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Britain is often depicted as having been a laggard in management education before the late creation of two graduate business schools in London and Manchester in the mid-1960s triggered the emergence of a new academic sector. According to the dominant narrative, the anachronistic views of Britain's industrial leaders and disdain of its universities for practical learning constrained developments in the field. Through the lens of elite theory, we offer a reinterpretation of the formation of Britain's first business schools informed by archival research, suggesting that they arose from an evolutionary process rather than a crucible event. The story of the creation of Britain's first business schools has never been told from the perspective of elite agency. Our study reveals the emergent managerial elite of the post-war era growing into something altogether more powerful. Our main contribution to theory is to demonstrate that, while expanding management education ostensibly contravened elite interests, elite interaction in the field of power at a time of national urgency amplified elite influence, prefiguring their role as "influence elites" today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is it that global elite universities operating in a hyper-competitive world replete with aspirational challengers maintain positions of dominance within the field of higher education decade after decade? Taking a Bourdieusian approach, we argue that the highest-ranking universities strategically leverage pronounced philanthropic advantages to differentiate themselves from would-be challengers. Philanthropy is a critical differentiator because it enables elite universities to sustain privileges that attract highly qualified students, faculty and powerful supporters, who in turn boost their competitive positions through acquisition of valuable cultural, social and symbolic resources. Elite universities co-create with stakeholders strong bonds of identification, honing the disposition to give back philanthropically and complete the socially reproductive cycle of elite domination. At a time of increasing concern about social inequalities, our contribution is to uncover how higher education philanthropy – an essentially conservative force – operates to entrench privilege and magnify social differences while purporting to do the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article expands understanding of how institutional biography informs institutional change by examining Conrad Hilton's role in building the global branded hotel chain (1946–1969). We show how an individual's institutional biography can play a pivotal role in their development as an institutional entrepreneur and the institutionalisation of a new organisational template. Biography, informed by the institutions individuals experience in their life trajectories, shapes the process by which an individual becomes an institutional entrepreneur; influencing the institutionalisation of a new template by enabling entrepreneurs to acquire a more central position within their field. Hilton's self-narrative became closely coupled with the 'grand narrative' of post-war U.S. capitalism. The Hilton case illustrates how institutional tensions, embracing national interests, corporate interests, and individual self-interest, can become distilled into the identity, choices, and ambitions – the personal biographical narrative – of individuals who play a formative role in the institutions they build, change, or disrupt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we better understand the puzzle of low-skilled migrants who have acquired citizenship in a European Union country, often with generous social security provision, choosing to relocate to the United Kingdom? Drawing on Elias's figurational theory as a lens, we explore how relational interdependencies foster the mobility of low-skilled African European Citizens from European Union states to the United Kingdom. We found that African European Citizens rely on 'piblings networks', loose affiliations of putative relatives, to compensate for deficits in their situated social capital, facilitating relocation. The temporary stability afforded by impermanent bonds and transient associations, in constant flux in migrant communities, does not preclude integration but paradoxically promotes it by enabling an ease of connection and disconnection. Our study elucidates how these relational networks offer African European Citizens opportunities to achieve labour market integration, exercise self-efficacy, and realize desired futures; anchoring individuals in existing communities even when they are perpetually transforming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we understand the multiple, intersecting webs of oppression that Palestinian women activists face in their everyday organizing? With a long tradition of counter-hegemonic organizing, the Palestinian context presents opportunities and challenges for women pursuing activist causes in the public domain. Adopting an intersectionality framework, we uncover how gender, class and settler-colonized domination interact, engendering dynamics of oppression differentiated by activists' social positions. Activists' stories captured at interview reveal they were not victims across all categories of difference, experiencing forms of relative privilege, characterized as safeguarded, secured and sheltered. We connect relative privilege to the patchwork nature of Palestinian institutions, whereby women's agency intermingles with a patchwork of historically constituted structures and conditions. Our fine-grained study contributes to literature on feminist and activist organizing and to theorizations of intersectionality by identifying forms of relative oppression and privilege as women actively resist hegemonic gendered structures in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]