Researching Amongst Elites: Challenges and Opportunities in Studying Up 9781315605586, 1315605589, 9781317065586, 1317065581

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RESEArCHING AMONGST ELITES

I dedicate this book to my dad Carlos Correia Aguiar (1914–2001) and my mom Noemia Maria Marques (1925–2012), my working class heroes who taught me to be suspicious of all elites! Luis L.M. Aguiar For Bernice Lawler (1924–2010). Christopher J. Schneider

Researching Amongst Elites Challenges and Opportunities in Studying Up

Edited by LuIS L.M. AGuIAr CHrISTOPHEr J. SCHNEIDEr University of British Columbia, Canada

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2 012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Luis L.M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Luis L.M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Aguiar, Luis L. M. Researching amongst elites : challenges and opportunities in studying up. 1. Social mobility--Research. 2. Elite (Social sciences)-Research. 3. Social classes--Research. I. Title II. Schneider, Christopher J. 305.5'2'072-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aguiar, Luis L. M. Researching amongst elites : challenges and opportunities in studying up / by Luis L.M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2955-5 (hbk) 1. Social mobility-Research. 2. Elite (Social science)--Research. 3. Social classes--Research. I. Schneider, Christopher J. II. Title. HT612.A48 ISBN 9781409429555 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgments   About the Editors   List of Contributors  

vii ix xi

1

Redirecting the Academic Gaze Upward   Luis L.M. Aguiar

2

“Studying Up” Wall Street: Reflections on Theory and Methodology  29 Karen Ho

3

“Studying Up” in the Context of Civil War: Understanding Armed Defense of the Status Quo   Carolyn Gallaher

49



Getting in and Finding Out: Accessing and Interviewing Elites in Business and Work Contexts   Shaun Ryan and John Lewer

71

5

Interviewing Celebrities: Strategies for Getting Beyond the Sound Bite Michael Ian Borer

89

6

Examining Elites Using Qualitative Media Analysis: Celebrity News Coverage and TMZ   Christopher J. Schneider

103



Overlooking the Workers: Community Leaders’ Perspectives on Plant Closures and Economic Recession   June Corman, Ann Duffy and Norene Pupo

121

8

The Globality of Globals: From Floating to Escape Routes   Anthony Elliott

9

Studying Immigrant Entrepreneurs: From Ordinary to Big Players in the Transnational Capitalist Class  159 Karl Froschauer and Lloyd L. Wong

4

7



1

141

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10 11 12 13

Productive Disorientation, or the Ups and Downs of Embodied Research   Virginie Magnat

179

Interviewing Elite Men: Feminist Reflections on Studying “Up” and Selling Out   Shelley Pacholok

199

Turning over Rocks and Unsettling Memories: “Studying Up” Euro-Canadians in the Spaces between Cultures   Natalie A. Chambers

217

Methodological Challenges Faced when Researching in Hostile Environments: The SAWP in a Canadian Hinterland   Patricia Tomic and Ricardo Trumper

233

Afterword   Luis L.M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider

253

Index  

257

Acknowledgments My thanks to the contributors to this volume for their patience, professionalism and belief in this project form the outset. Some are old friends while others I befriended (hopefully) through our collective engagement in this collection. To Neil Jordan, a big thank you for believing in the project and for being so patient, understanding, prompt, professional and collegial. Gemma Hayman, also at Ashgate, deserves my thanks too for shepherding this book through the final stages to publication. The usual disclaimers apply. Luis L.M. Aguiar I wish to express my gratitude to the contributors to this volume, to Ashgate Senior Commissioning Editor Neil Jordan, and for the helpful comments provided during the peer-review process. I also wish to acknowledge my friends and colleagues, Luis Aguiar, David Altheide, Ariane Hanemaayer, Jessica Stites Mor, and Peter Urmetzer. Christopher J. Schneider

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About the Editors Luis L.M. Aguiar is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Barber School of Arts and Sciences at the University of British Columbia. He is co-editor of the book The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy (with Andrew Herod, Blackwell, 2006) and has published academic articles in, amongst others, Antipode; The Canadian Journal of Urban Research; Geoforum; Capital & Class; and Social Justice. In his most recent work he explores the changing economic base of the Okanagan Valley and the recruitment of new labour forces for farms, tourism and other service work in the post-industrial economy of the Valley. His research on Jamaicans and Mexican migrant workers into the valley is published in the book Interrogating the New Economy (University of Toronto Press) and in BC Studies. Dr. Aguiar is a recipient of a SSHRC Standard Research Grant award (2010–2013) for a project on global unions and transnational labor organizing, especially as it applies to building cleaners. He is in the latter phases of this research project and a manuscript is in preparation. He has taught a qualitative methods course at UBC and uses these methodological approaches in the study of building cleaners in Canada, Europe, as well as in examining Jamaican and Mexican migrant workers’ experiences in the Okanagan Valley. Christopher J. Schneider is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. Dr. Schneider has received awards in recognition of his teaching, research, and community service contributions to public education. His research investigates mass media messages about crime, deviance, popular music, and information technologies in daily life. Dr. Schneider has published articles and chapters as well as co-authored and co-edited books in these areas. He has given more than 250 interviews with various news media across North America.

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List of Contributors Michael Ian Borer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the editor of Varieties of Urban Experience: The American City and the Practice of Culture (University of America Press, 2006) and author of Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark (New York University Press, 2008). He is currently conducting research on the roles of nostalgia in American popular culture. He is the 2011–2012 Vice President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Natalie Chambers holds an MA from the UBC and is now enrolled in the Interdisciplinary PhD programme also at the UBC. June Corman is Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology at Brock University. She has served as Chair of Sociology, Director of Labour Studies and Director of Women’s Studies. Her most recent SSHRC grant, a collaborative project with Ann Duffy (principal) and Norene Pupo, examines the impact of plant shutdowns and downsizing on workers, their families and their communities. Ann Duffy is Professor of Sociology and is affiliated with the M.A. in Social Justice and M.A. in Critical Sociology at Brock University. She also teaches in Brock’s Women’s Studies Program. She has authored and co-authored a variety of books, chapters and scholarly articles. Most of these publications concern some aspect of employment, women, violence and aging. In addition, she has co-edited several texts that have become popular sources in the sociology of Canadian society, sociology of the family and work and employment. Most recently, she co-edited a text on work in the new economy entitled Shifting Landscapes (Nelson). Professor Duffy is currently, under the auspices of a SSHRC grant, collaborating on an exploration into the impact of worker displacement on worker’s communities and their families. Anthony Elliott is Director of the Hawke Research Institute, where he is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and his writings have been published in 16 languages. His recent books include Making the Cut (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction (Routledge, 2009), The New Individualism (with Charles Lemert, Routledge, 2009, 2E) and Mobile Lives (with John Urry, Routledge, 2010). He is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Social Theory (Routledge, 2010) and is co-editor of Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010).

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Karl Froschauer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and his recent research focuses on regional electricity sector integrations, immigrant entrepreneurship, and new immigrants in the new economy of Vancouver and Calgary. He has published articles in Energy Policy, Journal of Canadian Studies, Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Comparative Political Studies, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Korean Review of Canadian Studies and has written and co-edited several books, White Gold: Hydroelectric Development in Canada (UBC Press), In/Security: Canada in the Post-9/11 World, and Convergence and Divergence in North America: Canada and the United States (Simon Fraser University, Centre for Canadian Studies). Carolyn Gallaher is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University. Her research focuses on right-wing paramilitaries. She has written two books on the topic. The first, On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), examines the politics of the militia movement in the US during the 1990s and early 2000s. Her second book, After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-accord Northern Ireland (Cornell, 2007) looks at the reasons behind the sluggish pace of Loyalist demobilization after the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Her work has also appeared in journals such as Antipode, Society and Space, Cultural Studies, and Space and Polity. Karen Ho is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research centers on the problematic of understanding and representing financial markets, sites that are resistant to cultural analysis and disavow various attempts to locate or particularize them. Her domain of interest is the anthropology of economy, broadly conceived, with specific foci on finance capital, capitalism, globalization, corporations, inequality, dominant discourses, comparative studies of race and ethnicity, and feminist epistemologies. Her ethnography, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009), based on three years of fieldwork among investment bankers and major financial institutions, has won two Honorable Mentions from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Recent publications include “Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy” (American Anthropology, 2009), “Finance” (Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2010), and “Outsmarting Risk: From Bonuses to Bailouts” (Anthropology Now, 2010).  Her latest book project attempts to excavate an alternative cultural history of financial risk.  John Lewer is a member of the Newcastle Business School at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He holds a Bachelor and Master of Commerce degree from the University of New South Wales and graduated with a Diploma of Education from Sydney Teachers’ College. His doctoral thesis, which was awarded in 2006, investigated the remarkable performance of the workforce at BHP’s Newcastle

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steelworks during the plant’s closedown. His recent research publications include an analysis of the role of Australia’s specialist Remuneration Tribunal, the impact of socially-responsible investment (SRI) on human resource management practices and a review of the intersection between the trade practices jurisdiction and industrial relations. His book, co-authored with Robyn Alexander and Peter Gahan, Understanding Australian Industrial Relations, is now in its seventh edition. Virginie Magnat is Assistant Professor in Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia. Originally from France, she was a PhD in Theater from the University of California, where she also held a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Anthropology. She currently directs a SSHRC-funded international research project examining women’s foremost contributions to Jerzy Grotowski’s crosscultural investigation of performance, and is completing a book and documentary film series contracted by Routledge. Her research has been featured in American, Canadian, French, Polish, Italian, and Cuban scholarly journals and books. Shelley Pacholok is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her interests include gender and disaster, families and work, and qualitative methodologies. Her research is situated squarely in the field of social inequality—specifically, the ways in which gender relations are reproduced and subverted in the wake of crises. Her forthcoming book, Into the Flames: Disaster, Crisis, and the Remaking of Gender, examines the possibilities for disrupting gender relations in the context of a disaster. She has authored several papers on time-use in families and recently completed a SSHRC-funded, multi-site project that examined the parenting strategies of middle-income families in Canada and the United States during the economic crisis. Norene Pupo is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University and former Director of the Centre for Research on Work and Society. Professor Pupo has published in the areas of women, work and social policy, part-time employment, call centers and shifting employment practices in the public sector, and unions and economic restructuring. She has co-authored The Part-time Paradox and Few Choices: Women, Work and Family (McClelland & Stewart), and has co-edited Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs: The Transformation of Work in the 21st Century (Harcourt Brace and Company). She is also a co-author with James Henslin, Daniel Glenday and Ann Duffy of an introductory sociology textbook, Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach (Pearson Education). She has recently co-edited Interrogating the New Economy (UTP Higher Education) with Mark Thomas, and The Shifting Landscape of Work (Nelson) with Ann Duffy and Daniel Glenday. Shaun Ryan is a senior lecturer in the faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University, Australia. His doctoral thesis in the School of Work and Organizational studies, at the University of Sydney, examined employment relations and

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organizational culture in the New South Wales commercial cleaning industry. His recent publications have examined the application of the Justice for Janitors campaign in Australasia and participant observation as a research method. He is currently engaged in research into managing organizational closures and organizational memory. Patricia Tomic is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus where she teaches sociology. She has written on language, racialization, identity and migration. Recent publications appear in Legislated Inequality Temporary Labour Migration in Canada (Lenard & Straehle eds., McGill-Queen’s), Car Troubles (Conley & Tigar McLaren eds., Ashgate) and Canadian Issues/Themes Canadiens. She has also published articles in journals such as Race and Class; Antipode. A Journal of Radical Geography; Canadian Geographer Geographe Canadien; and Scripta Nova Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales. She co-edited and contributed to Espacios de género: Imaginarios, identidades e historias, published by Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Ricardo Trumper is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, where he teaches sociology. His research interests include migration, mobility, and neoliberalism. He is currently conducting research on mobility, fear, and sport in Chile and on the repercussions of neoliberalism, global mobility, and migration in the Okanagan Valley. Recent publications appear in Legislated Inequality Temporary Labour Migration in Canada (Lenard & Straehle eds., McGill-Queen’s), Sport and Labour Migration (Maguire and Falcous eds., Routledge), and Car Troubles (Conley & Tigar McLaren eds., Ashgate). His work has also appeared in journals such as Alternatives, Race and Class, and Antipode. He co-edited and contributed to Transformaciones metropolitanas y procesos territoriales. Lecturas del nuevo dibujo de la ciudad lationamericana, published by GEOLibros. Lloyd Wong is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary in Canada. He is also the domain leader of “Citizenship and Social, Cultural and Civic Integration” at the Prairie Metropolis Centre, one of the five Canadian Centres of Excellence for Research on Immigration, Integration, and Diversity. His research interests include immigrant/ethnic entrepreneurship, transnationalism and citizenship, and multiculturalism. Recent articles appear in Canadian Journal of Social Research, International Journal, Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal and International Migration. Recent book chapters appear in Hier and Bolaria (eds), Race and Racism in 21st Century Canada (Broadview Press), Clement and Vosko (eds), Changing Canada: Political Economy as Transformation (McGill-Queen’s University Press), Cameron and Stein (eds), Street Protests and Fantasy Parks: Globalization, Culture, and the State (UBC Press), and Falcous and Macguire (eds), Sport and Migration (Routledge). In 2006 he co-edited and contributed to

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a book entitled Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, published by UBC Press. In 2008 he was a guest associate editor for a special issue of Canadian Ethnic Studies on “Multiculturalism Discourses in Canada”.

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Chapter 1

Redirecting the Academic Gaze Upward1 Luis L.M. Aguiar

After a long trek outside Tehran in pursuit of the Ayatollah Khakhalli2 for an interview, V.S. Naipaul in his book Among the Believers (1982) describes briefly his “methodology” saying that he will be direct with the ayatollah, and on “a sheet of hotel paper” writes the questions he will pose to him: Where were you born? What made you decide to take up religious studies? What did your father do? Where did you study? Where did you first preach? How did you become an ayatollah? What was your happiest day? (1982: 55, italics in original). The simplicity and directness of the questions are exemplary, and they can prompt anyone, including religious elites, to answer without hesitation or trepidation. Unfortunately in social sciences research employing qualitative methods, very little is straight-forward or direct. In part, this is a result of difficulties in gaining access to participants, including elites. Additionally, this presents challenges to crafting the parameters of a study at hand—like which questions can and cannot be posed—while seeking to have key issues addressed. Therefore, this volume speaks to the challenges, anxieties and difficulties of accessing elites in qualitative research, but also to the urgency and opportunities in studying up. Naipaul was not totally free from challenges in interviewing the ayatollah (Kumar 2011: 45–6), but he managed them with simplicity and resolve. This is often not the case in researching elites and the challenges and opportunities in studying up as this collection shows. Remaining cool and focused is never easy in the unpredictable context of establishing rapport with potential elite research participants while using qualitative methods (England 2002; McDowell 1998). This is the case whether one is an “insider” or “outsider” to the research group (Dunk 2003; Zavella 1997). As qualitative methodologies gain popularity and acceptance in academic disciplines like education, nursing, social work, political science, human geography, international business and international relations (e.g., Bailey 1997; Bogdan and Biklen 1992; Crang 2005; Dwyer and Davies 2010; Gallaher in this volume; Milliken 1999; Welch et al. 2002), and “unprecedented growth in inequalities in income, assets and resources” (Savage and Williams 2008b: 1), the reticence to 1  I would like to thank Karen Messing, Shaun Ryan, Shelley Pacholok and Tina Marten for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Whatever failings remain herein are solely of my own doing. 2  According to Kumar (2011: 45), from whom we first read this passage by Naipaul, Ayatollah Khalkhalli was “Khomeini’s hanging judge”.

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study the elite and powerful remains a scholarly anomaly (de Grangeneuve 2009). This is disappointing and unfortunate (Pincon and Pincon-Charlot 2007) since elites and other powerful actors are publically asserting their identities, bullying their power to exploit and oppress, and flaunting their growing fortunes at a time of increasing social inequality, exclusion, dislocation and injustice (Harvey 2005). Whereas classical sociology was found on examining social change and elites in this process (Savage and Williams 2008b), outside of the post-war work of C. Wright Mills and the influence he cast into the early 1970s (Savage and Williams 2008b: 2), little remains in the discipline today on elites (Savage and Williams 2008b). Savage and Williams (2008b: 2) write of a “glaring invisibility of elites” in contemporary sociological research and entitle their book Remembering Elites (Savage and Williams 2008a) to push the point. Pincon and Pincon-Charlot (2011: 136) go further by writing of their disappointment at sociologists’ silence on studying up and reluctance to bring “la grande bourgeoisie”3 into sociological focus. The situation is no better in anthropology, the original discipline of ethnographic research, and home base to Laura Nader4 (1972) who long ago called for a concerted effort to study up. Yet, with some exceptions (e.g., Hertz 1998; Ho 2009), most anthropologists ignore and even contest the idea of studying up (see Magnat in this volume for a discussion), and some even turn into corporate “consultant ethnographers” (DiFruscia 2011) churning out public relations slogans or are hired to enhance the workplace culture of large corporations (Cefkin 2009).5 Can it be that “Hawthorne” is being resuscitated in 21st-century workplace spaces via field research?6 It is increasingly pressing that social scientists address issues of inequality and its reproduction so that, for example, the myth of “self-made” man—so popular in the public realm today—can be unraveled and undermined. A reinvigorated studying up analysis will depict how social advantage and resources are used for private gain, wealth accumulation and power grabs (Gladwell 2010). It can also show how advantages are reproduced and legitimated in different places and at different scales. Some elites are extreme in abusing their power and influence. Here we cite the examples of television hosts Donald Trump and Chef Gordon Ramsay for their display—however manufactured—of demeaning, humiliating and abusive 3  Luis’ translation. Their exact words: “… en raison de notre revolte contre le silence des sociologues que nos avons entrepris de ne pas laisser les riches et les puissants a l’abri de l’investigation sociologique.” 4  Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. 5  Anthropology is more diverse than what I seem to imply here. Still, my point remains that the discipline has largely ignored the study of elites. 6  In a review of Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter, DiFruscia (2011: 43) concludes: “… although the business-ethnographers who have agreed to share reflections on their practice in this book come out of the exercise relatively unscathed, the same cannot be said for the discipline itself. Anthropology bears the marks of rough handling at being so summarily morphed into a participant in corporate expansion.”

