The power of indigenous capital in a company province : an analysis of the ruling class of British Columbia
Date
1977
Authors
Kerin, Theresa Ann
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Abstract
This thesis attempts to assess three views of the structure of power in western industrial societies; the Marxist, the elitist and the pluralist. The main claims of the two most radically opposed viewpoints, the Marxist and the pluralist, are summarized in a series of hypotheses which are expressed as five statements and counter-stateĀments. The province of British Columbia is used as a case study to examine the validity of these statements and data are collected on the political and economic elites of the province.
The methodology employed to select the economic and, political elites and to test these hypotheses is similar to that employed by Porter (1965) and Clement (1975). This enabled a comparison to be made between data collected in British Columbia and data collected from national samples.
Support is found for the Marxist statements although a simplistic Marxist view, which held that economic elites exercise political power directly through the occupation of political office, is rejected. The weight of the evidence suggests that the economic elite is a cohesive, homogeneous, closed group of men who are in a position to wield superior power vis-a-vis the political elite as a consequence of their internal strength, the dominance of their ideology and their strategic position in the metropolis. In contrast, the political elite is open, fragmented and heterogeneous. The conventional wisdom that a society closer to the fronĀtier is more open is questioned by comparing data collected in the province and data collected in national studies.