The Labor of Staying the Same: Anti-Developmental Elites and Coordinative Closure in the South

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 9: Industrial Changes and Employment

Abstract

Why do high-wage employment opportunities fail to materialize in regions where they would benefit most? Sociologists typically invoke path dependence or institutional lock-in. This paper develops a different account. I theorize coordinative closure: the organized alignment of incumbent elites across institutional positions to foreclose structural change by controlling the gates through which alternatives must pass. Where path dependence identifies feedback mechanisms that make deviation costly, coordinative closure specifies the actors and relations that produce what those frameworks describe. Lock-in is not a structural condition that traps actors; it is a political accomplishment, continuously produced through institutional labor.
To observe this normally hidden process, I exploit a rare moment of breakdown. In 1977-78, Philip Morris proposed a $200 million cigarette manufacturing plant in Cabarrus County, North Carolina (2,400 jobs at wages thirty percent above the county average) and encountered coordinated resistance from Cannon Mills, the textile giant whose leadership occupied positions throughout the Chamber of Commerce, the county commission, local banking, and regional media. The investment's scale exceeded the capacity for quiet gatekeeping, forcing coordination into the open. Drawing on internal Philip Morris documents, state archives, and extensive newspaper coverage, I reconstruct how closure operates when overstressed.
The case reveals an infrastructure paradox: the institutional positions enabling closure create vulnerabilities when coordination becomes observable. Network ties that permit rapid alignment become traceable connections; positions conferring discretionary authority impose public accountability. Visibility transforms the political question from "why don't alternatives succeed here?" to "who is blocking which alternatives and why?" The paper identifies specific conditions under which closure becomes vulnerable and shows that discursive justifications for closure collapse earlier than institutional gatekeeping, with implications for strategies of challenge. These findings illuminate how elite coordination reproduces regional inequality through the organized foreclosure of alternatives before they can formally fail.

Author

• Daniel Seel, University of Wisconsin-Madison