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behavior towards “their” employees in their “reality” shows. (Simon Cowell of American Idol fame and the “stars” of Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank7 also fit this characterization.) In fact, today many in the bourgeoisie are adorned with celebrity status making them practically beyond reproach,8 and so out of reach for serious critical investigation as topics of inquiry or as research participants (for corporate escape artists, see Corman et al. in this volume).9 This is an issue for researchers and especially social scientists, and even more so for those of us concerned with democratic processes, justice, equality and transparency in liberal democracies. In North American sociology, which arguably has practiced qualitative research more so than any other discipline with the exception of anthropology (DeVault 2007; Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz 1980b), the last scholarly book published in English on studying up using qualitative approaches appeared in 1995! (Hertz and Imber 1995).10 While coverage (exaltation) of celebrity culture continues to expand (Borer in this volume; Laurens 2011; Holmes and Redmond 2010), studies that critically examine elites remain scarce and limited in scope, breath and geography11 (but see: Hertz 1998; Ho 2009; McDowell 1998; Savage and Williams 2008a). For this reason alone a book on redirecting the academic gaze 7  The first is Canadian and the second American “reality” shows where small-time entrepreneurs come face to face with big investors looking for financial backing of their burgeoning business or ideas. In the presentations of their life-works to the investors, they are often ridiculed, dismissed and humiliated for their lack of business savvy and acumen. 8  Even when, as in the case of Donald Trump, they toy with the idea of running for the presidency of the United States. 9  But so are some non-members of the bourgeoisie (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) and more recently “internet celebrities” like Perez Hilton. Indeed celebrity status isn`t exclusive to the bourgeoisie as Borer shows in his chapter below. However, members of the bourgeoisie seem better insulated from harsh critiques and attempts to displace them from “their status” than non-members of their class. 10  Recently, the books Interviewing Experts (2009) and Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter (2009) were published. The former contains only one brief chapter on interviewing elites while the latter focuses on embedding anthropologists in corporations so that the latter can use them as consultants in order to develop better public relations narratives. In 1998, Environment and Planning A published a special issue on “Researching elites and elites spaces.” 11  In a 27-page essay on the American history of fieldwork in sociological research, DeVault (2007: 156) writes 10 lines saying: Although many studies in the fieldwork tradition train their gaze on the less priviledged, reporting their experience back to policymakers and middleclass audiences, fieldworkers also study “up”, providing close-up inspections of professionals and adminitrative elites (e.g., Strauss and his colleagues on medicine [Glaser and Strauss 1965; Strauss et al. 1964] and the ethnographies of science that later emerged from this group [Clarke et al. 2003; Timmermans 1999]; Daniels [1988] on affluent women as civic volunteers; Rollins [1985], who included the white employers of African-American domestic workers in her study; and Vaughan [1996] on NASA space flight engineers).

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upwards (Hyndman 2001) and outwards (Elliott in this volume; Forschaeur and Wong in this volume) seems warranted and timely. More importantly, a theoretical and methodological discussion of studying up will, I hope, spur on academic re-interest in elites, and stimulate debates on democratic access, practice, accountability and transparency relating to issues of leadership, justice, equality, and the role, function, and (il)legitimacy of elites in these processes. Studying up “holds the possibility of providing answers to those whose lives have been wrenched into despair” (Corman et al.: p. 180 in this volume). The irony is that as global north societies become more publically open as people share their most intimate thoughts through communication and information technologies such as social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and other instant communication devices, elites are fortifying themselves in gated communities, gated condos, retreats, and resorts (Caldeira 2001; Duncan and Duncan 2004). At the same time they run companies, organizations, institutions and government departments and agencies with little accountability—even less transparency— and annoyance (or is it abhorrence?) for democratic processes, practices and participation. And according to Freeland (2011), elites are now infiltrating global humanitarianism through their foundations, personalities and cultural capital. This would not be such an important issue if it were not the fact that decisions elites make have profound impact on our lives, though more so in some lives rather than others. Can societies survive if access to how decisions are made, and in whose interests they are made, remain outside the purview and participation of the general population and beyond the reach of researchers’ ability to do insider research? Who but academics are better placed to penetrate the sanctuaries of elites and their frequent unilateral decision making practices with important consequences for the rest of us?12 It behooves social scientists and qualitative researchers in particular to take on the task and responsibility of penetrating the fortress walls of elite exclusivity to explore and expose who, how, and why decisions are made, how the decisions are legitimated to benefit the few at the cost of the many, and show that even when “studying down” one should not ignore the role of elites in managing and controlling social processes and phenomena with broad socioeconomic implications and consequences at the local and global scales (Pincon and Pincon-Charlot 2011: 136). This book is about researching elites and studying up. It seeks to do two things: (1) to present arguments that studying up can, and indeed must, become again accessible and common to social research inquiry (Cochrane 1998; Hertz and Imber 1995; Nader 1972), and (2) to demonstrate through empirical evidence how this is being pursued. The chapters in this volume show how these tasks are being tackled in researching elites and studying up from various theoretical 12  There are, of course, journalists, documentarians, and some film makers in particular who can also do this work of analysis and exposure. However, social scientists often built their careers on analysis of specific groups and people whereas journalists, for example, are more contextual and fleeting in their interest in a specific topic or group of people.

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perspectives in different ethnographic places. In the remainder of this chapter I define what I mean by elites, studying up, and conclude by offering reasons for the neglect of studying up. A final section highlights the main points each chapter makes to this book. Defining Elites Elite as a concept has a long history of shifting meanings and fluid boundaries (Daloz 2010). Raymond Williams, in his always useful book Keywords, writes that elite originally referred to someone elected (from the French word “elire” or elect) or formally chosen (Williams 1983: 112). At about the 15th century the notion of elected through “some social process” came to mean “chosen by God” (Williams 1983: 112). Subsequent social processes were applied to distinguish and discriminate as in the rise of the notion of the “best”, which according to Williams was synonymous with 18th-century use of elite. From then on elite expressed “social distinction by rank” (Williams 1983: 113) as a result of lack of legitimacy of heredity and the need to distance elite from class as the former pertains to ruling cadres not always tied to class origin (Williams 1983: 113). Today elites13 are “small minorities who make decisions on behalf of the majority” (Hiller 1996: 127). They are integrated and well organized groups with “cohesion and solidarity” (Pakulski 2011: 329, 330). This does not mean that internal divisions do not exist, but their small numbers and cohesiveness “facilitates communication, collaboration, and collusion, especially the formation of extensive networks” (Pakulski 2011: 330). There are several different types of elites including State elites who are politicians, judges and bureaucrats occupying “top positions in the state system” (Olsen 1980: 1). Such elites are “the decisions makers of the State, just as members of the corporate elite are the decision makers of the private sector” (Olsen 1980: 1). Often, of course, elites in these two social locations overlap (Carroll 2008; Clement 1975) and rely on or put in place mechanisms (e.g., cultural capital) to reproduce their positions. Mills writes about more general power elite whom he identifies as those in political, economic and military spheres. Carroll (2008) focuses on the Canadian corporate elite as the most organized faction of the Canadian capitalist class since World War II. He writes (2008: 51): “[t]he Canadian corporate elite appeared as the leading edge of a well-integrated, domestically based capitalist class, organized through an extensive network of interlocks that brought together the leading lights of big industry and high finance.” For Mills (1959: 3–4) elites have this in common: The power elite is composed of men [sic] whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in 13  This paragraph borrows liberally from Aguiar, “Studying Up, Being Put Down: Farming Elites Disrupt Study.” Unpublished draft paper, June 2009.

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Researching Amongst Elites positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions; their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequences than the decisions they do make.

C. Wright Mills’ definition of elites situates them in the economy, the military and the political realm.14 This location of elites is useful, though today the sites of their power and influence have stretched into spheres like culture, sport, media, academia, and philanthropy, etc. as Mills did not anticipate sufficiently enough the acceleration and expansion of our cultural and social development and the accompanying ascension and control of existing and emerging elites. Nor did Mills take gender into account in his analysis of the power elite (Kanter 1977). Although today many women hold elite status (Fisher 2011), the corporate glass ceiling remains a stubborn obstacle for women, especially for those of colour and working-class backgrounds (Fisher 2011; Kanter 1977). Other writers define elites by their emotional state. For example, Wagstaffe and Moyser (1987) write of threatened elites and Ryan and Lewer (in this volume) of reluctant and even embarrassed elites. The point here is that expansion of the concept of elite is inclusive and flexible, as Tomic and Trumper show in their contribution to this volume. What the concept gains in its reach makes for some imprecision in its definition. Still it is a difficult thing to avoid or correct (Daloz 2010). Indeed some argue that this is as it should be (see Pacholok for a summary of this view). While global elites are emerging (more on this below), local communities continue to use their own standards by which to define elites. These standards do not quite correspond to those of the broader society (Corman et al. in this volume). Further as Corman et al. (in this volume) show the diversity of elites within the community itself makes defining difficult and complex. Identifying these, negotiating and navigating within the overlapping spaces of local elites can be quite challenging and a source of stress in research (Zagarski and Zagarski 1980). Some ethnographers have demonstrated the need to gain access to these elites and the necessity to negotiate with them lest the research be in jeopardy of never taking place (Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz 1980). The careful ways one needs to navigate with elites and ensure that negotiating with one group of ethnic elites does not prevent the researcher from accessing another, needs to be kept in mind at all times. The work of elites at the local scale and the emergence of elites at the global scale remain social phenomena to explore and analyse given that they don’t necessarily operate independently of each other nor in distinct bounded scales. There is a long and insightful history of sociological research on elites and the powerful in capitalist society (C. Wright Mills 1956; Clement 1975; Domhoff 2006; Porter 1965; see in this volume Forschaeur and Wong; Ryan and Lewer for reviews on research on elites). However, this history and focus begins to wane 14  See Schneider in this volume for a discussion of Mills’ definition of celebrity elite.

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and decline in the early 1970s as a result of the prominence of “sample survey as the most powerful and legitimate social science research method of the late 20th century” (Savage and Williams 2008b: 6). “From within this perspective,” Savage and Williams (2008b: 6) declare “elites become opaque from within its purview” as case studies are sidelined for the “scientific method” of sample survey methodology. But even before the displacement of elite research, and with rare exception, studies avoided directly interviewing elites as a result of time and difficulties of access even when their behaviour or actions were crucial to the research topic and data collection. Researchers rely on documents, telephone surveys, newspaper clippings, new media sources (Schneider in this volume) and other sources to build a file15 with data that will enable them to infer explanations for the behavior of elites. These methodological practices make important contributions to our understanding of the role and interests of elites and the ways by which they wield their power to protect their positions and wealth. No doubt there are theoretical and methodological issues arising from doing quantitative research on elites (see Savage and Williams 2008a for more on this). However, the issues differ significantly from the approach outlined herein centering on access to elites and powerful men and women for a sit down, face-to-face interview, or ethnographically embedded in structures of social activity and action at the local and global scales. Quantitative research is distant and impersonal, qualitative close and intimate (Bryman 2004; Esterberg 2001). In qualitative research settings issues arise immediately at the time and space of interviewing and often by the interviewee herself who requires an immediate response. The immediacy of the methodology often gives rise to trepidation and anxieties, but satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment as well.16 In spite of this varied and often forgotten history, one can make some general comments on the concept of elite. First, in its application and reach it is gender skewed; it is most commonly applied to men (but see Vianello and Moore 2000). In other words, due to a lack of gender consciousness in the sociology of elites’ research, one often imagines males as occupying this category. Pakulski (2011) continues this gender-blindness in an otherwise important publication on clearing the ground on elites, class and global elites. Second, elites are defined within the borders of the nation-state. For example, they emerged and are recognized as elites by the economic and cultural standards and developments within the country they are born or make their claim to fame. Today the reach of television, advertising and print and online media has moved some national elites onto the global stage (see Elliott; Forschaeur and Wong; both in this volume). These are elites of all 15  See C. Wrights Mills’ “intellectual craftsmanship” chapter for discussion of keeping “files” contained in The Sociological Imagination (1959). 16  Christine Williams, who wrote the ethnography Inside Toyland, reveals in an interview: “The hardest part of qualitative research for me is the emotional work involved in contacting gatekeepers and potential respondents” (in Fenstermaker and Jones 2011: 210). And, see also Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz 1980a: 3–22.

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kinds including those playing professional sport (e.g., David Beckham; Cristiano Ronaldo; Lebron James) and involved in transnational ethnic entrepreneurship (Froschauer and Lloyd in this volume). How some manage to move beyond the nation-state and others do not in this time of the globalization of elites, is not entirely well developed or understood (Juvin and Lipovetsky 2010). Furthermore, Richard Florida (1992) speaks of a creative class with skills and knowledge of distinguishing importance making them elites in a post-fordist economy of flexibility and consumption. Their superior skills furnish them with agency to decide where to settle and work. Third, and connected to the second point, is the globalization of the economy which has given rise to new elites defined by the terms of reference and preference of the global economy (Buthe and Mattli 2011; Sassen 1991). Sassen (1991) writes of this in the rise of the global city and the emergence of a new middle class with its own elite members. Others write on how the dismantling of the welfare state and the rise in privatization lead to the growth of think tanks and a policy elite with the agenda of rolling out neoliberalism (Smith 1991). The rise of the billionaire elite (a “superclass” [Rothkopf 2008]) is also being written about but the tendency thus far is to treat them with curiosity and envy (Laurens 2011) rather than through a detailed analysis of how they wield their power in the global economy and the implications of their actions and interests onto the rest of us (Rothkopf 2008).17 The shifting definitions of elites and their differentiation from class remains an important debate within sociology (Daloz 2010; Pakulski 2011), as does the transnationalization of the concept in the global economy. Forschauer and Wong in this volume write of global ethnic elites migrating between geographical regions carrying multiple citizenship identities. Anthony Elliott, also in this volume, defines global elites as “globals” and sketches their changing social identities and mobile worlds of work (see Paluksi for another view on global elites). Freeland (2011) sidesteps the economic power of the global elite, which she assumes is obvious to readers of The Atlantic (where she publishes), and instead draws attention to the immense transnational cultural power elites display in global humanitarianism work, for example. The transnationalization of the idea, identities and practices of elites is a recent phenomenon and is only now emerging as a research topic. Even those who are critical of the facile way with which the concept of global elite or transnational capitalist class (Pakulski 2011) is invoked, recognize the important of the concept even if they are skeptical of the empirical data presented in recent scholarship to support the emergence of this new class (Pakulski 2011).

17  Though more description than analysis, Rothkopf (2008) puts the number of the “superclass” (what others define as global elites) at 6,000 individuals.

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Studying Up: Detours Laura Nader (1972) first urged researchers (in particular anthropologists) to study up. She sought to revitalize and influence anthropology by redirecting the discipline toward examining “First World” cultures, including its socio-economic structures and power dynamics. More specifically, Nader proposed that issues of accountability and democratic processes be key to anthropological fields of study engaged in analyzing the cultural practices of “First World” societies, like the United States were the income disparity between the general population and the elite remains shockingly high.18 Forty years on19 Nader’s call for studying up in the form of researching elites and powerful actors for the purpose of accountability, democracy and justice remained even more pressing given the fiasco economic elites have been laying on people long before the financial crisis of 2008,20 and who use neoliberalism to solidify their control and grow wealthier in the process (see Corman et al. in this collection; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Ferguson 2011; Harvey 2005; Klein 2007). Sociology and the social sciences more generally, have been slow and inconsistent to heed Nader’s call (Gusterson 1997). While much has been studied, analyzed and written about the disadvantaged and underprivileged (Aguiar and Herod 2006 [and which has been critically and politically important]; ScheperHughes and Bourgois 2009; Wacquant 2008), little of this is concretely grafted to the behaviour and actions of the elite in the same space and place (but see Bridges 2011). What seemed perhaps clear and unambiguous to study up at the time of Nader’s position, is no longer. Consider for instance Gusterson (1997) who states: “participant observation is a research technique that does not travel well up the social structure” (cited by Ortner 2010) or Welch et al. (2002: 613) who point out that “elite interviewing has not been a mainstream issue in the literature on in-depth interviewing.” Left with this state of affairs, what are we to make of this? What explains this detour from studying up? What has happened in the interim to explain the neglect of looking up with our academic gaze? Difficult and challenging as it is to access elites, we would do worse than heed the advice of Nader when she remarked that obstacles to access in studying up are numerous but anthropologists (and we add others) face them everywhere they study and solve them through “rapport” (Nader 1972: 301–2). In other words, obstacles to access are challenging but should not provide an excuse to avoid committing to and persevering in studying up.

18  Emily Jackson (2011: A8) writes: “The recovery may be slow, but not for the world’s wealthy, who have $2-trillion more to invest than they did before the crash.” 19  In the intervening years, Marcus and Clifford (1995) published their edited book, and more recently the geography journal Environment and Planning A (1998) carried a special issue on “Researching elites and elite spaces.” 20  See footnote 13 above.

