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This paper investigates the role of elite philanthropy in the context of rising global inequality, asking whether large-scale philanthropic donations by elites are well placed to help tackle structural inequality. The challenges posed by such “plutocratic philanthropy” are explored through analysis of a network of the top 30 philanthropists in the United Kingdom and their connections to businesses and foundations, which shows their financial scale and connectivity. This new data is embedded into a review of the most recent social science literature on elites, which focuses on elite reproduction, how wealthy families perceive inequality, and how and why they engage in philanthropic activities. From this data, the paper develops an analysis of the current landscape of inequality, based on the work of British sociologist Mike Savage (2015), arguing that elite philanthropy as an ecosystem— made up of capital, people and institutions—is not well placed to systemically challenge inequalities, because the financial size of elites’ philanthropy tends to be dwarfed by their business activities, and the social functions of philanthropy help maintain the advantaged positions of elites. The paper concludes with informed policy considerations on the role of elite philanthropy in light of the results of the analysis.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-soc-10.1177_0038038520975593 for Social Polarisation at the Local Level: A Four-Town Comparative Study on the Challenges of Politicising Inequality in Britain by Insa Koch, Mark Fransham, Sarah Cant, Jill Ebrey, Luna Glucksberg and Mike Savage in Sociology

This article offers a critical ethnography of the reproduction of elites and inequalities through the lenses of class and gender. The successful transfer of wealth from one generation to the next is increasingly a central concern for the very wealthy. This article shows how the labor of women from elite and non-elite backgrounds enables and facilitates the accumulation of wealth by elite men. From covering “the home front” to investing heavily in their children’s future, and engaging non-elite women’s labor to help them, the elite women featured here reproduced not just their families, but their families as elites. Meanwhile, the affective and emotional labor of non-elite women is essential for maintaining the position of wealth elites while also locking those same women into the increasing inequality they help to reproduce.

Transfers between generations are a key driver of social and economic inequalities, ensuring that wealth is not redistributed, but accumulated instead in the hands of a small elite, sometimes described as ‘the super-rich’. It is crucial to understand how this accumulated capital is socialized and passed down the generations through a labour that I argue is gendered in nature, heavily reliant on women, and currently under-researched. In this paper I address this gap ethnographically, focusing on the gendered labour that women perform to sustain and reproduce the dynastic projects of elite families. I compare and contrast the symbolically distant categories of mothers/wives (Ostrander 1984) and “girls” – young women who socialize on the VIP scene, as defined by Mears (2015). Both groups involve biologically female bodies deeply involved in the reproduction of elites but the categories they inhabit, the selves that are both ascribed to them and which they choose to present could not be any more different. In light of this data, elite London emerges as a social space structured around strong hierarchies not just of class but also gender. I therefore argue that it is essential to understand more about the interplay of these two structuring principles within elite spaces, focusing on the ‘invisible’ labour performed by elite women.

This article examines the phenomena of "Family Offices" (FOs) within the context of the re-emergence of patrimonial forms of capitalism. As global wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of dynastic wealth élites, we examine the new financial infrastructures - within which FOs are key - that are emerging in core urban areas to support them. We review the existing literature on the phenomena and report on an observational study of their form and functioning in London and beyond.

This thesis considers the social implications of urban regeneration from an anthropological perspective centred on concepts of waste and value. It is concerned with the symbolic devaluation of people, their homes and communities on inner-city estates in south-east London. This process is of course nothing new, as the extensive literature on gentrification both in the UK and around the world, by anthropologists and social scientists in general, testifies. The originality of the thesis lies in connecting large scale urban regeneration programmes to small scale, everyday processes of dealing with waste in people’s homes, and communally on their estates.\ud \ud The ethnography connects these two levels by showing how those who live on estates often lack the most basic tools – such as lifts that work, or doors that open, or space in their kitchens – to engage in recycling themselves, meaning they are excluded and ‘othered’ from a morally loaded value-creating circuit which feeds into their symbolic representation as intrinsically worthless and ‘other’. Meanwhile, the very same residents engage in community building in their everyday lives, producing and reproducing their estates as sociable spaces they care deeply about, even though within the confines of a framework that only recognises value in what is privately, individually owned, epitomised in the ‘Right to Buy’ policy that has deeply affected housing estates in England for the past thirty years, residents' efforts are either misread or ignored by those in charge of the estates.\ud \ud The thesis thus challenges the misrepresentation of its main set of respondents – working class, poor, ethnically diverse inner-city dwellers - as valueless and as waste themselves, labels that are attached to them not just by media and popular culture, but also by officers, policies and politicians, who are interviewed and interrogated at length in the course of the thesis. Furthermore, it questions the alleged parallels between processes of urban regeneration and recycling. It is easy to understand why local authorities and developers would wish to adopt the morally loaded terminology of recycling and apply it to their programmes, presenting regeneration as related to recycling in its positive connotations of both improvement and recovery of the old, be it people or homes. The ethnography shows instead that regeneration in practice is more akin to wasting and buying new, in that established residents are moved out of their homes, which are then demolished, or wasted, and new middle class incomers are welcomed in – bought anew?