Auteur/autrice : Michael A Strebel

Together with Roberto Di Capua, Sinergia team members Pierre Benz and Michael Strebel have co-authored a paper in which they assess the evolution of urban elites residential choices over the 20^th century. Scholars generally agree that elites do not only distinguish themselves from non-elites through social practices, but also physically segregate themselves through their residential choices. Yet, as of now, only few studies systematically analyze elites’ place of residence as a form of differentiation and distinction. To contribute to this endeavor, the authors analyze the evolution of elites’ favored place of residence in conjunction with the transformation of urban spaces in the 20th century. They use data from the Sinergia research project on local elites from 1890 to 2020, which identifies elites based on a positional approach in different Swiss cities. With this data that includes information on elites’ place of residence, we analyze the transformation of academic, economic, and political elites’ residential choices from 1890 to 2000 in the two cities of Basel and Geneva. The results show that elites continuously deconcentrate and spread from the center city to surrounding municipalities and to other places in Switzerland. In addition, the authors also identify certain elite neighborhoods in both cities which are home to a disproportional number of elites.

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Sinergia team members Michael Strebel and André Mach have written a paper on corporate elites ties to institutions and organizations at different territorial scales. Existing research has found an increasing transnationalization of company networks and a decline of companies’ ties with national institutions since the end of the 20th century. However, these studies have neglected the question of how companies are connected to the city- regions where they have their seats. In their paper, the authors conduct a long-term analysis of the multilevel ties that companies maintain with the local and the national context they are embedded in. To do so, they focus on the directors of the major companies in the three largest Swiss city-regions (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) from 1890 to 2020. For seven benchmark years, they track the evolution of company directors’ multipositionality in local and national networks. In addition, to capture the transnational embeddedness of directors they look at the evolution of the percentage of foreigners and dual nationals among the corporate elite. Their analysis reveals three different phases of company networks’ multilevel ties. From the end of the 19th century to World War I, networks were mainly local and partly transnational, characterized by strong ties of companies to local institutions, weak ties to national institutions, and a certain presence of non-nationals in company directorates. From the interwar period to the fall of the Berlin wall companies’ ties were essentially national, with continued importance of local connections and an absence of non-national directors. From the end of the 1980s onwards directors’ local and national ties decline and directors’ backgrounds become increasingly transnational. Documenting the evolution of the relational embeddedness of companies allows to show the changing scales of companies’ activities in a long-term perspective. The results of this analysis further our understanding of the origins and the evolution of global capitalism.

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Sinergia team members Baptiste Antoniazza, André Mach, and Michael Strebel have co-authored a paper on the long-term evolution of the political left in Swiss cities. Nowadays, many cities in post-industrial societies are strongholds of left and progressive political forces. This urban left hegemony has not always been in place, however. Over the course of the 20th century, cities in Western countries have experienced different waves of left-progressive and right-conservative dominance. The aim of the paper is to trace these developments in more detail in the three largest Swiss cities over the course of the last 130 years to understand the evolution of left-progressive parties from counter elites to new urban hegemons. The authors take two steps to understand these developments and to document these long-term changes and transformations of political elites in Swiss cities. First, they provide a periodization of the political strength of left-progressive parties in the three major Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva and Zurich) in identifying key moments for their affirmation, access to power and integration with local political institutions. In a second step, they analyze the changes in the profiles of left-progressive political elites across these different periods. Based on a unique database including all political elites in the three cities for seven benchmark years (1890, 1910, 1937, 1957, 1980, 2000, 2020) they show that in terms of educational and professional background, left-progressive elites were clearly distinct from right-conservative elites during their first phase of dominance (1920-1940), whereas they have a more middle-class and academic background in their second phase of dominance (1990-).

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For the occasion of the election of the new president of the Zurich art society (Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, hereafter ZKG), which will be decided by the end of May, Sinergia team members Stéphanie Ginalski, Matthieu Leimgruber, Juliette Montandon, and Emilie Widmer have written a research note which sheds a light on the profiles of the presidents of the ZKG since its creation. For the first time in its history, the insider candidate of the ZKG Committee, Anne Keller Dubach – who could thus become the first woman to lead the society and who has developed her career in close contact with two former ZKG Presidents (Thomas Bechtler and Walther Kielholz) – has been challenged by an outsider candidate, lawyer Florian Schmidt-Gabain. This election coincides with important developments for the Kunsthaus Zürich, namely the opening of its new «Chipperfield» extension, which will host among others the famous and controversial Bührle art collection, as well as the nomination of a new director for the Kunsthaus.
The research note provides a timeline as well as individual biographical profiles of the 10 ZKG presidents and of the two candidates to the presidency. In doing so, it documents the rise and the reign of the « financial praetorians », i.e. the dominance of the financial elite in the executive committee and at the head of the ZKG since the interwar period, as well as their intricate links through family and business relationships.

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On the occasion of the « Historiales 2020 », Sinergia PhD candidate Émilie Widmer organized a panel with Louis Deltour (University of Geneva) and Fiona Vicent (University of Basel) reflecting on the topic of “the legitimation of elites”, exploring the practices, means and strategies implemented by the elites to distinguish themselves from other groups or classes. In this context, her contribution is a preliminary research to one of her thesis chapters and investigates how the Fine Art Societies of Basel and Zurich worked as key places of sociability for the finest local elites of these cities between the end of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century. Using sources from the archives of the Schweizer Kunstverein, the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft and the Basler Kunstverein, her work aims more precisely to shed light on the practices of exclusion and inclusion implemented by the Basel and Zurich Fine Arts Societies’ members to legitimize their elite status. These organisations were indeed generally very selective in their admission of new members, employing a system of heavy financial contributions and peer-mentoring to be able to get in. Such a system ensured an effective filter, that only allowed the elite to enter the societies and thus undeniably participated to the creation of class cohesion among them.

Drawing on the concepts of “exclusivity” and “segregated inclusion” developed by Accominotti et al. (2018) in their research on the New-York Philharmonic, her analysis underlines two important elements for a better understanding of the mechanisms of the elites’ privileged access to high culture. Firstly, the fact that cultural exclusivity allows elites to distinguish themselves from other social groups and gives them the opportunity to develop a vast network of contacts sharing the same social status. Secondly, however, the fact that this high culture cannot exist without a certain inclusion of other social groups in elite practices. The latter is truly essential in the process of legitimization of the elite, for the pre-eminence of bourgeois culture must be recognized by all in order to impose itself. This contribution however emphasizes how a practice, even when it appears inclusive, actually hides effective mechanisms of exclusion that ensure the persistence of bourgeois hegemony, thus highlighting a phenomenon of “segregated inclusion” taking place in these Fine Art Societies.

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