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Nader’s rallying call sputtered along at best due to both theoretical developments in the social sciences and changes in the political economy of late capitalism. These developments gave rise to questions that were, in Nader’s time, non-pressing or yet to be articulated. In the interim between Nader’s call and today, however, questions such as: what exactly does it mean to study up? To whom does “above” refer to in the studying up metaphor, have emerged to trouble studying up. Even more contentious in recent literature has been the notion that studying up is useful or even desirable (Magnat in this volume; Smith 2006; Tomic and Trumper in this volume). The skepticism in the metaphor of studying “up” relates to theoretical perspectives like post-modernism and post-structuralism, as well as feminism. The latter’s concern with positionality and appropriation of voice in research played like a “drama” in methodological and theoretical debates (Pacholok in this volume). The remainder of this chapter discusses these questions and how theoretical developments pushed studying up to the backburner. Class Social class is a benchmark concept in the discipline of sociology even though much debate has ensued to refine and make the concept more precise in language and applicability. Class is a foundational concept in the discipline of sociology and it crosses disciplines to also remain central in political science and geography, for example (Clement 1990; Gibson-Graham 1996; Laclau and Mouffe 1986; Pakulski and Waters 1996; Wright 1985). Our perspective conceives society as composed of classes (not only) categorized into high, middle and low class in relation to the means of production (Marx and Engels 1998). Class is a “term to distinguish groups of individuals who are socially and economically stratified within various societies” (Herod 2011: 415). This and other sociological definitions of class and indeed society, as well as the Marxist paradigm, has been troubled and challenged in important ways (Bauman 1982; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Weber 2008;). The issue is that some writers “presume in advance that some of these [sources of harm, inequality and injustice] are more fundamental than others, analytically and politically” (Barnett 2011: 426). Yet a certain equilibrium of identities and social differences arose in the literature not only questioning the explanatory value of class, but contesting the relevancy of studying up (class analysis) for broader conceptualizations of experience, social relationships and identity. And so in the midst of neoliberalism and the accumulation by dispossession by capital (Harvey 2005), ideas of exploitation, abuse, and injustice have been largely suppressed, replaced by discourses of responsibility, entrepreneurship and a new individualism “free” from class re-formation and identity (Aguiar and Herod 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Dumenil and Levy 2011; Harvey 2005; Peck 2010). To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, there is no society, only individuals (Baudrillard 1983). Class has also been sidelined, marginalized and invalidated by neoliberal organic intellectuals (Gramsci 1971; Harvey 2005) peddling discourses of objectivity and consent about self-reliance and market fundamentalism (Boltanski

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and Chiapello 1999; Carroll and Ratner 2005; Harvey 2006; Klein 2007; Peck 2010). But class hasn’t gone away; it has changed and re-formed (Bourdieu 1999; Clement 1990). To me class has renewed urgency and applicability in my readings of the changing economic landscapes of late capitalism. Bringing class back into the re-direction of the academic gaze upwards has never been more timely and urgent (Hyndman 2001; Jackson 2011; Pincon and Pincon-Charlot 2011; Savage and Williams 2008a, 2008b). While we agree that reality is far more complex that our analytical tools, the re-inscription of class through a study up analysis of the social structure of capitalism is what defines the “Occupy” movements who have identified the super-rich as the elite running the world economy into the ground while amassing obscene levels of personal wealth. Feminism Feminism provides another source of contention on studying up. Some feminists (Benjamin 1988; O’Brien 1981; see Segal 1987 for discussion and critique) argue that we live and endure a patriarchal culture which subordinates women and aggrandizes men. They argue that patriarchy is the hegemonic culture reproducing male power and unequal gender relations and relationships. As such studying any aspect of this culture is studying patriarchy, which by definition means studying up since it is the culture of domination and exclusion, and the domination of men over women. The omnipresence of patriarchy in the global north is feminism’s source of analytical power but its weakness as well. Power in that it clearly identifies the central issue in society which is how social institutions, practices and discourses are ultimately organized to reproduce women, in general, subordinate to men. The gendering process of making women socially unequal to men is the work of patriarchal culture. Weak in the sense that this mainstream feminism has been critiqued by dual systems theorists (Hartmann 1979) and socialist feminists (Barrett 1985; Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright 1979) for inadequately addressing issues of periodization, change within patriarchy, women’s agency in resisting and/or consenting to patriarchy, difference, or on the emergence of women’s autonomous spaces and alternative life practices (Hill Collins 2000; Segal 1987). And while feminisms have dealt with most of these criticisms, it has come at a cost. According to Bannerji (1995) the focus on identity and subjectivity was increasingly dislodged from connections with class and the political economy making the issues more exclusive. Nancy Fraser (2009) argues that second wave feminism was co-opted by neoliberalism and the post-fordist economy of accommodation and claims recognition in the process distancing itself from issues of redistribution and transformation. While feminism became more broadly validated and accepted, along the way it lost a militant critique of the changing political economy and foci on broader systemic structures of oppression and change (Fraser 2009: 113). “After all, this [neoliberal] capitalism would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the cornerstone of women’s waged labour, and

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seeks to disembed markets from social regulation in order to operate all the more freely on a global scale” (Fraser 2009: 133). A matrix of cross-cutting identifies such as gender, class, race and sexuality better construct the analyses of capitalism and white male bourgeois culture, as some feminists argue (Fraser 2009; Stasiulis 2010). In other words, contemporary culture is also about the reproduction of class, race and sexuality in formal and informal ways (Bridges 2011). From this latter perspective the task is not simply to demonstrate something that is always already there—patriarchy—but rather to show how in different ways and spaces the discourses of patriarchy (but not only these) are invoked, rearticulated, reproduced to oppress but also challenged as women (and men) live their lives. Khiara Bridges (2011) provides an excellent example of class and race analysis in her ethnography of a public medical clinic in New York City. She studies down—interviewing Medicaid/welfare patients— across—her co-workers in the clinic—and up—doctors about the productions and reproductions of class and race in the geographies of the clinic, including the doctors’ offices. Shelley Pacholok outlines some of the feminist issues on studying up and qualitative methods as she focuses on, in part, demonstrating how working class firefighters constitute an example of elites whereby studying up becomes applicable. Gender is then a key component of studying up. Reflexivity within feminism has been helpful in other ways. In the area of methodologies feminists have re-thought the idea of research, research setting, the role of participants and the obligations (to participants) in the dissemination of research findings. Such worthwhile concerns have led to innovative research developments, relationships and strategies. Amongst these developments have been ideas about power, positionality, and representation. Power In qualitative methodological discussions it is often said that an imbalance of power exists between the researcher and her participants in the research activity (Patai 1991). The imbalance is most often due to the researcher’s class position and the advantages this accrues to her over research participants who are often located in the lower classes of the social order (Esterberg 2001). Since there are distinct advantages to class position in the class structure, the university researcher’s upper-middle-class position confers onto her social, financial and cultural capital. Some of these advantages, we have learned, are unearned when white skin is marked for privileged treatment and social ascension. Lipsig (2006) describes this through the concept of possessive individualism in whiteness and Aguiar and Marten (2011) call it painless white privilege. In research these advantages are obvious (Lipsig 2006). It is the researcher who designs, develops, implements and divulges the result of the study often with little or no input from participants. Critiques of the implications of this imbalance in research, and strategies to rectify it have been raised and debated, especially as it pertains to studying the powerless in society (see Pacholok in this volume; Ho in this volume; Gallaher

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in this volume). The development of participatory research practises whereby research participants are included from the start in conceptualizing, shaping, developing, directing and implementing the research plan is an important way that the imbalance is addressed. The nurturing of rapport in the interview setting by developing closeness and intimacy with the interviewees themselves in order to remove barriers and boundaries between the researchers and researched, and people of different classes, has been another important approach (Oakley 1981; Patai [1991] for a critique). Being conscious of the knowledge participants possess and validating that knowledge by letting them speak for themselves, (but see Rice 2009) is yet another strategy employed by researchers (Messing, Seifert, Vezina, Balka and Chatigny 2005). Nonetheless, researchers are timid in studying down fearing the intellectual and political repercussions of misrepresenting the Other. Some, however, caution about too quickly withdrawing from studying the socially marginalized for fear of “entering their world” and appropriating their voice and thus misrepresenting their lives. So Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2003: xiv– xv) advise: “… fieldworkers must heed the postcolonial critiques of the classical anthropologist’s craft. However, there is still much work to be done unpacking the structures, meanings, and effects of powerlessness, injustice, and race, sex, and class apartheid for millions of people stranded on the urban peripheries of the global economy.” We concur with this point of view. Given the issues identified above in researching down, what concerns arise when the study shifts to interviewing elites and other powerful actors? What important and inherently sociological issues emerge in studying up? What methodological strategies are social researchers devising to study up? Does the researcher still hold power over her participants when studying up? Or, do powerful participants seek to subvert the position of the research in carrying out his/her study in exchange for participating? (see Tomic and Trumper in this volume) What point is there in giving “voice” to interviewees who are already visible and quite outspoken in the public sphere? (Gallaher in this volume; Ho in this volume; Tomic and Trumper in this volume) How do researchers suggest we deal with these questions in order to move on with our studies? So far in discussions (Cochrane 1998; Guterson 1997; Hertz and Imber 1995) of qualitative methods agency has been placed on the researcher’s lap. Afterall, it is she who articulates the issue, gathers funds, assembles the research team, frames the study and attaches her name to the end product—publications. In such a scenario the research participant is often a “tourist” of sorts in the study who is called upon by the researcher to strategically intervene in the research plan by often answering a question or two, or by being relied upon as resource person for access to contacts. However, Rice (2010) along with attributing agency to elites in the gatekeeping phase of the research writes that elite participants exercise agency even prior to the encounter with the researcher. This is done through a “network embedded” in partnerships stretching out their business operations, and geography of connections and contacts. The range of this network enabled elite research participants to be aware of the research initiative even before being approached by Gareth Rice

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for interviews (2010: 72). In this milieu the researcher must develop a pivoting agility to shift positions quickly to adapt and respond to questions and concerns coming from different angles and interests tied to objectives in the researcher’s plan of study. Rice’s “elasticity of positionality” is adopted to address the different questions and explain to different elites what the research is about, how he will address their specific questions and concerns, and how the post-research phase will take into account issues raised by elites gathered in research. The caution here is not to bend too much to accommodate potential participants (bend too far and the elastic band will brake) and thus guard against becoming supplicant to the wishes of elite research participants. Researchers, too, often claim that either they have no power in the research setting—even when dealing with the powerless—or that they have succeeded in establishing a balance of power with their research participants (e.g., Oakley 1981). Of course a lot more goes into the research setting then raising questions for interview, and the idea of the “elasticity of positionality” captures well this idea. However, to frequently the concept of power is bandied about as if everyone has equal ability and wherewithal to manipulate it for an advantage. We object to this view and endorse Allen’s view that: In a world where it almost becomes commonplace to talk about power as networked or concentrated, distributed or centralized, even decentred, deterritorialized or radically dispersed, it is all too easy to miss the diverse geographies of power that put us in place (Allen quoted in Rice 2010: 73).

As a scholar concerned with these issues I believe these are important questions to raise, discuss and debate especially with the various ways (e.g., individual web pages, journals that we publish in, websites etc.) elite participants can access to profile the academic who is about to interview her. It is also important, to engage in a discussion of how to address these questions while in the research setting. Furthermore, my skepticism relies, in the last instance, on the fact that the researcher retains the power. This is not to say or discourage the conscious development of researchers to be more careful, sensitive and inclusive to participants in the research activity. And in this regard we support action research, collaborative research and the like to minimize the distinctions between the two in order to enable more precise research foci to develop. Culture “What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizer rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty,” states Laura Nader (1972: 289). Some interpret the culture of the colonizer to be total and terrorizing. For example, hooks (1982; [Fanon 1968]) writes about the colonizing culture of whiteness and its terrorizing effects in the

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minds and bodies of African-Americans.21 In this collection, Chambers follows this line of interpretation by arguing that studying the culture of the colonizer is studying up, even if the actual people she interviews—all former employees (e.g., janitor) of residential schools in British Columbia—are below her class position in economic and cultural capital terms. For Chambers studying the culture of the colonizer and whiteness is the same as studying up since the former is understood as all-encompassing. The challenge, of course, is to demonstrate how spaces of resistance to colonization emerge even when one defines the culture as total. Some Indigenous scholars are developing theories and methodologies to show (Wilson 2008) the ways and beliefs of indigenous people enabling researchers to genuinely understand indigeneity in place and space in the early 21st century (Magnat in this volume; Wilson 2008). In doing so they move beyond the “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) and into an “ethical space” embedded in indigenous beliefs and customs in the construction of the life worlds of aboriginal peoples everywhere (see Chambers in this collection for discussion of these concepts). Posts Another important intervention into qualitative methods with implications for studying up has to do with postmodernist, post-structuralism and postcolonial theory (Weedon 1997; see DeVault 2007 for discussion) and its influence in the social sciences including sociology, anthropology and geography. More specifically, this has to do with how to conceptualize society (does society exist at all?). From a post-modernist point of view ideas of structures, hierarchy and authority along with meta-narratives and transhistorical agents of social change are a legacy of the Enlightenment which no longer served to orient in late 20th century disorganized capitalism. Post-structuralism rejects ideas of levels, scales and/or structure to society as some pre-existing a priori framework. Instead it articulates the materiality of discourses as a framing conduit for “structuring” society and behavior of the general population, and which cannot be pre-determined as existing in any particular analytical frame or anchored in an originating structure (Marston, Jones and Woodward 2005). That is, studying up (if it exists at all) does not exist in some structural sense since class is not structurally defined, if it is significant at all, but discourses socially mark out groups as different and distinct and legitimize them as such. Studying up is less a position or location in the class structure than a set of emerging practices delineating differences whereby some (men) are constructed as superordinate and others (women, visible minorities, etc.) as subordinates. These practices become “natural” and accepted as common sense and reproduced through time and space by political forces with vested interested in maintain the status quo. It is not structure, the 21  To be fair, hooks also has other definitions of whiteness, including calling it “white supremacy”. For discussion of various definitions by various authors, see collection of chapters in book The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

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political economy or the history of relations with regards to economic resources that organize social and economic activities but documents (i.e. discourses) that take on a “naturalness” and legitimacy to be the means by which the social and economic world is understood and organized. While insightful, challenging and controversial, post-structuralism has trouble explaining convincingly wherefrom discourses come since potentially everyone can develop a discourse, and yet there is an imbalance, disequilibrium to the nature and power of/in discourses (Harvey 1989). It is not entirely clear to us how, why and by what social forces do some discourses supersede others and become hegemonic and thus organizing and ruling documents. Furthermore, post-structuralism is too discourse-dependent and so can only explain the reproduction of the social order within the realm of discourse as if there is nothing but discourse. Persistent patterns of economic inequalities with observable differences between groups performing different functions within the economy exist not only in discourse but also in the inequality of access to the valued goods of a society (Clement 1988; Eagleton 2011). While the power of discourse cannot be underestimated in structuring patterns of inequality and exploitation in the material ways practices are oriented and cemented by discourses, economic and class exploitation are nonetheless based on a rationality of profit making set on the privatization of the means of production and the hiring and exploitation of wage laborers. Private property is not mainly a discourse, though this is a crucially important point in our culture, but a historical process of the appropriation of lands and resources by one class from another. In the end there is too often a leveling of forces, equilibrium of actors, that make studying up difficult to articulate (see Magnat in this volume). More influential, perhaps, are the post-structuralism and feminist views on reflexivity and positionality as they relate to the position the researcher adopts in the research endevaour vis-à-vis the study’s participants. In this context, DeVault (2007: 175) writes that “some sociologists” seemed paralyzed to go on doing fieldwork as a result of debates about reflexivity and one’s position and relationship with research participants. The panic seemed largely overdrawn and DeVault (2007: 177) writes that an “increasing awareness of the researcher’s situated position has led to a period of innovation in fieldwork practices, especially in reporting the findings of qualitative research.” Now is the Moment … Some researchers direct their work “sideways” (see Magnat in this volume) towards examining issues (e.g., threats to professionalization, de-professionalization, downward mobility; pensions; workplace reorganizing; de-skilling; etc) that grip middles class members like themselves (Lamont 2009) or “down” to understand the difficulties working class people and other socially marginalized groups endure during this time of growing economic uncertainty (e.g., Goldstein 2003). Certainly many excellent research projects have been undertaken, and outstanding

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contributions have been made to various disciplines, i.e., sociology, anthropology, geography, to the challenges of living and working in the capitalism of the early 21st century (cf. Florida 2002; Goldstein 2003; McElligott 2001; Sherman 2007; Wacquant 2009; Williams 2006). Collectively these studies address issues of access, power, positionality, and representation, amongst others, in and beyond fieldwork (Patai 1991). However insightful these works are, we contend that they fall short of capturing the experience of elites and other wealthy members of society who live with neoliberal capitalism, and have grown richer with it (Bolstanski and Chiepello 1999; Harvey 2005). They are also the very people imposing, directing and managing the economic model22 that oppresses, exploits and threatens the lives of the poor and working class (Agamben 1995; Elliott in this volume; Ferguson 2010).23 It surprises us, then, to read in a foreword to Donna Goldstein’s ethnography on a Rio favela, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2003) implication that the “frequency” of studying up has been to the detriment of studying the poor, marginalized, and those abandoned to the peripheries of urban cities. They proceed to make this starling conclusion in a passage anticipating how they see Goldstein book, for which they are writing the foreword, being received. Consider: A great many Brazilian social scientists and anthropologists share their North American counterparts ‘decided preference for ‘studying up’ and have consigned the classical ethnographies of the Latin American barrio and shantytown to the dustbins of ‘politically incorrect’ anthropological theory (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003: xvi).

