The MCC, society and empire: a portrait of cricket's ruling body, 1860–1914

Deep-time organizations: Learning institutional longevity from history

“…Since these organizations do rarely include experts from outside, they had to establish inside knowledge and competition; Kongō Gumi, for example, used to create internal groups of seven to eight members who competed against each other to become group leader and against other groups for higher places in the company’s hierarchy (Yoshimura and Sone, 2006: 146). Also, the Marylebone Cricket Club has an elected committee for which only a restricted number of people can vote, which has been compared to the Catholic Church’s conclave (Bradley, 1990: 3). An exceptional feature that we observed only once is the loose network of Freemasonry: even though grand lodges exist within each country and each lodge in each city is hierarchically organized, there is no worldwide center or hierarchy (Snoek and Bogdan, 2014: 1; Bullock, 2000).…”

“…In particular, four of the organizations of extreme longevity that we investigated are based in the United Kingdom, a monarchic state that did not collapse or become occupied during their time of existence over several centuries. Even more, the British Empire was a dominant world power over the last centuries and allowed these organizations to flourish globally, as for instance the Marylebone Cricket Club did in an exemplary way (Bradley, 1990). Two more organizations of extreme longevity are located in Japan, where again a monarch in form of the Imperial House as well as a related set of dominant cultural mechanisms such as regulation, control, and responsiveness might have aided the survival of organizations over centuries (Eisenstadt, 1996: 106-140).…”

Domination in Organizational Fields: It’s Just Not Cricket

“…Correspondence between objective and incorporated structures reproduced the relations of domination. Amateurs and ex-amateurs held powerful positions on the committees of the MCC and the fi rst-class County clubs, while professionals could not be members of County clubs-let alone the committees that administered them-and were excluded from leadership positions on the cricket ground (Bradley, 1992). This enabled amateurs to impose their vision of the social world as legitimate, which reproduced the objective relations of amateur power in fi rst-class cricket in symbolic relations of power.…”

The Diffusion of Cricket to America: A Figurational Sociological Examination

“…This led to an expanded elite class, but an elite which was more exclusionary than it had been in the past. The MCC, and cricket’s elite more generally, underwent a similar change in class composition (Bradley 1990), and also became more socially exclusive (Brookes 1978: 90). Despite their social status, the MCC became increasingly inward looking, so much so that Rait Kerr describes 1840–1864 as, “the very worst period of MCC control of the game” (1950: 37).…”