The [Oxford] Handbook of the Sociology of Global Elites

This handbook provides the most comprehensive portraits of elites across the globe. In an area of study where there is no agreed methodologies or theoretical perspectives, this Handbook provides a systematic overview which includes most of the most influential writers who have made this area of study such an important part of sociology. Mindful of contemporary events, in which wealthy elites are increasingly politically powerful, we explain how elites exercise power, and how this is coming to challenge the hold of liberal democracy and meritocratic beliefs.

María Luisa Méndez is Full Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Director of the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). She previously served as Director of the Department of Sociology at Diego Portales University (UDP). Her research explores social mobility, urban inequality, and elite reproduction in Latin America. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester and is the author of Upper Middle Class Social Reproduction (Palgrave, 2019) and The Politics of the Elite (Routledge, 2023). Her work has appeared in leading journals including Urban Studies, Urban Geography, and The Sociological Review.

Mike Savage has written extensively on the sociology of class and inequality. He has been Professor at the Universities of Manchester and York and was founding co-Director of the LSE's International Inequalities Institute, one of the world's premier interdisciplinary centres for the study of inequality. His best-selling (co-authored) Social Class in the 21st century (Penguin 2015) made a major impact in insisting on social class as a key contemporary divide. The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard UP 2021) has been translated into three languages.

Annette Lareau is the author of the award-winning books Unequal Childhoods, Home Advantage, and Listening to People. With Blair Sackett, she authored We Thought It Would be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America (University of California Press). She received her doctorate in the field of Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing a book, to be published with the University of California Press, on the blessings and challenges of wealth for family life. Annette Lareau is Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Past President of the American Sociological Association.