This is a gross over estimating of recent academic research (Anderson 1999; Duneier 1992) and without supporting evidence to boot.24 Studying up is a widely under-studied part of recent research endeavors (Gusterson 1997; Pincon-Charlot 2011; Savage and Williams 2008a, 2008b). It is scarce, sporadic and marginal in academic research, and in qualitative studies in particular (Cochrane 1998; Hertz and Imber 1995; Nader 1972; Savage and Williams 2008a, 2008b). This gap is not surprising given the issues of limited access and negotiations qualitative researchers must tackle, or the post-structuralist arguments about the use of dichotomies such as up and down, and positionality in research relationships. In the case of Savage and Williams (2008b) they see the shift in the turn away from qualitative methods and into survey methodology and its dominance in the 22  Interestingly, Freeland (2011) writes about the emerging global elite and how they are not using their capital (or at least not only) to influence the world but increasingly doing so through humanitarian agencies they set up. 23  Marx and Engels in the Manifesto write that capitalists can manage the profit motive as much as a sorcerer can manage the contents of an open Pandora’s box. 24  I thank my colleague John Wagner for bringing this piece to my attention and for suggesting that their argument would have made some sense had they included citations.

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discipline. We wonder about the prominence of neoliberalism in re-designing university governing bodies, structures and reward systems. Academics are embedded in the ethos of neoliberalism in their places of work and so endure the professional pressures that come with it. This can stifle critical research agendas especially since many researchers have been morphed into entrepreneurial academics whose purpose has been to find money for their research plans and support graduate students through employment (Smith 2010). In many places, for example, graduate studies are largely conducted on the backs of academics who have received extramural research grant awards (Whiteley, Aguiar and Marten 2009). In this climate of neoliberal ethic, turning the academic gaze upwards (and onto the academic space itself!) is risky since it could jeopardize achieving tenure, promotion and other advancements by an increasingly restrictive and quantifying internal reward system in a hyper-competitive academic workplace and labor market more generally (Whiteley, Aguiar and Marten 2009).25 The neglect of studying up is not so surprising even with the prominence of elites and the wealth in mainstream mass media, government and in the private sphere of our lives be it through the influence media exert (in)directly on people via the “advice” and “know-how” elites are allowed to dispense, or in the manner that some impose upon the livelihoods of most by signing or withdrawing the pay cheques workers take home. Journalists, distant cousins to sociologists (see Borer opening statement on this in this volume), have been more focus and gung-ho in the pursuit of the rich, famous and elite, even if in some cases issues of accountability, fairness, justice are overtaken by a focus on the lifestyles of the rich and famous (Laurens 2011; but see Ferguson’s Inside Job [2011] for opposite approach). Perhaps what we need is a reinvigorated sociology pointed towards an “unrespectable view of society” to expose the underside of elites and other powerful people in society (Berger 1963: 45). “Such [a sociological approach to studying up] is ipso facto a refutation of the respectable presuppositions that only certain views [and interests and people] of the world are to be taken seriously” (Berger 1963: 46). Or perhaps more appropriate would be a Bourdieuesque (1998) sociology as a “sport de combat” unafraid to speak truth to power and militantly defending the rights and gains of the working classes (Bourdieu 1997; C-P Productions 2007). A kind of guerrilla sociology that breaks through restrictive access and libelous threats to expose an increasing unfair economic system run by elites and the like for their benefit and oppressive to the aspirations of the working classes everywhere.26

25  In the new academic world, researchers are increasingly governed by neoliberal structures of academic “success”. See Whiteley, Aguiar and Marten (2009) for an elaboration and discussion of how these structures function at the University of British Columbia in the Okanagan. 26  Perhaps Burawoy’s (2005) call for a “public sociology” is an attempt to inject political relevance to the discipline. See a much older call for a sociology promoting an “unrespectable view of society” (Berger 1963: 46).

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In this collection we claim that studying up has been scattered and sporadic at best and that Nader’s call for researching elites and the culture of power has gone largely unheeded. This volume is in direct response to the limited research available on this topic for teaching purposes as well as for understanding who are the rulers of the contemporary world. We further claim that studying up can no longer be stranded in the margins of social science research given the visibility and arrogance of elites, their culture of neoliberalism, and the damage they done. As researchers we can no longer avoid studying up since we must seize the opportunity to expose how and by what means elites entrench themselves in positions of power and secure this by legitimizing their ideas and practices. While some chapters contest the idea of studying up, most argue for the necessity of looking upwards and describe the opportunities for doing so. Gilding (2010) shows that elites are not reticent to being researched and that it is more likely the researcher himself/herself who either lacks the interest or motivation for doing so. While we don’t want to over generalize the sentiment, it is nonetheless important to keep in mind that the motivation for studying up rests with us and not to assume form the outset that opportunities are close to doing such research. Besides, people on the streets have already done their own study up analysis of the culprits of the current economy misery and are building a movement on the basis of that analysis. Isn’t it time that we as academics catch up to their analysis? The Chapters The contributors assembled in this collection come from various disciplines— sociology, management, international relations, anthropology, creative and critical studies—bringing into dialogue their discipline-specific ideas and debates with broad and comprehensive transdisciplinary literatures for the benefit of both novice and experienced researchers interested in turning their studies upward. Each chapter illuminates the research dynamics of researching elites and studying up. The comments, interventions and suggestions herein on studying up are lively, important and necessary. This feature more than compensates for the diverse orientations (e.g., grounded theory, action research, etc.) included in this volume. The contributors assembled do not always agree on whom or what is an elite or the value in studying up seen from different theoretical perspectives. However, rather than see the occasional disagreement amongst them as a weakness of the volume, I see it as a strength in the way they explore and present different avenues on how to get to the same end—to study up in order to expose the unfairness of elite privilege in our social milieu. Some of the chapters focus more on empirical issues in studying up while others add a healthy skepticism to the metaphor of studying up from more explicit theoretical positions. This makes for lively and engaging chapters. Let me now turn to briefly summarizing each chapter. Karen Ho begins the collection with an insightful discussion of studying up based on her recent ethnography of a Wall Street investment bank. She reflects

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on her qualitative approach and the ways by which she went about gaining inside information on skilled bank investors. Ho does this by highlighting and analyzing the organizational culture and the demands this imposed on bank investors. She shows how “complexity”, “contradiction,” and “context” enable or limit even the powerful in our society. Studying up in the context of conflict and war is rare especially in International Relations literatures which focus primarily on the role of the state and its mechanisms for securing national borders and geopolitical interests. When the metaphor of up/down is invoked in the research programme of some academics, the focus inevitably turns downward to the study of guerrilla groups and their impoverished members. Carolyn Gallaher, in contrast, turns her IR academic gaze upward to the study of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. These are groups who defend state and elite interests. But establishing the focus of her interest is only part of the story in this chapter. Gallaher also describes the methodological initiatives she conceived, in place, to study groups that are often unpopular, violent and suspicious of outsiders, especially academics. She concludes with a discussion of trust in fieldwork and the need to represent participants in complex and fuller terms and identities. Drawing on three case studies, Ryan and Lewer describe strategies and tips on how to research up management and union elites. Amongst many other ideas, they argue that getting in is a “dance of seduction” with rules and formalities that must be respected otherwise the researcher will be reprimanded or even denied access to the elites he seeks. Ryan and Lewer write about the key role intermediaries (often other elites) can play in putting researchers in contact with gatekeepers to elites or elites themselves. Michael Ian Borer remarks that when celebrities (elites) have been studied, it has been at a distance since research is almost always about them rather than of them. Borer wants to argue for pursuing the latter in studying up elites. An important challenge in studying celebrity elites—besides navigating through their entourage—is dealing with the “interview repertoires” they bring to the interview. This refers to the sound bite answers they are accustomed to delivering especially to entertainment journalists and sports writers. This strategy is useless for the sociologist who is interested in more contemplative responses to the questions posed. In his chapter Borer describes how he addresses this tactic when interview baseball celebrities. Chris Schneider draws on C. Wright Mills’ definition and discussion of celebrities as elites “to get close” to celebrities like Mel Gibson to access and analyse the mediated behaviour of celebrities. Schneider proposes the use of qualitative document analysis as a methodological approach that combines ethnographic content analysis and participant observation which he says is “the process of immersing oneself in media documents (data) at the intersection of ethnographic content analysis and participant observation.” He concludes by stating that this media methodology allows for access to elites such as celebrities and thus circumvents issues of inaccessibility. In a community devastated by corporate decisions to close shop to go and make profit elsewhere, Corman, Duffy and Pupo examine the reactions and actions of different elites at different levels of the community and beyond to see how the crisis is being managed and what

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prospects exists for the revitalization of the community’s economy. Disappointedly, they find that community/local elites gazed upwards to bigger and more powerful elites (corporate elites) to resolve the crisis and make the community’s economy run again. In doing so they ignore local workers, unions and community activists and their potential creativity in devising alternatives solutions and economic practises. In addition they discuss the difficulties in finding the right person(s) in the corporation to interview about the plant closure given the “‘faceless’ Board of Directors”, or “myriad of faces within the upper echelons of power.” In Chapter 8 Anthony Elliott asks “is the new mobile economy breeding new global elite?” And if it is, how do we study them since their modus operandi is movement? For Elliott “globals” (the global elite) are a new social class with new “‘experiential’ texture” to their lives. So Elliott uses creative qualitative research techniques to arrest these moving targets—the mobile globals. They include “mobile methods,” “mobile shadowing” and “mobile free-association” along with an organizational ethnographic observation. Using the case study of Victor Li, an immigrant global elite with elusive status partially due to being kidnapped for ransom, Froschauer and Wong describe in detail various alternative strategies to pursue studying up when access is particularly difficult or even impossible. Virginie Magnat argues that ethnography is a process akin to apprenticeship whereby “researching” is an embodied, emplaced learning process where one is immersed in the local to achieve new ways of knowing. To achieve embodiment, one must be willing to let go, to disorient oneself and even lose a sense of control to truly begin to learn in a path towards empathy. In this way the idea of up/down research agenda is a non-starter since it begins from a position of distance and even division between the researcher and participants. This is contrary to emplacement and embodiment and the willingness to learn empathy. Implied in Magnat’s account is the view that researchers must challenge themselves to let go of this distance of up/down so that they can develop alternative ways of knowing. In her chapter Shelley Pacholok asks if studying privileged white men is a sell out to feminist methods and feminists such as herself. She raises this question in the context of researching white male firefighters who shift from threatened elites (due to the loss of 250 homes to a fire) to assertive masculinist identities during interviews. What is a feminist to do in these situations of change and uncomfortability? How can she invoke and employ feminist research methodologies and ideas—transparency, disclosure, etc.—in this context of male power and arrogance? Trying to find an answer to this is the task Pacholok sets for herself in the chapter. Faced with studying up colonialism via interviews with former residential schools’ workers, Chambers struggles with how to manage her emotions during difficult interviews when former employees of these schools describe the harsh treatment meted out on Aboriginal children. Like Pacholok, Chambers refrains from divulging to the participants that she is the wife to an Aboriginal husband, and mother to Aboriginal children. In our final chapter, Patricia Tomic and Ricardo Trumper describe how an initial study on Mexican migrant agricultural workers and their accommodation in farms in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia turned into character assassination

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Chapter 2

“Studying Up” Wall Street: Reflections on Theory and Methodology1 Karen Ho

My ethnographic study of major Wall Street financial institutions and investment bankers was fueled by my desire—following the call of Laura Nader—to analyze the relationality and interconnection between cultures of power and powerlessness. It comes as no surprise that studying people and institutions of relative power and affluence changes the very kind of knowledge that anthropologists are able to produce. As Nader so presciently pointed out, the historical intensity of the social scientific focus on the marginalized and on social problems such as crime through emphasis on the poor has, not surprisingly, helped to foster both the equation of crime with poverty and the mainstream understanding of crime as consisting primarily of crimes against property. Correspondingly, if social scientists had instead researched banks’ and insurance companies’ refusal to offer insurance or extend credit to certain areas of cities, or municipal officials’ failure to enforce building codes in those same places, perhaps we could have seen poverty and the development of ghettos and slums as at least in part the products of a culture of white-collar crime (Nader 1972: 289–92). This is not to say that social scientists should no longer study “down” but rather that studying up, middle, and down— utilizing a vertical cross-section methodology to comparatively understand mutual constitution and intersection—are more important now than ever before, given that mainstream discourses increasingly depend upon singular and often dichotomous explanations for social inequalities (see Magnat in this volume). Studying up fostered for me a critical re-framing of anthropology’s fundamental assumptions, challenges, and possibilities because it necessitated pulling apart methodological and theoretical tools that were forged through the process and contexts of studying the marginalized, and recalibrating their directionality and use. Given our expertise and focus on local marginalized communities, anthropologists have traditionally approached capitalism in terms of its impact on these communities. By privileging the “knowable, fully probed micro-world” in fieldwork, we came to see the “macro-world” abstractly in terms of context 1  Special thanks to the editors Luis Aguiar and Christopher Schneider for focusing our scholarly gaze on studying the powerful, and for patiently coaxing this chapter into being. I am grateful to Gary Ashwill and David Valentine for their careful readings and insights into this piece.

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or reference (Marcus 1998: 33). Anthropologists focused mainly on the effects of deindustrialization, middle class downsizing, and the devastation of company towns (Dudley 1994; Nash 1989; Newman 1999), and largely ignored “Wall Street” itself, which, I contended, was at the center of these powerful transformations. The consequence of such analysis was that capitalism came to be associated with global processes and forces instead of specific and local, albeit globalizing, configurations and coalitions (Tsing 2000). In the past few decades, critical social scientific scholarship on capitalism and finance has methodologically and theoretically tackled these legacies by stressing friction, contingency, contextualization.2 They have demonstrated, for example, that academic discourses of globalization and capitalism are often “disabling” because they perpetuate “the impact model,” where “the global” is imagined as an “inexorable” force, dominating “the local” imagined as passive recipient (Hart 2002: 13). The literature on “glocalization,” for example, has focused on the global-local nexus, recognizing not only their dynamic, mutual constitution but also that the global is always localized and the local produces and reshapes the global (Robertson 1995; Salazar 2005; Swyngedouw 1997). The overarching goals—methodological, theoretical, and applied—of my ethnography were not only to delve inside the mechanics and workings of finance, but also to trace its wide-ranging effects throughout corporate America and globally. My point was to apprehend Wall Street without losing sight of its socioeconomic impact, to counter reductionism and not replicate traditional localized studies with the powerful substituted in, narrating and demarcating their own micro-world. I thus moved back and forth between examining the subjectivities of those who have grown to wield much influence over the socioeconomic lives of most Americans—Wall Street investment bankers—and investigating and contextualizing the larger historical and social phenomenon of financial capital dominance in the American economy. Specifically, my research on Wall Street necessitated that I confront how to think about finance, capitalism, markets, and globalization neither from the margins towards the center, nor inside “the top,” but rather, first, through and into the top, and then, across and down to other sites. As I have written elsewhere (Ho 2009a, 2009b), I primarily sought to understand and analyze a complex question: how and why were corporations transformed from long-term social institutions to short-term investment vehicles, and how did investment bankers help to enact and justify this sea change? Other questions and goals would have demanded other ethnographic designs, tools, and strategies. Given that my purpose was to use ethnography to bring to bear on “the top,” on a powerful cultural configuration 2  My research builds on a long line of scholars who approach finance and money as always mediated and cultural—as folk and alternative, as aspirational, as conjuring and universalizing yet unexpected, as linked to sovereignty, as a set of techniques and organizational configurations, as marked and classificatory (Catellino 2008; Maurer 2005; Miyazaki 2006; Tsing 2005; Zaloom 2006; Zelizer 1997).

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and its structural effects, I sought to find ways to thickly describe and give texture; to enter, ground myself within, and follow outwards the worldviews, practices, and effects of investment bankers working in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions departments throughout the major Wall Street financial institutions from Morgan Stanley to Merrill Lynch. To achieve the goal of entering and investigating “through” and “into” the top, my strategy throughout ethnographic fieldwork between 1996 and 1999 was to bring multiple scales together, as well as to switch between them, in order to “micro-tize” the macro and show the micro “macro-tizing.” In particular, I deliberately linked an investigation of individual biographies and the cultivation of competitive smartness to Wall Street institutional cultures of liquidity to the restructuring of corporate America and large-scale financial crisis. By demonstrating how these sites necessarily imbricate and mutually constitute each other, macro scales that otherwise float uncontested in an abstract ether can be grounded, explained, and made accessible by “small” stories, biographies, and accounts of the conditions in specific institutions. Simultaneously, to access and portray such a “structure” as financial markets, I focused on that from which it emanated—institutions, ideologies, and individuals. In sum, my strategy of continually moving both through and across mimicked my attempt to localize the macro, extend the micro, and capture the relations between the two (Ho 2009b). In this chapter, after setting the stage with more generalized observations about studying the powerful, I delve into lessons learned from my research on Wall Street, entering the belly of the beast, so to speak. It is important to acknowledge, of course, that studying up itself is a heterogeneous practice and that many of the concerns and questions I raise in this essay emerged from my particular project, though many observations are widely applicable. For example, researching financial institutions that are explicitly understood to be voices of powerful states (see, for example, Dalinghaus 2011; Holmes 2009; Marcus 2006; Riles 2004) might engender stricter confidentiality guidelines and demands for solidarity than my research on supposedly “free market” financial institutions who continually leverage and merge themselves out of existence, and whose employees consider themselves to be free agents (Pink 2002). In my field context it often turned out that confidentiality subsided as a major concern for my informants—and for me during the writing and publication process—due precisely to the rampant job turnover and constant organizational liquidity that I was in part studying. By the time Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street was published, nearly all my informants worked at different firms or had left Wall Street entirely.3 Though I 3  On Wall Street, job insecurity, revolving door employment with other investment banks, and continual institutional demise are normative in both bubble and “crisis” moments. For example, the very nature of a Wall Street investment banking analyst job (usually filled by a recent college graduate) is that it expires after two years, and all employees in this class must leave, usually to go to business school. Even before my fieldwork concluded, over half of my informants had switched jobs, departments, or banks. Moreover, with

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continued to safeguard informant and employee identities with pseudonyms, I did often divulge the names and non-proprietary practices of actual institutions, many of which no longer existed or had been rendered barely recognizable by periodic industry upheavals. The very need for confidentiality, after all, depends on some measure of employee stability, organizational commitment, and institutional affiliation, all of which have largely dissipated on Wall Street. Methodology is Theoretical A discipline’s approach to research does not lie simply in the realm of the practical or logistical, but rather encapsulates its central theoretical concepts and assumptions about the world. Studying up, then, instigates the field to ponder and rethink some of its most fundamental concepts of space and time, self and other, norm and difference. Historically, when anthropologists sought to locate their “field” and study “the other,” it was not often explicitly understood as part and parcel of colonization efforts, sponsored by colonial government grants and productive of imperial categories of difference. Rather, anthropological site choice often manifested as a logistical issue: it was simply more adventurous and “anthropological” to study “remote” cultures “far away” from “us.” Of course, the farther away, the more ideal and “other” it was. Upon subsequent reflection, many anthropologists realized that what constituted “the most distant” (and thus, the best fieldsite) was not something so self-evident or technical as the actual length from point A to point B. Rather, “distance” indexed “lack” of power and imagined social difference; it measured relative power differentials—what anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson call a “hierarchy of purity of field sites” where “home” was the least appropriate area of study. In other words, distance became less a matter of the miles separating the researcher’s home and that of the subject, and more a consequence of uneven power relations forged and measured by colonialism, race, gender, capitalism, and so on (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 13). “Farthest,” referring to physical distance, was often conflated with “furthest,” referring to mental distance. Thus, “distance” became a function of both imagined “foreignness” and “difference” and the social and political gulfs between presumably unmarked researchers and their less powerful subjects. As Gupta and Ferguson point out, Ethnography’s great strength has always been its explicit and well-developed sense of location, of being set here-and-not-elsewhere. This strength becomes a liability when notions of “here” and “elsewhere” are assumed to be features

the exception of one institution, every investment bank I studied had undergone a major merger, acquisition, or bankruptcy from the time of my fieldwork to the beginning of our current financial recession.

