CHAPTER 3 Opening the Black Box of the Elitism Dispositif: Graduate Schools in Economics Jens Maesse INTRODUCTION Graduate schools 1 are important institutions in the development of uni- versities. As a part of neoliberal higher education reform policies, graduate schools are expected to ‘improve’ quality and serve discourses of ‘excel- lence.’ Against this background, graduate schools are part of power struc- tures that aim at the formation of academic elites. But what is meant by academic elites? How are these elites produced, how do they relate to wider society and how do graduate schools contribute to these processes? Elite formation processes cannot be generalized across all academic disciplines and they are not identical in all higher education systems. They take a specific form in each national and disciplinary context. This chapter takes a discourse theoretical perspective by applying the term ‘elitism dispositif’ (Maesse 2016b) in order to flag up the multiple dimen- sions that influence elite formation processes in economics. The term ‘elitism’ hereby reflects the constructionist character of elite formation processes as opposed to a hierarchical perspective that centers on econo- mists as a specific elite group. While similar processes can be observed in J. Maesse (*) University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany e-mail: jens.maesse@sowi.uni-giessen.de © The Author(s) 2018 R. Bloch et al. (eds.), Universities and the Production of Elites, Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53970-6_3 53 jens.maesse@sowi.uni-giessen.de