Owners and managers. In the patterning of elite power in the business community the owner group has the advantage of often being a hereditary elite with the margin of influence that such position gives. There are still areas in the world in which those in business are considered to be a cut below the landed aristocracy or other gentry of the cloth or cultural centers of the arts and learning. Latin Americans and Europeans are prone to claim this to be true. Yet many businessmen from many diverse nationalities are being integrated into the cultures there and their business success does them no harm in the process.
History affords many parallels.
There is a vitality in trade and commerce and its fruits that is hard to deny. Even managers of foreign corporations are culturally advantaged by rates of exchange, higher pay, and the prestige of their parent companies and nations and in time find themselves taken into the policy strata of national affairs of the nation in which they do business. Managerial personnel both locally and abroad are in strategic positions in relation to policy development. They may not be at the top of the power pyramid in policy formulation, but through their active contact with conditions of work within their businesses plus the fact that research and other organized blocks of knowledge are available to them makes them persons upon whom the top policy makers depend. The whole network of national trade organizations with their ability to influence policy is usually open to these men or to some of their immediate subordinates.