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of geography, rather than sites constructed in fields of unequal power relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 35).

In addition, while the other was defined as geographically, politically, and/or culturally distant from the center, the center was taken for granted as the norm; the white, western selves, systems, and structures against which the other was marked were largely rendered universal and invisible, both everywhere and yet nowhere (non-locatable) at the same time (Harding 1993; Rosaldo 1989).4 This was explicitly the context in the field of finance on Wall Street in Manhattan. There, investment bankers across multiple job hierarchies, departments, and financial institutions framed “the market” as neutral operations, autonomous forces. To counter the rhetoric of universal, normative markets (which both rationalized global expansion and elided social construction), I deliberately focused on the everyday lives and values of these actors as a window onto larger structures of financial markets and market crises. I recognized, for example, that investment bankers were socialized into explaining market practices not in terms of their own life circumstances, cultural practices, or institutional milieu, which I sought to showcase. Rather, they learned to speak in terms of natural and neutral economic laws and principles, which in turn further legitimated and spread their particular cultural model. In this context, the practice of speaking through and in the name of a universal market, then, was a particular strategy of power, which in turn produced global influence. Studying the powerful, then, turns anthropological notions of distance upside down. One could argue that it is precisely the centers of power that have been furthest removed from the anthropological lens, and are thus “the most distant.” When the powerful escape scrutiny and build up exclusive social, cultural, and political walls to limit access, they become representationally invisible. Conversely, the powerless, commonly understood as the most “distant,” and whose social difference from both researchers and cultural norms is presumed and actively perpetuated, are often the most closely scrutinized, and correspondingly blamed, for social ills. An explanation of the politics of visibility and invisibility is instructive here. I would argue that in many contexts, powerful identities, categories, and experiences often act (and are represented) as “invisible” in the sense that they occupy the norm or baseline of human experience and of social and legal enfranchisement. For example, just as Wall Street relies on the presumption of naturalized, organic market cycles, rates, and forces to deflect attention from its particular practices and interests, so do dominant social identity categories such as whiteness rely on the ideology of colorblindness to deny contemporary racism, “equalize” all

4  These legacies continue to haunt the anthropological enterprise, undergirded as they are in our theoretical and methodological frames as well as replicated in such constructed “there-and-here” separations as fieldwork vs. analysis, gathering data vs. writing up.

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ethnicities, and thus protect the economic, social, and political privileges which have accrued to whiteness since the colonial period. It is in this sense of association, conflation, and utilization of “the natural” and “the normal” that the techniques of the powerful are rendered invisible (Frankenberg 1993). The particular social position of “just human” or “just the natural order of the economy” allows the dominant to mark others while unmarking and normalizing themselves. This claim, of course, does not mean that finance and whiteness are any less “cultural” than other domains, but rather that cultural transcendence and culturelessness are precisely what characterize their cultural identities (Dyer 1997: 1–2; Perry 2001). At the same time, this is not to say that the powerful are invisible in the sense of being unseen, unheard, or unrecognized. One could argue, in fact, the opposite— that their experiences are normative and acknowledged, their voices authoritative, and they receive undue credit for their achievements, as well as amnesty for their mistakes. Consider dominant economic forms and models, such as neoliberal or free market capitalism; they continue to symbolize “best practices” despite continual failures, as well as evidence that competing economic forms and models might be more robust against crisis (Dunn 2004; Maurer 2005). For example, Wall Street advocates and the financial press heralded financial institutions for “paying back” the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a practice which not only symbolized that Wall Street could “escape” government bailout, but also linked up with larger discourses of free market “independence” to demonstrate that state largesse and public welfare are largely unnecessary and ineffective (Barr 2009; Eder 2009). On the flipside of the politics of recognition, the marginalized often feel invisible, stereotyped, circumscribed. Extending the whiteness analogy, bell hooks has long observed that “whiteness often exists without knowledge of blackness” (and often presumes to be unseen by blacks). As she explains, historically, “one mark of oppression was that black folks were compelled to assume the mantle of invisibility, to erase all trace of their subjectivity … so that they could be better, less threatening servants … as only a subject can observe or see” (hooks, 1992: 166, 168). Of course, since the 1970s, through the trenchant critiques borne out of the postcolonial, civil rights, and feminist movements, social critics and scholars have fundamentally challenged, for example, these Western representations of “the other,” recognizing that social analysis is a “relational form of understanding” in which both analysts and subjects are “actively engage[d] in ‘the interpretation of cultures’” (Rosaldo 1989: 206–7). Yet, as anthropologists Akhil Gupta and Sylvia Yanagisako have argued, these same critical analyses often “accept the self-representations of the West,” which creates methodological difficulties for studying up (Gupta 1992: 207). For example, the anthropological literature critiquing Orientalism and Asian capitalism mainly interrogates Western representations of “the East,” not Western self-representations. As Yanagisako reasons, given that “Orientalism is a discursive practice through which the West constructs itself as the modern

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antithesis of the Orient,” then “it follows that a thorough critique of Orientalism requires a critical examination of both representations of ‘Asian capitalism’ and representations of ‘Western capitalism’” (Yanagisako 2002: 25, my emphasis). Countering dominant Western representations of “the other,” then, is incomplete and insufficient without simultaneously examining Western norms and demonstrating Western heterogeneities and particularities. Just as critiquing the racism of white representations of people of color without destabilizing and analyzing whiteness itself (and whites’ own self-representations) leaves intact the normativity of whiteness, the project of dismantling “Oriental capitalism” is diluted without a corresponding interrogation of “Western capitalism.” For example, during my fieldwork on Wall Street in the late 1990s, it was striking how Western investment bankers immediately blamed Asian and Russian crony capitalism, lack of transparency, and planned markets for the global financial crises of 1998. In fact, they even blamed these economies for the demise of Long-Term Capital Management (a hedge fund composed of ex-Wall Streeters and Nobel Prize winners, whose impending bankruptcy threatened to unravel the financial markets), rather than the practices and ideologies of the hedge fund and Wall Street itself. In other words, while it is crucial for social critics to dislodge uncritical stereotypes of “crony capitalism,” it is equally important to undermine the normative distinctions of “marked” vs. “unmarked” capitalism by interrogating those “selves” which serve as the normative marker. But even beyond unpacking and interrogating the normative standard, studying up allowed me to think through how one might actually undertake the examination of a powerful system, or a systemic (though by no means homogeneous) set of practices and ideologies. Given that the anthropological legacy has been to study small-scale communities that are often theoretically assumed to be circumscribed, my project to study a powerful site that is also systemic and pervasive generated methodological quandaries about how to discuss dominance and influence without over-generalizing (McDowell 2010). I was interested in understanding what constituted relatively powerful Wall Street actors and institutions and how they themselves generated, amassed, and/or wielded increasing influence. I was faced with the twin challenges of attempting, on the one hand, to localize, particularize, and culturalize financial actors (especially since finance and the markets are dominantly naturalized to be acultural, neutral, cyclical), and, on the other hand, to demonstrate their generalizable and wide-reaching effects on our socio-economic lives and institutions. Concerning the latter, while larger American culture certainly has the tendency to make blanket statements about Wall Street, perhaps the more common practice is to render investment bankers as individuals. The powerful, in stark contrast to “the other,” have the luxury of being considered as heterogenous individuals while simultaneously resisting objectification, such that problematic decisions and practices are often blamed on individualized decision-making and, hence, a “few bad apples” (Pierce 2003; Silbey 2009). Given this tendency, the challenge becomes how to capture generalization, systemic thinking and practices.

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In what follows, I hope to show that ethnography, conventionally used to “reveal” the culture of the “other,” can be used in a similar way to make sense of “the self.” The unique orientation of anthropology—to attend closely to social and linguistic practices and decipher their coherences and contradictions—continues upon “studying up.” However, what is shaken up are central anthropological frames, theories, and imaginaries such as the “differences” between large and small scales, local and global, method and theory, or cultural and non-cultural. How these analytical domains relate to one another are challenged and remade. Lessons from Wall Street Face Value and Truth Claims One of the first quandaries that arose for me was the question of voice. The anthropological toolkit has focused on “giving voice” to marginalized others— so what happens when one’s informants’ voices are dominant, when they have considerable resources and institutional marketing platforms to make their voices heard and naturalized? It seemed to me necessary to start with the assumption that, when studying the powerful, their self-representations cannot be taken at face value. While this phenomenon certainly occurs when studying the less powerful—we analyze all of our informants’ worlds and discourses for regularities, discontinuities, even dissemblings—these informants usually do not have access to the kinds of discursive apparatuses, educational cachet, and explanatory models that the powerful command. Moreover, given that dominant American culture often doubts, scapegoats, and discredits the explanatory frameworks of the marginalized, it is important to be mindful of how, and the extent to which, anthropology can resist mainstream hierarchies of “truth.” Whereas research on the marginalized often encounters the problematics of objectification and essentialization, researchers studying the powerful often risk reproducing the very normative assumptions and hierarchies in which “we” are all embedded. For example, though many anthropologists are loathe to admit such entanglements (because most of us are politically inclined and trained to identify with the relatively marginalized), it is oftentimes with the relatively powerful that anthropologists share unexamined presumptions, educational backgrounds, and analytical paradigms. As anthropologists George Marcus and Douglas Holmes have observed, drawing from their research with Federal Reserve bankers, “It is perhaps disturbing to think that we are more like some managers of capitalism or some politicians than we would like to admit.” Studying the relatively powerful (such as elites, entrepreneurs, or technocratic experts) who “differ from us in many ways but who also share broadly the same world of representation with us” necessitates embracing both critical self-interrogation of the values and practices that constitute “us,” as well as the alternative discourses, contradictions, and fissures that exist in parallel or in opposition to official, elitist or technocratic

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discourses (Holmes and Marcus 2005: 250–51). In my own case, for example, how are my understanding and critique of Wall Street affected by the fact that my 401(k) retirement account (a key sign of upper-middle class status) is dependent on the capital markets rising? And certainly, my entanglement differs from both union workers whose pension funds rise in the short term when corporations downsize, and from financial executives who are paid via bonuses regardless of market performance. Moreover, just as my access to Wall Street depended upon my dual alma maters of Stanford and Princeton Universities, my now tenured position at a major research university was perhaps equally made possible by such institutional privilege. My point here is not to simplistically demand the mutual exclusivity of critique and complicity—after all, who is not complicit in maintaining our social order(s)—but rather to make the case that a reflexive approach is necessary. In addition to challenging our conceptual tools and rubrics, it is crucial for anthropologists and social critics to examine our own participation in powerful definitions and constructions such as “the market.” Otherwise, it becomes easy to overlook the ways in which we unself-consciously replicate dominant ideologies of capitalism, markets, and globalization. To draw from an extended example, during my study of Wall Street investment banks and bankers, I had initially presumed that, per their own proclamations, their primary mission was shareholder value, for their own institutions as well as the corporations they advised. Taking it for granted that increasing a company’s stock price was what all investment bankers sought to achieve, I further presumed that the central reason why Wall Street values and practices were often detrimental to the livelihoods of employees and communities was that these marginalized stakeholders were sacrificed for the abstracted and price-motivated interests of shareholders. Imagine my confusion, then, when my ethnographic, historical, and organizational data began to show that, even according to my informants’ own standards, rises in corporate stock prices often proved to be short-term spikes. Corporations that had been advised by Wall Street to acquire or merge in the name of shareholder value often experienced declines in shareholder value. Financial market bubbles and crashes were constant, indicative of shareholder-value volatility and unpredictability. Because I had assumed that shareholder value would almost fully explain their ideologies and practices, these contradictory, in some cases inexplicable findings troubled me greatly. How could Wall Streeters constantly jeopardize their own stated primary mission? How do they attempt to make sense of this, if at all? At first, I sought to find cracks in my informants’ logic: perhaps shareholder value was an inherently contradictory ideology? Or perhaps I was misunderstanding what they meant by efficiency or the purpose of a corporation. After some investigation, I found that a particular understanding of temporality allowed Wall Streeters to maintain a tenuous hold on their shareholder value mission. While the very strategies that increased a company’s value in the short term often led inexorably to its long-term decline, as the focus on quick stock-price spikes

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effectively mortgaged future institutional resources or positioned corporations for buyouts which generated institutional demise, many of my informants would make sense of this by proclaiming that the short term can immediately line shareholder pockets, and that “many short terms” could possibly be additive and lead to longterm growth. However, Wall Street temporality could not fully explain the extent to which shareholder value was consistently “betrayed” despite the passion that pervaded articulations of it. A stronger, cultural explanation was necessary, and I could not provide that by accepting investment bankers’ self-representations as the central authority on the ideology of shareholder value. It was only through further ethnographic work that it became clear to me that Wall Street investment banks’ institutional cultures influenced their enactments of shareholder value as much as their representational proclamations. Their organizational milieu incubated a culture of liquidity designed to foster rampant, continual deal-making judged not by the quality or long-term productivity of the advice or decision, but for efficient execution and immediate per-deal bonus compensation. Wall Street investment bankers’ privileged biographies, cult of smartness, and insecure workplace cultures produced institutional structures that thrived on expediency and real-time market identity, which in turn justified the restructuring of corporate America in the image of Wall Street. In this manner, Wall Street not only helps to generate financial crisis and socio-economic inequality, but also creates conditions that enable its own practices to “boomerang” back on the banks themselves. It was only through exploring the construction of smartness, the temporal identity of being “one” with the market, the ethic of grinding, relentless work, the conditioning to accept radical instability, the bonus structure as a sign of banker superiority—all part of Wall Street social contexts and workplace culture—that I gained the ethnographic resources to de-center shareholder value. In addition to massive state and regulatory shifts, not to mention fundamental changes in financial business practices, which glorified leverage, the particular elite identities and experiences of investment bankers, as well as the history, corporate culture, and organizational values of investment banks, are as crucial to understanding Wall Street influence and the process of market-making as the contours of shareholder-value theory. In fact, it was going beyond shareholder value that allowed my research to demonstrate, ironically, that Wall Street’s common-sense daily practices, far from generating steady shareholder value, actually catalyze volatile boom-and-bust financial markets that detract from their stated mission. Showing how finance implodes also accomplishes the crucial task of countering financial representations of dominance. It is important to recognize, of course, that taking seriously the organizational culture and historical contingency of Wall Street does not “prove” that investment bankers’ proclamations are intentionally contradictory, or the deliberate creation of obfuscation. Instead, I would argue quite the opposite. As anthropologists have long recognized, “deep” cultural norms, practices, and ideologies are often relatively opaque to those most embedded within them, though one’s critical standpoint and window into one’s world can certainly be honed depending on a multitude

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of factors, such as social location, position of power, and particular experience. As such, investment banking organizational norms and dominant ideologies of shareholder value are both helping to shape Wall Street and corporate America writ large. Investment bankers can hold steadfast to the understanding that shareholder value is primary, that all corporate practices should lead towards it, even as they make expedient deals in the full knowledge that revolving-door job insecurity means that they will almost certainly not be around to clean up after advice turns sour. That Wall Street bankers understand themselves to be vastly smarter, more efficient workers than run-of-the-mill corporate employees structures their subjective understanding of the moral hierarchy of capitalism and emboldens their restructuring agendas, with only intermittent attention paid to the actual results of such changes. In this context, a commitment to shareholder value, then, can manifest as constantly speaking for and in the name of the shareholder without successfully enacting the ideology. Moreover, shareholder value primacy can still be taken seriously—all other constituents can still be written out of this vision of the corporation, employee stability can still be outsourced, and corporations can still be held hostage to Wall Street expectations of continual stock price increases—though how it is continually interpreted and enacted is mediated by the social contexts and cultural feedback loops in which Wall Streeters exist and which change over time. One could argue that such an approach actually broadens “the native’s point of view.” I describe my own journey to understand shareholder value as one of the key discourses and practices of my informants to illustrate that a nuanced interpretation of authoritative worldviews necessitates a broader situating of their understandings within a larger social context. Otherwise, we risk the danger of reinforcing the powerful “truths” of those already in power. As Sylvia Yanagisako observes in her study of bourgeois Italian family firms in Como, Italy, “the reflexivity of the ethnographer usually does not extend to a critique of the knowledge claims of the subjects” (Yanagisako 2002: 48). A crucial reason for studying the powerful is to analyze how and why certain actors, groups, and institutions have greater influence over claims about the truth, and to articulate why and how their interpretations of the world come to be dominant. As I have illustrated, one concrete strategy is to intersect and put into conversation these narratives with alternative, marginalized, and competing discourses and practices. Such a method allows the ethnographer to triangulate—to test, situate, complicate—dominant representations “within the broader context of the stories that are told by other people” (Yanagisako 2002: 48–9). While triangulation can be an important tool for any ethnographic project to access people’s complex (and always relational) subjectivities and articulations, it is especially important for dominant and naturalized logics because it allows both the ethnographer and the audience to decipher, de-center, and even challenge these powerful knowledge claims.

