Questioning the Super-Rich

Dados Bibliográficos

ID6141540
AutoresP Serafini (0000-0002-4278-1832), Jennifer Smith Maguire (0000-0002-8990-2371)
Ano2019
Volume15
Fascículo1
Páginas1-14
Data de publicação2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCultural Politics an International Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1743-2197 • E-ISSN: 1751-7435
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/17432197-7289444
OpenAlexW2936360910
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6
Referências citadas45

The authors outline how multiple dimensions—historical and contemporary; global and local; political, economic, social, and cultural—inform an understanding of the super-rich. Recent super-rich scholarship is reviewed with regard to three themes: discourses and representations; mechanisms and structures; experiences and identities. The empirical and conceptual insights of the contents are then highlighted, with regard to the significance of discourses of legitimacy, namely, those of meritocracy, civility, and luxury; the intersections of race and class that underpin assumptions about and representations of wealth; institutional and political-economic dynamics, in relation to international financial systems and property markets; and experiences and attitudes, examined via elites’ professional identities and cultural practices. The authors suggest that questioning the super-rich provides an avenue for the study of power in society, how it is reproduced, and how global hierarchies may be shifting. To that end, the articles attempt to make visible the brute force of the infrastructures (politics and policy, cultural and occupational conventions, financial devices and systems) that are occluded by the tendency to focus on the gloss of super-rich lifestyles; to draw attention to the long-term and newly emerging tensions within and between categories of wealth and of elites, and spheres of political, economic, and cultural activity; and to contribute to an understanding of how the accumulation of wealth is perpetuated and excused through discourses of legitimation, structural dynamics, and lived identities. These are much-needed critical interventions at a time of escalating inequality

Economics · Legitimacy · Legitimation · Meritocracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies