Dunne on Boltanski:
he question of the dominant social class, on Boltanski’s analysis, can no longer be reduced to questions surrounding the ownership of the means of production, as orthodox Marxism would have it, nor even to a question of habitus and cultural re-production, as Bourdieu’s critical sociology had more recently said. Today’s dominant class, for Boltanski, is the class of people who can pass out rules and transcend them. Under conditions of complex domination, the dominant class is the class which entitles itself to a double-relationship towards rules which it prohibits to the majority. On the one hand, rules are there to be obeyed – they are necessary. On the other hand, rules must be occasionally disobeyed, but only by a certain few – this too is necessary. The people that make these very calls, the people who rule over the rule-ness of the rules, the people for whom rules are both binding and unbound; these are the dominant class under conditions of complex domination. And for Boltanski, it is leaders and managers who are the bearers of this very privilege – they are the ones for whom the maintenance of structures of complex domination contains all the hallmarks of a vested interest.
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