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The Ethnographer is Not Exempt I also used the narrative strategy of the journey to document the development of my own anthropological approach to markets and globalization, and my initial and changing assumptions about Wall Street. I first began to notice that tracking myself in relation to my informants would be crucial for my research during my initial year working at Bankers Trust Company (now Deutsche Bank) on Wall Street. (I had taken a leave of absence from graduate school to become an employee in order to immerse myself in the language and milieu of finance; active fieldwork took place after I left the company.) Because “the global speak” I encountered on Wall Street mirrored what I had been reading in anthropological and social scientific accounts of globalization in the mid to late 1990s, from Manuel Castells’s “space of flows” to Arjun Appadurai’s “global scapes” (Appadurai 1991; Castells 1989), I found myself fully ensconced—both academically and ethnographically—in scenarios of totalizing globalization. While I was experiencing this reinforced global seduction from multiple angles and to some degree internalizing the discourse, I also recognized that my fieldsites were too complicated and manifold to be singularly encapsulated and explained by global capitalist penetration. I thus began to trace my own orientation and disorientation into investment banking lifeworlds as a way to document my confusion, and later on, to account for how and why I experienced “the global” in this particular way (Kondo 1990). An important tool was to recount my own recruitment and initiation into Wall Street practices, both as an employee and then, as a fieldworker (see Gallaher for similar experiences but in different context; in this volume). I analyzed the various recruiting events I attended as a potential employee, the orientation sessions I participated in as a new employee at Bankers Trust, as well the various panel discussions and general recruitment/social events that attracted investment bankers, traders, and analysts throughout Wall Street. I recorded how I was bombarded by proclamations and representations of “the global,” how senior financial actors spoke eloquently about borderless flows of financial capital and finance becoming increasingly world-girdling as Wall Street investment banks created, expanded, and dominated the capital markets of various countries. I noted how I felt myself literally becoming so inundated with “global speak” that I began to understand investment banks as the epitome of the global; I imbibed such proclamations as incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street financial institutions were seamlessly and single-handedly constructing global capitalism in their own image. And yet, through the device of the personal journey unfolding over time, I was later able to situate, follow, analyze, and problematize my initial frameworks. For example, re-examining my journal and fieldnotes over time allowed me to construct a more nuanced ethnographic interpretation of global finance by charting and comparing the nexus of my own positionality and experiences with the multiple contexts of my informants. I thus noticed how I had conglomerated and conflated Wall Street instances of “global speak” with my own narrative of global capitalism, and came to understand the importance of differentiating and contextualizing Wall Street’s

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multiple understandings of “the global” as a way to both particularize investment banks and intervene against dominant scholarly norms that homogenize and thus buttress dominant discourses of globalization. Mainstream History In a similar vein, what happens when one’s subject of study has access to a representational and marketing apparatus that produces images and ideas that resonate deeply with mainstream American cultural norms? Wall Street, for example, has been able to circulate a populist origin myth of the stock market as the original productive engine of American enterprise, in which owning shares of stock is like owning shares of America itself. Given this backdrop, where popular, academic, and “native” understandings of Wall Street often rely on similar normative assumptions, it became crucial for me as an ethnographer to directly investigate why these particular representations of Wall Street hold such explanatory and naturalizing power. One of the ways in which Wall Street investment bankers control their present and future representations is to strengthen their hold on the past. I thus examined in detail how Wall Street and advocates for a finance-centric approach to corporate America interpret and use history, from their understanding of finance’s role as the “original” fountain of capital for all public corporations to their viewing of corporations and the stock market through the lens of neoclassical economic and private property values. How Wall Street imagines the historical “development” of corporations in America, the particular sequencing of events and structuring of time, constitutes a powerful tool for legitimating not only the present state of affairs but also Wall Street’s role in “restoring” a particular order. This task is further complicated by the fact that much of the literature on Wall Street, in disciplines ranging from business administration to law, replicates and perpetuates investment bankers’ ideas about themselves and the history of their profession. The common assumptions are that investment banks financed the very creation of the U.S. corporate system and have throughout history been the primary suppliers of fresh capital to maintain and expand it. In fact, Wall Street has historically downplayed its actual main site of intervention and expertise, the secondary trading (investor-to-investor) of securities. Wall Street thus rendered invisible its contested and deliberate attempts to legitimate the stock market and speculation by conflating the primary and secondary capital markets, and establishing supposed foundational links to productivity and industrial enterprise. Even if Wall Street’s role during J.P. Morgan’s heyday in the early 20th century was closer to this productive characterization (see, for example, Carosso 1970; Geisst 1997), my research led me to challenge this presumption as an accurate description of present-day relations between Wall Street and the wider corporate

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world.5 As such, I approached the narrative of Wall Street as fundraiser to the world as an origin myth, indicative of a particular worldview and narrow socioeconomic interests, rather than an objective statement of fact. In addition, many scholarly treatments of Wall Street view most financial actors, especially investment bankers, as innately concerned about profit maximization. Such an approach denies both the historical particularities and cultural construction of capitalist social practices, and the existence of highly contested capitalist actions and ideologies. I found, then, that many social critics of capitalism who are concerned about investment banks’ power too readily accept the standard story that Wall Street “masters of the universe” are conjuring. Such an analysis only ratifies and empowers (however inadvertently) capitalist dreams and Wall Street self-representations. My strategy, then, was to intersect, compare, and juxtapose competing capitalist narratives. I put in the same analytic frame finance and managerial capitalisms; and to capture multiplicity and the social stresses among the powerful, I analyzed finance capitalists who had experienced downsizing or who were marginalized in some way. It is important to underscore that anthropological attention to the relationship between history and power arose from the recognition of the historicity of colonized people and of colonization itself, and that capitalist and colonial practices help to produce not only western notions of “the primitive” but also some of the very social and material conditions anthropologists observed. Using and interpreting histories gives social scientists, in general, key insights into the workings of power, and in the particular case of studying up, counters the normative history of the victors. Macro and Micro Studying up raises the question of how one accesses and apprehends “the macro”— i.e., that which is grand in scale, scope, or capability. In my fieldwork, “the market” (which often refers specifically to the financial markets) was my macro behemoth, and the challenge of tackling it was made all the more necessary by the fact that multiple disciplines and audiences understood it to be a black box, an unexamined, unopened concept. I would argue that my research project was often automatically understood as a macro fieldsite precisely because Wall Street financial institutions have transnational influence (scale and scope) as well as access to and command of powerful resources (capability). Yet, Wall Street, like all such sites, is also inescapably micro; it has specific, historically contingent, homespun practices and worldviews that grew out of particular institutions, structures, and demands. The mistake, I think, is to presume that seemingly larger-than-life contexts are in fact decontextualized, and are simply part of the air we all breathe. Though their influence is far-reaching, the macro is always already micro and locally situated.

5  For further elaboration of my argument on Wall Street’s primary role in the capital markets and historical relation to corporate America, see Ho 2009b.

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As Bruno Latour reminds us, train tracks that span continents are themselves local at every point (Latour 1993). One strategy I used to localize and culturalize the market was to embrace ethnographic demonstration. As many scholars have articulated, complex social phenomena such as financial markets are more often broadly described or theoretically conjured than concretely shown. Sociologist Julie Bettie, in her poignant ethnography of relatively marginalized high school girls in California, has observed that “the race-class-gender trinity remains more often asserted and thought through theoretically, textually, and historically than it is ethnographically explored” (emphasis in original; Bettie 2003: 7). Scholars have long recognized that race, class, and gender not only intersect, but also congeal, combust, and manifest in specific, often unforeseen, ways. However, when it comes to the actual demonstration of their workings, we often resort to depicting a singular axis of either race, class, or gender (which serves as the micro) and allow the other dimensions to be cordoned off to serve as background or part of the macro context. In a similar way, many social scientific projects often either focus on financial markets as semi-isolated actors or as powerful background shadows. Given the immensity of the site, an ethnographic demonstration of how a complex slice of “the market” unfolds from the micro to the macro and back again would be unwieldy and difficult to design. Below I describe a few of my own attempts. I found that one way was to both localize powerful actors or institutions and show their concrete movement across a variety of inter-related sites, set of events, and timeframes. I sought to reject confinement within a single site (such as one investment banking office) while still working towards depth, nuance and complexity through a category or a broadly defined fieldsite. In other words, I attempted, on the one hand, to culturalize Wall Street (that is, “localize the macro”) without becoming too trapped within local categories, while on the other hand portraying the wide-reaching influence and effects of investment banks without losing sight of their groundedness. Such a complex goal led me to specifically design my fieldsite to enable a constant focus on both depth and movement, studying through and studying across, to show the textures of and the relationality between the micro and macro. For example, I studied multiply positioned investment bankers (in multiple job hierarchies and departments, stratified by university status, race, class, gender, sexuality, nation) within a specific investment bank as well as across all the major Wall Street financial institutions from Lehman Brothers to Goldman Sachs. Instead of focusing on one bank or one group of bankers, my scope was an entire occupational category, a cross-section of investment bankers throughout “the Street,” as a window into industry practices writ large. Also, I focused on investment bankers who specialized in mergers and acquisitions as well as downsized investment bankers, in order to better access complex financial understandings of corporate restructuring. I then juxtaposed these vantage points with historical research on both corporate executives who by and large resisted Wall Street-led downsizing and Wall Street financiers who instigated these changes. In this manner, I sought to put in the same analytic frame

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multiple, competing, in-depth understandings of capitalist values, practices, and change. When studying up, the dual dangers of macro obfuscation and normativity, of black boxes and invisibilities, are also constantly present. To resist them, another strategy I utilized was similar to documenting my journey into Wall Street worlds; it was the tactic of showing markets-in-action, of demonstrating how central actors, events, and practices got socialized and enacted, i.e. what they do, and how they came to do and understand it. I focused on bringing together a few major components of financial market-making—how key market actors and spokespeople learn to become “the smartest guys in the room,” empowered to give expert advice; how some workers in corporate America get positioned as “dead weight” and the practical consequences of this construction; and how a local model of liquidity is manufactured on Wall Street and then disseminated throughout the economy. Such a tactic concretely unpacks the markets by dramatizing the particularities through which they came to be, from the cultivation of undergraduates to the inculcation into a fast-paced temporality and specific approach to corporate America. It takes the audience through this socially constructed process as it unfolds for Wall Streeters themselves, and in so doing, attempts to render the markets Wall Street makes much more comprehensible. Studying up also necessitates, I would argue, a focus on literary exposition, on thinking through how to build a narrative, and on creating a broader readership. The monograph Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street endured multiple drafts, each successive one almost completely restructuring the previous version. The central impetus for the drastic reorganizations was to counter the large-scale opacity of markets and investment banking worldviews. For example, previous drafts of the manuscript began with complex analyses of Wall Street discourses of globalization and shareholder value, with ethnographic evidence squeezed in later. After a number of critical readers’ reactions, I realized that my priority was to demonstrate through ethnography the practices and ideologies that make the dominant discourses come alive, not the other way around. I recognized that it was one thing to state that Wall Street exerted enormous influence and to conduct an ensuing analysis of their dominant and complex discourses; it was yet another to actually demonstrate how investment bankers came to be this way. My task, then, was not simply to describe and analyze Wall Street’s effects, but to show its incubation and generation. Instead of having the manuscript read like a mystery novel with the solution at the end, the point was to show (not simply state) how investment bankers come to do what they do. End Notes In the wake of the most devastating global financial crisis since the Great Depression, I am often asked what my research foresaw, whether it is applicable to the contemporary moment, and finally, how I can stand to research such “greedy” actors as Wall Street investment bankers. I believe that much of the strength of

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the ethnography stems from the challenges of studying up, from being required to constantly detail, situate, and unpack the macro until the particular cultures of financial markets show through. Through this process, I was able to get at and portray Wall Street’s specific culture of liquidity and crisis through tracking organizational and bankers’ truncated temporalities and values, which in turn created the conditions of unsustainability in corporate America that lead to financial crises. Just as their culture of expediency and immediacy helped to construct the bubble of a bull market (during the time of my actual fieldwork), it was that same set of ideologies and practices that also set the stage for catastrophic bust. And, finally, when asked about those insufferable and profiteering investment bankers, I make sure to situate and complexify those statements by demonstrating that discourses of innate greed actually re-empower Wall Street actions by drawing attention to their human inevitability. Moreover, the powerful are also capable of turning greed on its head by proclaiming (again the problem of face value) that private vices such as greed lead to public goods such as more efficient, competitive corporations and continual innovation. However, acknowledging the nuances of investment banking subjectivities and cultural contexts also allowed me to ground my analysis and interpretation of their values and practices. Anthropologists usually understand themselves to be allies with their informants—so how would I negotiate writing an ethnography of Wall Street that combined examination and critique? What I found was the importance of context: as long as I took care to embed investment bankers within the complexity of their organizational culture, the demands of their positions and jobs, and demonstrated how they came to a particular place or decision, their actions were rendered understandable and less prone to generalized aspersions. Recognizing, for example, that investment bankers are constantly “on threat” to lose their jobs—coupled with the ameliorating fact that they are so exorbitantly paid that the downsides of insecurity are often absorbed, and they are thus left with the character-building challenge of life on a tightrope—allows the reader to understand the particular constraints and empowerments which frame their decision-making. Critique became possible with attention to complexity, contradiction, and the contexts that enable and limit even the most powerful among us. References Appadurai, A. 1991. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. R.G. Fox. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 191–210. Barr, C. 2009. “Goldman ‘Warrants’ Raves from Congress.” CNNmoney.com, Retrieved September 1, 2011, http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/22/news/ economy/tarp.warrants.fortune/. Bettie, J. 2003. Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Carosso, V. 1970. Investment Banking in America: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Cattelino, J. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dalinghaus, U. 2011. “Trace Searches: Excavating Economic Experience in the Present.” Paper read at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association Meetings, Montreal, Canada, November 19. Dudley, K.M. 1994. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dunn, E. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dyer, R. 1997. White. New York: Routledge. Eder, S. 2009. “Goldman Sachs Redeems TARP Warrants for $1.1. Billion.” Reuters.com. Retrieved September 1, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/ article/2009/07/22. Frankenberg, R. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Geisst, C. 1997. Wall Street: A History. New York: Oxford University Press. Gupta, A. 1992. “The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of Commodities: Representations of Time in ‘East’ and ‘West’.” Cultural Critique 22:187–211. Gupta, A, and Ferguson, J. 1997. “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.” In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, eds A. Gupta and J. Ferguson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1–46. Harding, S. 1993. “Rethinking Strong Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity”? In Feminist Epistemologies, eds L. Alcoff and E. Potter. New York: Routledge, 49–82. Hart, G. 2002. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ho, K. 2009a. “Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy: Wall Street’s Institutional Culture of Crisis and the Downsizing of American Corporations.” American Anthropologist 111(2): 177–89. –––. 2009b. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Holmes, D.R. 2009. “Economy of Words.” Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 381–419. Holmes, D.R. and Marcus, G.E. 2005. “Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, eds A. Ong and S.J. Collier. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 235–52. hooks, b. 1992. “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 165–78.

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Kondo, D. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcus, G. 1998. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, G. 2006. “Where Have All the Tales of Fieldwork Gone?” Ethnos 71(1): 113–22. Maurer, B. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McDowell, L. 2010. “Capital Culture Revisited: Sex, Testosterone, and the City.” Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(3): 652–8. Miyazaki, H. 2006. “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critique.” Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 147–72. Nader, L. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. D. Hymes. New York: Pantheon Books, 284–311. Nash, J. 1989. From Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Communities and Industrial Cycles. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Newman, K. 1999. Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Perry, P. 2001. “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30(1): 56–91. Pierce, J. 2003. “Racing for Innocence”: Whiteness, Corporate Culture, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action.” In White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, eds A. Doane and E. Bonilla-Silva. New York: Routledge, 199–214. Pink, D. 2002. Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself. New York: Business Plus. Riles, A. 2004. “Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge.” American Ethnologist 31(3): 392–405. Robertson, R. 1995. “Glocalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity.” In Global Modernities, eds M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson. London, UK: Sage, 25–44. Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and Truth. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989. Salazar, N. 2005. “Tourism and Glocalization: ‘Local’ Tour Guiding.” Annals of Tourism Research 32(3): 628–46. Silbey, S. 2009. “Rotten Apples or a Rotting Barrel: How Not to Understand the Current Financial Crisis.” MIT Faculty Newsletter 21(5). Swyngedouw, E. 1997. “Neither Global Nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale.” In Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local. New York: Guilford Press, 137–66. Tsing, A. 2000. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 327-60.

