Representing the Family Firm: the enduring power of the British royal family

Dr Laura Clancy, Lancaster University

In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. Yet the British monarchy is usually ignored in studies on ‘the elites’, positioned as an archaic institution, an anachronism to global corporate forms of wealth and power, and therefore irrelevant. Drawing on research from her new book, Running the Family Firm: how the monarchy manages its image and our money, Dr Laura Clancy argues how the British monarchy can be understood as a corporation – the Firm – committed to accumulating wealth and reproducing power, alongside other corporate giants like Amazon and Apple. Meanwhile, in media culture we see representations seeking to obscure institutional and corporate power – the Cambridges as an ‘ordinary, middle-class family’, for example, or the Queen as an elderly (great-)grandmother. Dr Clancy argues that these representations of the royal family are a prism: a central ideological project designed to distance the monarchy from capitalist vulgarity and aristocratic debauchery, and reproduce monarchical power by ‘producing consent’ (Hall et al., 1978) for the monarchy in the public imaginary.

The talk will also reflect on the effect of the Queen’s passing on the corporation, and what the Firm might look like under the reign of King Charles III.

You can follow her on Twitter: @Laura__Clancy.