Book Chapter
Understanding the Dynamics of Elite Behaviour in a Development Context

The chapters in this book cover a number of key issues on how elites interact in the development project. However, this book is intended to take the literature just one step further. Many of the chapters detail new areas of inquiry and raise questions to be answered. While legitimacy of political elites is a frequent topic in political science and political sociology, there is much less work on non-governing elites. One of the biggest challenges faced by researchers remains the difficulty of bridging disciplines. There are many rich areas of research on elites, but in the absence of a common conceptual framework, the terminology, assumptions and samples of existing work make cross-disciplinary work challenging. This volume was an initial effort to move towards stitching together existing work and producing a cohesive theory of elites and economic development for the future.