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Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, S. 2002. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zelizer, V. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 3

“Studying Up” in the Context of Civil War: Understanding Armed Defense of the Status Quo Carolyn Gallaher

This Chapter examines the concept of studying up as it pertains to contemporary war. In many ways, the context of warfare is not an obvious location for studying up. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, warfare occurred between states (or alliances thereof) that were relatively evenly matched, making the question of studying up or down immaterial. Even when states were unevenly matched, socioeconomic differentiation—which informs the notion of studying up—was considered less important than the geopolitical maneuverings behind state decisions to go to war (Clausewitz 1968). After World War II civil warfare began to take up a greater share of global conflict (van Creveld 1991). While states are still involved in civil warfare, nonstate combatant groups play increasingly important, even dominant roles in them. For these groups domestic issues related to socioeconomic differentiation often trump wider geopolitical concerns (Ignatieff 1998; Kaldor 2001). Indeed, civil war often begins when guerrillas revolt against the state and the socioeconomic order it secures. The state responds with military force, but much of its fighting is done by proxies—independent paramilitary units that support the state and sometimes trade weapons, intelligence, and fighters with it (Bruce 1992).1 Even in wars where the state has collapsed, non-state combatant groups can sometimes be categorized vis-à-vis their interest in crafting a new pecking order or defending the existing one. There are, of course, substantial debates about what, if anything, the growth in civil war and the concomitant decline in interstate war means. Some scholars argue that “new” wars are substantially different from “old” wars (Gray 1997; Kaldor 2001; Van Creveld 1991). Other scholars counter that the “new” features of war have always been present in warfare (Kalyvas 2001; Smith 2003). This debate is expansive and it is not my intention to stake a position in it here. Rather, the salient point for this chapter is that social and economic inequality underlies much 1  The terms used to describe non-state combatant groups are often used loosely. The terms guerilla and paramilitary are no exception. Here I use these terms respectively to refer to a group’s opposition to or support of the state in the context of war. Bruce (1992) makes the same distinction although he uses the terms pro- and anti-state paramilitaries.

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of the civil strife around us today, and as such we should assess whether studying up is applicable for the study of civil war and its non-state combatants. In this chapter I make three arguments. First, I argue that the power gradient central to the notion of studying up/down has not been analytically important in most of the theoretical frameworks used in International Relations (IR), where war is most often studied. Though the reasons vary by theory, two trends explain why in general terms. Most theories in IR, for example, study the decision to go to war as it relates to systemic factors, such as anarchy, poor economic cooperation between states, or the end of the Cold War. Domestic inequality, and the power gradient that comes with it, is rarely used to explain the outbreak of war. The state centric nature of IR also means that when scholars focus on civil war, they tend to examine state responses to it rather than the power inequalities that inform it. Within IR only Marxists2 have been sensitive to the role of inequality in fostering war, however, their work has tended overwhelming to study down the scale, looking at the motivations, strategies, and tactics of guerrillas while ignoring those of paramilitaries. To empirically demonstrate this trend to look down I conduct a content analysis in two search engines to determine if there is parity in how the guerrillas and paramilitaries in three test conflicts. My results demonstrate that guerrilla groups receive far more scrutiny than their paramilitary counterparts. Second, I argue that there are good reasons to study up—i.e. focus on paramilitaries—in the context of civil war. Much of our thinking about guerrillas and paramilitaries has been filtered through simplistic dichotomies such as hero/ villain and just/atavistic. However, in my research on paramilitaries in Northern Ireland I discovered that these dichotomies were too simplistic to be of analytic use (Gallaher 2007). Third, I argue that the nuances that attend paramilitarism have methodological consequences. In particular, many qualitative methodologies are premised, at least implicitly, on the assumption that researcher and researched share a political outlook. These approaches are likely not to work for people studying paramilitaries. Not only do paramilitaries tend to be unpopular in the public and intellectual imagination; they are also aware of that unpopularity and are frequently defensive about it. As such, researchers need mechanisms for circumventing defensiveness in informants. As a case study I examine how I confronted this issue in my research on the conflict in Northern Ireland, which pits the Irish Republican Army against the British state and its Loyalist paramilitary proxies. The remainder of the chapter is organized in the following manner. I begin by detailing how four theoretical frameworks in IR conceptualize war. I then describe my content analysis and provide the results. In the third and fourth sections I detail why we should study the role of paramilitaries in civil war and discuss the methodological issues that are specific to work on them. I conclude with parting thoughts on the benefits and limitations of studying up in the context of war. 2  I use this term broadly to describe scholars who employ Marxist analytic categories.

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Studying Up in the Context of War The concept of studying up/down has tended to have little currency in International Relations. Indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of the discipline’s dominant theoretical frames have largely ignored or failed to account for the socioeconomic power gradient that is central to the notion of studying up/down. Most theories understand war as a response to systemic variables rather than domestic ones where socioeconomic differentiation is most often experienced and understood. The centrality of the state as a unit of analysis also means that IR has been less interested in studying non-state actors and understanding their motivations. Although Marxists do account for a socioeconomic power gradient, their efforts are limited in scope. To demonstrate these trends I briefly outline below how four theoretical frames—realism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and Marxism—have approached the study of war. Realism Realists look at war as it relates to the international geopolitical order.3 They argue that the world system is marked by anarchy because no state or collection of states has been able to monopolize the means of violence globally (Waltz 1988). As such, states continually jockey for power and use war as one means to obtain it. Success in war does not, however, breed stability. Rather, as Waltz (1988) argues, “the excessive accumulation of power by one state or coalition of states elicits the opposition of others,” leading to future war (p. 625). The inevitability of war also means that there is no permanent hierarchy of states, but rather one perpetually in flux. In this context, the notion of studying up/down, based as it is in notions of entrenched power and weakness, are immaterial to realist interpretations of warfare. The realist concept of the “security dilemma” is a case in point. First developed by John Herz (1950, 2003), and later expanded by Singer (1958), Jervis (1978), and Glaser (1997), among others (Garver 2002), the concept describes why states go to war with one another in the absence of aggressive behavior. Herz (1950) theorized that states recognize that the anarchy of the world system means no outside entity can secure their security. The state response is to enhance security by stockpiling weapons, building armies, etc. However, neighboring states view such efforts with suspicion and often respond in kind, not only matching but exceeding their neighbor’s efforts. The initial state is then compelled to respond with even greater security enhancements. The spiral that ensues (rather than any initially aggressive action) will often lead to war. Realist interpretations of civil war have also been conducted in ways that prevent focus on the role of socioeconomic differentiation in them. Indeed, realist 3  My discussion here includes work by realists and neorealists. The differences between them are important but their views on warfare are similar enough to include under one rubric.

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concepts developed to understand the international system are often applied to the intrastate level (Angstrom and Duyvesteyn 2001). Realists, for example, treat ethnic groups like states and view their motivations as reactions to internal anarchy rather than discrimination or other manifestations of inequality. Posen (1993) argues that in civil war social groups have to “pay attention to the first thing that states have historically addressed—the problem of security—even though these groups still lack the many attributes of statehood.” Likewise, Weingast (1998) uses the logic of preventative war—where a declining state attacks a rival state to prevent its future ascent—to explain civil war, arguing that potential warring parties must choose not between “cooperation and aggression but between aggression and victimhood” (p. 165). Liberalism Liberal interpretations of war are substantially different from realist ones, but they too conceive of war in ways that are inconsistent with the notion of studying up/ down. Liberalism has its roots in the period after World War I when then US President Woodrow Wilson championed the idea of the League of Nations as an institutional means for maintaining peace. Although the League would not prevent a second world war, it served as a blueprint for liberal assumptions about statecraft and warfare after it. In particular, liberals argued that states could be prevented from going to war with one another if they cooperated on economic issues (Caporaso and Levine 1992). Material gain would accrue to all parties involved and would blunt the use of war for economic gain. Liberals used the 1945 Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire to implement their ideas, creating international organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to encourage trade between nations and in so doing keep conflict at bay (Ruggie 1982).4 In the academy liberal understandings of war are best exemplified in the democratic peace approach. Its advocates argue that there is a significant and positive relationship between democratic governance and peace (Doyle 1986; Ember et al. 1992; Fukuyama 1991; Geva and Hanson 1999; Maoz and Russett 1993). They also argue that international organizations should use a combination of carrots and sticks to encourage one-party states to open up their political systems to competition. The IMF’s approach to the 1980s debt crisis is a case in point. States taking out loans were required to not only reorient their economies towards free trade but also open up their political systems to competition (Ould-Mey 1996). 4  Although the IMF and World Bank have been accused of ignoring the extent to which their austerity programs contribute to violence (see Kaldor 2001), Stiglitz (2003) observes that these organizations were initially Keynesian in approach. They believed firmly that states, with the assistance of international organizations, could enact measures that guarded against another great depression and the unraveling of the social fabric that attended it.

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While the liberal view of warfare is quite different from realism, its understanding of the state system is similar to it in that the difference between states is not conceived of along a power gradient from weak to strong. Rather, Liberals categorize states using a regime typology in which some regime types (democracies) are more peaceful than others (illiberal). Although there is a clear preference for liberal forms of statecraft in the literature, scholars level the playing field by arguing that all states can adopt democratic governance structures. The inequality within and between states that contributes to illiberal forms of government is rarely considered, except as a tribal or pre-modern remnant (Barkawi and Laffey 2001). As such, the notion of studying “up” or “down” has had little purchase in liberalism. Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism, a variant of Liberal thought, also posits an understanding of war inconsistent with the notion of studying up/down. In the context of war, cosmopolitan thinkers have concerned themselves with the rise of so called new wars (Fabre 2008; Held 1995; Kaldor 2001; van Creveld 1991). Cosmopolitan thinkers argue that the collapse of the Soviet empire undermined the vertically organized identities attached to it and gave rise to particularism—the idea that ethnic/religious groups cannot share space with groups different from them. These changes affected areas not only within Soviet boundaries but also outside of them, in former client states. As states collapsed (or held on by a thread), individuals sought identity and protection in horizontally organized categories of kin, tribe, and god. Some in their ranks responded with a bunker mentality, arming themselves and attacking groups different from them. States aligned with the US were also affected. Indeed, the US responded to its victory in the Cold War by eliminating, or significantly shrinking funding for its client states, reasoning that communism was no longer a threat. With outside economic support cut off, America’s former clients also saw the national identities they maintained through patronage networks disintegrate. Cosmopolitans argue that the particularist logic of new war demands a universalist response (Buchanan and Keohane 2004; Fixdal and Smith 1998; Narangoa 2009).5 Human (individual) rights must trump cultural (collective) rights (Beitz 1999). Indeed, though cosmopolitans recognize the diversity of culture, they espouse coexistence on the grounds that humanity underlies all difference. Ironically, while advocates of cosmopolitanism recognize the role that othering plays in new wars, especially against minority groups, they generally refuse to evaluate differences between non-state combatant groups. Rather, cosmopolitans view all particularism as instrumentalist, even nihilistic. 5  While cosmopolitans condemn particularism, there are varied perspectives on how or even whether states should engage in humanitarian intervention in particularist conflicts (see Archibugi 2003).

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Enzenberger (1994) argues, for example, that new wars are “about nothing at all” (p. 30), and as such their fighters are indistinguishable from one another. Kaldor (2001) contends that new wars provide “legitimation for various criminal forms of private aggrandizement” (p. 110). In short, because all combatants are defined as ‘criminals,’ any consideration of the role of discrimination/inequality in driving particularism is foreclosed. Marxist Approaches Within International Relations, the concept of studying up/down has only had relevance to scholars using Marxist analytic categories (Frank 1966, 1981; McGowan and Johnson 1984; Wallerstein 1974). In particular, both dependency theory (Frank 1966) and world systems analysis (Wallerstein 1974) recognize the existence of an entrenched hierarchy of states and point to macroeconomic factors to explain it. However, the majority of work has focused on systemic factors rather than micro level work on the role of inequality in specific countries, and when empirical analysis is conducted on combatants themselves, the focus has been almost exclusively down rather than up the scale. Although there are important differences between dependency theory and world systems analysis, both hold that economic inequality between states is not based on inherent differences in material resources or human capabilities but instead on the economic inequalities established during the colonial period. Both also argue that the unequal structure of the world system explains much of the recent violence that has occurred in formerly colonized places (London and Robinson 1989; McGowan and Johnson 1984; Overton 1989). Frank (1981) argues, for example, that domestic elites adopted dictatorial regimes in Latin America after the colonial period in order to maintain their wealth and economic advantage. Likewise, O’Donnell (1973) argues that authoritarianism emerged in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s in response to the systematic underdevelopment of the hemisphere’s economy in which plundering, financial speculation, and capital flight replaced domestic investment. Authoritarianism allowed leaders to force domestic investment while also ruthlessly policing dissent among the poor. When Marxists have studied non-state combatant groups they have tended to focus on class based guerrilla struggles rather than paramilitaries.6 The focus down the scale is rooted in two trends in the literature. The first is the influence, at least implicitly, of Franz Fanon’s understanding of violence as both necessary and self-affirming. In international relations it opened the door, however narrowly, for examining the geopolitics of war not only from the ground up, but also from the perspective of its victims (Muppidi 2009). This was especially the case in early work on anti-colonial revolutions in Africa as a whole (Henriksen 1976; Hutchinson 1972;) as well as specific movements in Algeria (Decker 1990–1992) 6  Nairn (1977) argues that Marxism’s inability to understand nationalism outside of class terms limits its ability to understand ethnic and religious conflicts.

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and South Africa (Gibson 1988). The second trend is the belief that economic crisis can and often does spur revolution (McClintock 1984; Scott 1985; Skocpol 1979). This work holds that guerrilla movements emerge because the ability to economically survive has been put at risk. McClintock argues, for example, that a “crisis of subsistence” was fundamental to the rise of the guerrilla army Sendero Luminoso in Peru.7 Looking Down in the Study of War In General To empirically demonstrate this tendency to look down, I performed a brief content analysis of the scholarly output on three conflicts—Chiapas, Chechnya, and Northern Ireland. In particular, I searched for books on guerrilla and paramilitary groups active in each conflict in two databases—the Amazon.com database of books for sale and my library’s search engine, which returns results for the eight universities in the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC hereafter).8 For each conflict I conducted keyword searches of the largest guerrilla and paramilitary groups active during the conflict. I also used more general search terms where applicable. In my search of the paramilitary side of the Chiapas conflict, for example, I searched both the name of the largest paramilitary in the state, “Paz y Justicia,” and the more general term “paramilitaries Chiapas” to capture works about smaller paramilitary groups. I did something similar in my search of the Chechen conflict. Since the groups fighting for and against the Russian state have not had stable noms de guerre, I searched the labels locals gave to describe them (“boyeviki” and “Kadyrovtsy” respectively) as well as more general terms (e.g. “Islamists” and “paramilitary” respectively). Table 3.1 below shows my results. My first search was on the conflict in Mexico, where the Zapatista Army of National Liberation staged a revolt against the state government of Chiapas in 1994. The search results were highly skewed in favor of the guerrilla side of the conflict. Amazon.com returned 260x as many ‘hits’ for the keyword “Zapatistas” and 70x as many for the group’s Spanish acronym “EZLN” as it did for the conflict’s largest paramilitary group, “Paz y Justicia.” Even when the more general search term is used—“paramilitaries Chiapas”—there were 37x more results produced for “Zapatistas” and 10x as many for “EZLN.” The same search in the WRLC catalog returned fewer results for either side of the conflict, but the disparity was still highly uneven. For every result returned for “Chiapas paramilitary,” 25 sources were returned for “Zapatista” and nine for “EZLN.” 7  Many scholars disagree with McClintock that a crisis of subsistence is fundamental to peasant revolutions. However, her dissenters remain focused on the role of guerrillas rather than paramilitaries. 8  Both searches were conducted between February 23 and 24, 2011.

