to compare attitudes of the American public and policy elites toward medical author...

It has been a long-lasting pursuit to promote cooperation, and this study aims to promote cooperation via the combination of social stratification and the spatial prisoners' dilemma game. It is previously assumed that agents share the identical payoff matrix, but the stratification or diversity exists and exerts influences in real societies. Thus, two additional classes, elites and scoundrels, ...