THE NORWEGIAN FIELD OF POWER ANNO 2000

ABSTRACT

This article, in the line of Bourdieu (1989), belongs to the research domain about elites and the field of power. Using data from the Norwegian Power & Democracy survey on elites, conducted in 2000, it specifically seeks to uncover the main dimensions and fractions in the Norwegian field of power. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) has been used to address this issue. The three main findings are these: firstly, our results show that the three most important principal dimensions in the field are an economic capital axis, then an educational and social capital axis, and then an axis separating the judicial positions from positions in culture, organizations and politics. Secondly, the political positions are the most accessible. Thirdly, the public judicial group is the most homogeneous.

Keywords:

• field of power
• Norway
• geometric data analysis
• multiple correspondence analysis

Notes

This research is part of the project ‘Comparative Investigations of the French and Norwegian Social Space’, headed by Brigitte Le Roux and Olav Korsnes, and funded by the Aurora program (Egide, France and nrc, Norway). The data have been provided by Statistics Norway. This institution is not responsible for the analyses of these data.

²For a previous application of MCA in this journal, see Lebaron (2000)

³The survey was performed as a combination of personal (87%) and telephone (13%) interviews. The total response rate (87.3%) is 20–25 percentage points higher than what has been usual in Norwegian surveys in the 1990s. The highest non–response rate is found among the private business executives (25.2%), whereas it varies from 2.3 to 13.1% in the other groups. Despite this difference, the overall quality of the data set is therefore also regarded as excellent (Holt and Pranger⊘d 2001: 16).

⁴NOK 8 = approx. Euro 1 (nok=Norwegian kroner).

⁵Kroner Erikson and Goldthorpe (1991).

⁶For further details see Holt and Pranger⊘d (2001), Gulbrandsen (2002), Hjellbrekke and Korsnes (2003).

⁷We have tested a wide range of coding alternatives. The chosen manages to grasp professional trajectories in an adequate way, and the contributions of the six headings to the variance of the cloud are fairly balanced (cf. Table 4).

⁸The specific MCA was performed with ADDAD software, and the exploration of clouds with the EyeLID software (www.math-info.univ-paris5/∼lerb/).

⁹In this way, we have disposed of the problem of age.

¹⁰At this point, the reader may have a look at Appendix.