Kinship Interlocks: Mapping Family Ties Between Economic, Political, and Social Elites

The sociology of elites tends to focus on analytically distinct categories of people defined by singular resource types. But given a particular time and place, these analytically distinct elites are variously interwoven through family ties. Taking a Zelizerian perspective on inequality, and using the case of Dallas, Texas in its first century, I systematically examine the distribution of economic, political, and social elites across a multigenerational kinship network. Each collection of individual elites was highly concentrated within one massive, tangled “family web,” but within that web, they were relatively dispersed. The most durable sectors of the family web wove together super-densities of diverse resources, and were especially likely to include ties to elites at the national and international levels. Broadly, I advocate for a network-based perspective on elites and inequality, in which elites and their disproportionate resources are unequally distributed across a global-historical kinship network. This perspective complements a traditional approach based on the ranked wealth, status, or power of individuals. Mapping elite kin ties enriches and sometimes transforms the way we see central topics in the study of elites, including (a) patterns of mobility and persistence at the top of the class distribution, (b) relationships between local, regional, national, and global elites, and (c) cohesion and fragmentation among elites at a given point in time.