C. Wright Mills on White Collar

By Frank W. Elwell

In all of his writings, Mills interprets the world through a theoretical perspective very much influenced by Max Weber. He concentrated particularly on power elites within business and their political influence. He examined the extent to which business elites were tied in with military and governmental elites. He was interested in this relationship because of its historical and political significance in a nation that subscribes to an ideology of democracy. We are, he suggested, now caught in a disastrous drift of a merging power elite which, in the name of “crackpot realism, is carrying us ever closer to catastrophe.

Like the classical theory of the discipline, Mills’ vision is a holistic view of entire sociocultural systems, this system is interdependent, and it has profound effects on human values, thought, and ehavior. Mill’s main body of work centers on the themes of the expansion and centralization of bureaucratic coordination, and the consequent "rationalization" of social life. Individuals with power in modern American life derive their power from an institutional base. “This means, very broadly, that the exercise of power cannot be simply the exercise of individual eccentricity but must, to a considerable extent, run parallel to the ‘grain’ of power that characterizes the institutional source... The study of power, then, becomes the study of institutions, the power relations between institutions, and the people who represent the expressions of those institutions” (Cuzzort and King 1976, 144).