Power holders: one versus many. Leadership and elite theories

Abstract

‘Leadership’ and ‘elites’ are two crucial concepts that refer to individuals who hold power within a community. The aim of the article was to demonstrate to what extent the two concepts and theories are linked with each other in the literature. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the encyclopedic and dictionary entries demonstrates a divergence of approaches: on the one hand, a fundamental separation between the two theories, while on the other hand, a tendency to identify the one with the other. This shows the need for much more dialog between the frameworks of these two closely related phenomena.

Keywords:

• leadership
• elite
• power holders
• comparison
• theoretical gap

Notes

1. As far as such publications are concerned, I disregarded just one of them (Goethals et al. 2004) because its profile (Encyclopedia of leadership) indicated, understandably, a huge disproportion between the respective entries of ‘leadership’ and ‘elite’.

2. Two collective works were not considered since they were referenced as a collection; it is, therefore, unknown to which specific writings the authors of the entries referred.

3. In his work, he used the term ‘elite’ (and derivatives) 480 times, and the term ‘leadership’ (and derivatives) 120 times.

4. Curiously, in the English publication of Michels’ work, the term ‘elite’ (and its derivatives) appeared only 16 times, making references to both Mosca’s and Pareto’s works. The word ‘leadership’ (and derivatives) appeared in Michaels’ work over 800 times (Michels 1949).