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Table 3.1 Scholarly output for guerrillas and paramilitaries Conflict

Guerilla Search Terms

Paramilitary Search Terms

Chiapas

Zapatista

EZLN

Paz y Justicia

Paramilitaries Chiapas

Amazon

1,043

281

4

28

WRLC

126

47

0

5

Chechnya

Boyeviki

Islamists Chechnya

Kadyrovtsy

Paramilitaries Chechnya

Amazon

2

46

1

3

WRLC

0

2

0

1

Northern Ireland

IRA Northern Ireland

Republicans Northern Ireland

UVF Northern Ireland

UDA Northern Ireland

Loyalist Northern Ireland

Amazon

188

148

16

16

85

WRLC

191

14

2

4

21

The second conflict I considered is the war in Chechnya between Chechen rebels and the Russian state. This conflict began as a nationalist conflict and has since morphed into a religious one (Tishkov 2003). My search of the conflict in Chechnya also returned uneven results. My initial search terms—“Boyeviki” and “Kadyrovtsy”—did not produce a meaningful sample size (only three books across both databases). However, when I used broader terms, the results were larger, and as in the Chiapas conflict search, uneven. In Amazon.com, for example, “Islamists Chechyna” returned 15x as many sources as “paramilitaries Chechnya” did. My search for books on Northern Ireland’s main conflict actors also returned uneven results. These results are especially notable because unlike the Chiapas or Chechen conflicts, the conflict in Northern Ireland has been formally over since 1998 when a peace agreement was signed. As such, scholars have had time and distance from which to address any lacunae that might exist on the paramilitary side of the conflict. Amazon.com returned almost 6x as many books for the conflict’s guerrilla group, the Irish Republican Army (“IRA”) as for the conflict’s two paramilitary factions, the Ulster Volunteer Force (“UVF”) and the Ulster Defence Association (“UDA”), and nearly 32x as many results in the WRLC database. When I used more general terms for the two sides, the results were less skewed. In Amazon.com there were 1.74x as many results for “Republicans” as for “Loyalists.” The same search in the WRLC database actually returned more

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hits for “Loyalists” than for “Republicans,” although as with the Chechen conflict, the total numbers of sources returned was quite low (21 and 14 respectively). These brief snapshot searches are not, of course, without their problems. None of these searches were, for example, confined to the discipline of IR and the total results in some searches are too small to make significant inference possible. However, as a snapshot, these searches do illustrate that guerrillas tend to attract more attention than paramilitaries. Why We Should Study Up in the Context of Warfare In General Guerrilla fighters are often romanticized as Robin Hood figures fighting for the poor against the rich. The depiction of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas provides a particularly telling case in point. When I first decided to teach this conflict I searched my university’s media library for a documentary on the conflict. I wanted my students to see what Chiapas and its grinding poverty looked like. Because the conflict was fairly new at the time, the only video I could find was a Sixty Minutes segment on the conflict. When I screened it, I was struck by the correspondent’s description of the group’s charismatic spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos. Mexicans seemed enthralled with him, and he wanted to know why. The journalist brought in to explain things painted a quixotic portrait. “Even with his mask,” she explained, “he is very good looking. He has lovely eyes, has nice hands, and he has a very nice voice … A lot of Mexican women dream about him but they don’t dare tell that to their husbands.”9 While Subcommandante Marcos has been more successful than most guerrilla leaders at crafting a romantic image for himself, the imagery he invokes is not specific to the Zapatistas. More importantly, the durability of the romantic trope says as much about how we view paramilitaries as it does guerrillas. Indeed, after I saw the Sixty Minutes segment I remember thinking to myself, “who could disagree with this man?” When I saw a documentary10 about the conflict several years later, the filmaker’s depiction of the Zapatista’s main paramilitary rival—as henchmen for large landholders—did little to change my mind. It was only later, when I was the faculty sponsor for a 2003 alternative spring break trip to Chiapas that I realized opponents of the Zapatistas were more complicated than the hero/villain trope suggested. During that trip our group visited Roberto Barrios, a remote village controlled by the Zapatistas. While there 9  The episode is available on Youtube. The portions quoted here can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZlKEWBeBqg. Accessed Jun 24, 2011. 10  A Place Called Chiapas. 1998. By Nettie Wild, produced by Canada Wild Productions Ltd. in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. New York: New Yorker Video.

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our group was prohibited from walking around the village. A Zapatista guide explained that nearly half of the village’s residents opposed the Zapatistas and might attack the group’s American visitors if they saw them out and about. It turned out the Zapatistas opponents included not just ranchers and other large landholders, but impoverished peasants as well. The situation in Roberto Barrios is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it suggests that the villain trope is too limited to capture the nuances involved in armed defense of the status quo. In particular, the elite interests paramilitaries defend are not always reflected in their members’ backgrounds. Indeed, paramilitary members are often from the same background as guerrilla supporters (Gallaher 2007). Second, because most paramilitaries are not elites, their decision to participate in conflict may be motivated by concerns which only partially align with those of elites in the state (Bruce 1992). Over time the areas of overlap may change, or even shrink. Recognizing the difference between paramilitary men and elites is more than semantic. Crafting a durable peace plan requires that the interests of paramilitaries not be conflated with those of the state. When they are, paramilitaries may sign onto peace but refuse to disarm (Gallaher 2007). In Northern Ireland In Northern Ireland stereotypes have also informed scholarship on the conflict’s armed actors. When Bruce (1992) began his research on Loyalist paramilitaries in the early 1990s, for example, he “discovered that very little had been written about Loyalist paramilitaries and most of it was fanciful” (p. 1). The reason, he speculated, was that the unionist cause was seen as passé. As he explained, The university-educated middle classes have difficulty understanding why anyone would fight for something as insubstantial as patriotism. They can almost understand Irish nationalism, because the geography of the place would suggest that everyone here ought to ‘live together.’ If, as many are, they are also leftleaning, they will sympathize with what can be portrayed as an anti-imperialist movement. But when the patriotism is something as unfashionable as a desire to remain part of the United Kingdom, comprehension fails completely, and most people fall back on imputing alternative motives to Ulster Loyalists (p. 1).

As an example, Bruce (1992) cited a study done in the early 1980s suggesting Loyalist paramilitaries killed Catholics to “preserve ‘Protestant’ jobs.” As he incredulously noted, “Can we imagine an academic suggesting that the IRA kills Protestants to create job vacancies for Catholics?” (p. 1). The use of a colonial narrative to understand the conflict in Northern Ireland also helps explain the limited attention (in absolute and relative terms) given to Loyalist paramilitaries. A number of scholars, for example, argue that the colonial history of Northern Ireland makes it much easier for Catholics than Protestants to articulate who they are (Aughey 1989; Miller 1978; Mitchell 2000; McDonald

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2005; Nairn 1977). After partition11 Catholics in the province defined themselves as victims of Britain’s incomplete withdrawal from Ireland. Their desire to be reunited with the Irish “free state,” along with systematic discrimination by Protestants, served to bring Catholics together despite differences among them. By contrast, the colonial narrative depicted Protestants as “settlers,” with all the negative connotations it implied. They were outsiders who did not belong. While Protestants were loath to adopt a settler identity, they were unable to develop a cogent counter-narrative in its place (Aughey 1989). The Protestant identity crisis has led many observers to view Protestants as reactionary and their Loyalist fighters as atavistic (Porter 1996). So conceived, there was little reason to study the Protestant side or its fighters. Fortunately, over the last decade scholars have begun to focus on Loyalist paramilitaries (Finlayson 1999; Graham 1998; Tonge et al. 2011). This work complicates accepted “truths” about the conflict in general, and paramilitaries in particular. Using interviews with Republican and Loyalist paramilitary men, for example, Tonge et al. (2010) demonstrate that the accepted view that military stalemate brought combatants to the peace table is incorrect. Loyalists, for example, viewed the peace process as “a thinly veiled surrender by Republicans, who had been unable to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom” (p. 10). Taylor’s work (1999) indicates that during the early conflict Loyalists did not understand Catholic claims of oppression because they lived in similarly poor conditions. In my work on Loyalist paramilitaries (Gallaher 2007) I found that the sluggish pace of paramilitary decommissioning was due to an internal power struggle and not atavism as many commentators suggested. One avenue where future research is needed, however, concerns the methodological issues that attend to studying up in Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. In the next section I examine some of these issues by recounting how I dealt with them in my own research on paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (Gallaher 2007). Methodological Considerations for Studying Interviewing members of any armed group can be difficult. An interviewer, for example, may have to conduct interviews in a war zone where fighting is ongoing and civilians are targeted. The nature of war also means that armed groups will often form a tight protective circle around themselves, foreclosing open dialogue with outsiders. However, there are also frictions that are more likely to appear when studying up (i.e., paramilitaries) than down (i.e., guerrillas). Indeed, 11  In 1921 after a grueling battle with Irish guerrillas, the British government granted Ireland its independence. However, in response to pleas by Protestants, who were a demographic majority in the north, the crown maintained control over the island’s northernmost province. Partition describes the process in which the boundary between Ireland and Northern Ireland was established.

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though the stereotype of the liberal academic is just that—a caricature based on assumptions rather than hard data—it is also true that a number of methodological approaches are based on the assumption that researcher and researched share a political outlook. Participatory action research (PAR), for example, is premised on the fact that scholars will do research in ways that contribute to finding social justice for the persons/communities they study (Christians 2005; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). In the context of warfare scholars have used PAR to publicize/ document state abuses and guerrilla efforts to end them. Hammond’s work (1998) on teachers sympathetic to guerrillas in the El Salvadoran civil war, for example, is designed to not only recount the important role that education played in the guerrilla campaign but also support guerrillas’ efforts to write their own history of the war. Likewise, poststructural analysis is often predicated on a political goal— identifying normative tropes about “othered” groups in society and deconstructing and/or decentering them (see Baxter 2003 for a feminist version). By contrast, scholars studying up must grapple with groups that are not only violent, but also unpopular and frequently misunderstood. A researcher may, for example, find a paramilitary group personally distasteful even if she vows to remain objective. Likewise, a paramilitary man may assume a researcher is interested in making him look bad, and arrive for an interview with his guard up. This context means that researchers studying paramilitaries have to find a way to manage defensiveness so that it does not become an obstacle to collecting accurate data. In this section I discuss three ways I confronted and handled defensiveness in my research on Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland—asking about dominance, establishing a baseline for trust, and dealing with hostile informants. Asking about Dominance For those doing research on guerrillas, there is often a tacit understanding that guerrillas are representing those who have been dominated by the state or other powerful actors in society. As such, questions tend to focus on documenting how others have dominated them; why they chose violent resistance; and how they would change things (Hammond 1998; Lykes and Mallona 2008; Memi 1991; Scott 1990). By contrast, asking paramilitaries to explain/justify their violence is far trickier. As defenders of the state and the patterns of dominance associated with it, paramilitaries have to explain what many people see as unjustifiable. Paramilitaries also bear the added stigma associated with their role as state proxies—i.e., doing the dirty work the state cannot be seen doing itself. The gist of these differences means that asking paramilitaries about dominance can be awkward and generate defensiveness in respondents. During my research in Northern Ireland I often encountered defensiveness about the topic of Protestant dominance in Northern Ireland and its presumed role in spurring the conflict. When the topic came up even obliquely, my interview subjects frequently made an analogy between Protestant settlement during the

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plantation period and British settlement in colonial America.12 In one of my first interviews, for example, an ex-prisoner with the Ulster Volunteer Force brought up the analogy when we started discussing Protestant history in the province. As he observed: A lot of Americans, Irish Americans, in particular, would use that [the plantation] as proof that we [Protestants] came over here and took the land from the native Irish if you like. But, you know, when you point out to them that the white Europeans took the land of the red Indians, you know, they don’t seem to get the analogy.

After encountering this analogy from several informants I realized that my informants assumed I had a colonial view of the conflict and were telling me I had no right to see it that way. To be fair, my informants did have a point. I did not, for example, believe Europeans should get out of America, nor did I know any IRA supporters who did either. However, it was also true that the analogy did little to explain or even justify Protestant dominance so much as deflect any discussion of it. Indeed, the very fact that I was an American researcher meant that a figurative line had been drawn in the sand. I could not question Protestant dominance without also explaining Anglo dominance of Native Americans. To work around this issue I realized I would need to get at the issue of dominance in a more nuanced way. I began by scouring materials produced by paramilitaries themselves to see how they depicted their cause, and by extension the status quo. In the course of my research I discovered that dominance meant different things for paramilitaries than it did for the Protestant political elite. During the course of my fieldwork Protestant elites were focused on what the IRA’s failure to decommission meant for the country’s new power sharing executive while Loyalist paramilitaries were more concerned about their place in the province’s new economic order. For most of the twentieth century Northern Ireland’s economy was industrial, built around shipbuilding and ancillary activities, and the labor markets that supplied it were highly sectarian (Cebulla and Smyth 1999; Mulholland 2002). Indeed, though Catholics worked in factories, the great majority of workers were Protestant (Whyte 1983). Like other states in Europe, however, deindustrialization began transforming Northern Ireland from a manufacturing to service based economy, and the changes accelerated in 1998 when the peace accord was signed. For the working class men who made up Loyalist paramilitaries, the shift was an ominous reminder that their place at the top of the province’s labor hierarchy was no longer certain (Cebulla and Smyth 1999).

12  After establishing military control over Ireland in the 16th century, the British crown consolidated its hold through settlement, granting Scottish and English nobles the right to establish plantations across the island.

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To account for these differences, and to understand how Loyalists understood Protestant dominance I added new questions to my interview instrument to tease out how Loyalists viewed the economy and their place in it since the 1998 peace accord was signed. I discovered that these questions were useful for unpacking exactly how the paramilitaries conceived of the dominance they were defending. In particular, I found two things. First, Loyalists did not feel dominant. Indeed, they stressed to me that growing up Protestant did not inoculate them from inequality. One paramilitary man told me, for example: There was high infancy death rate whenever we were kids. So, you know, I started realizing just how we were excluded. We weren’t accepted. We were looked down upon. People in the Orange Order or the Unionist establishment would’ve looked down on us. We were from the poorer classes. And, I realized as well that we were [only] educated to a degree. We were educated to do certain work and that was it … Yet we were always told we were the most intelligent people and we were smarter than these Roman Catholics and all the rest of that, and we were Unionists. And that was just a load of bollocks, you know.13

I also discovered that many Loyalists believed that deindustrialization was a form of punishment against working class Protestants. As the same paramilitary man explained: It isn’t unlike any country in the world where if your father was a coppersmith or your father was a welder, you would want your son [to do the same]. I mean, look at the steel industry and all the rest of it. Or the motor industry. You know, you have 6, 7 generations of kids there. We were no different. But, all of a sudden that went. Investors went out because of this PR and this demonization of our people. The bad imagery on television about ‘it’s a bad place to invest.’

Such depictions are, of course, based on a selective history. Deindustrialization also occurred in European countries not at war. Although Protestants did dominate manufacturing, it was not because they were somehow better equipped for it. Discrimination by Protestant employers allowed Protestants to dominate industrial jobs. Despite the revisionist history apparent in these quotes, they were useful nonetheless because they demonstrated the chasm that existed between Loyalist notions of the status quo, based on Protestant dominance in the working class, and elite visions built around political dominance in parliament. These understandings were also useful for thinking through ways to engage working class Protestants in the post-peace transformation of Belfast. I could not, however, have identified the differences between Loyalist and elite notions of the status quo by asking direct questions about it (e.g., how do you justify defending a government that discriminated against Catholics). Rather, a circuitous route, couched in another 13  Personal Interview, July 28, 2004. Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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issue, allowed me to do so. In short, while the particulars of every conflict will vary, researchers will likely get a more nuanced view of how paramilitaries view their defense of dominance if they approach it through related issues rather than directly. Establishing a Baseline for Trust The qualitative research process often accentuates the differences between researcher and researched. The researcher wants information, for example, but has nothing tangible to give in return. The research asks all the questions and the researched answers them. The researcher has credentials and high status while the researched generally has neither. However, these differences can quickly morph into suspicion when one is in a conflict zone where us/them distinctions are a matter of life and death. Suspicions can be especially heightened in conflict zones where international public opinion leans heavily in favor of guerrillas. In these cases, paramilitaries are likely to be especially wary of outsiders. During my research in Northern Ireland my informants were unfailingly polite to me, but they were also cautious. Indeed, they knew they were unpopular and had even developed a theory of sorts to explain it. As one informant noted: There’s probably more people in America of Ulster Scots extraction [than Irish extraction] but, I think it’s pretty typical of Protestantism – it’s not this homogenous unit, if you like. You know Irish Catholics in general tend to bond together, but there’s not a sort of homogenous unit [within Protestantism] … I’ve often said here that if [Protestant] people don’t agree with what the minister’s preaching, they go down the road and build a tin hut and start preaching themselves.14

In this context, I had to find a way to present myself as a neutral and non-threatening observer. My efforts met with varying success. I document both successful and unsuccessful tactics here because trial and error is often the only way to determine what will work. When I first travelled to Northern Ireland I discovered that even though I was raised Protestant people across the religious spectrum often assumed I was Catholic, or at the very least sympathetic to the Catholic side of the conflict. At the time several NGOs hosted American activists for the contentious marching season when Orange Lodges hold parades to commemorate past Protestant victories over Catholics. Their job was to document attacks by marchers, blunders by police, and other detrimental effects on Catholic communities subjected to the marches (Staff Writer 2011). To present myself as non-threatening, then, I chose to emphasize the parts of my “story” that I thought might be attractive to potential informants. I did so 14  Personal Interview, July 1, 2003. Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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in several ways. The most common method I used was to geographically locate myself. I routinely told potential interviewees, for example, that I grew up “in Virginia,” “near the Appalachian Mountains,” or “in the Bible Belt.” When people would ask me to spell my last name I would tell them that family lore has it that the second ‘g’ in my last name went missing after an Appalachian family feud. I used these “locators” because my background research suggested that Loyalists were aware that most people of Irish descent in the US South were Protestant rather than Catholic. My goal was to identify myself as Protestant without having to say so directly. Indeed, as I discovered during the course of my research, people in conflict settings will rarely ask strangers to identify their religious background. However, they are often anxious to know it and will find other ways to assess where you “fit” in a conflict dichotomy. As such, even though I felt hypocritical situating myself in this way (I do not attend church and have no religious affiliation), I also realized that my religion mattered in Northern Ireland and I needed a “backdoor” way to share it. My informants did not care if I went to church—most of them did not go either. Rather, what they cared about was an intangible sense that I understood what it meant to be Protestant. My introductions were small social lubricants that allowed me to inform my research subjects that I was, in some small but important way, like them. For the most part, these worked. Informants would laugh at my family feud reference or tell me about their visits to the US south. And, though my introduction hardly opened a chamber of secrets, it did serve as an ice-breaker that made the conversation that followed flow more smoothly. I also shared my prior research on the militia movement in the US with informants (Gallaher 2003).15 My goal was to let potential informants know that I had research experience with “unpopular” groups and that I would give them a fair shake in much the same way I felt I had done with my militia informants in the US. I soon realized, however, that while this information did not close any doors to me, it also raised a new suspicion among my informants. That is, Loyalists viewed militias much the same way the general public in American views them—as extremist and paranoid. I had come to see the complexities of my militia informants and failed to realize that Loyalists would recoil from the comparison. In one of my first interviews, for example, an informant interrupted my introductory spiel (where I talked about my work on militias) with a warning that a comparison was not warranted. Another night a unionist in a pub took offense when I explained my research on Loyalism by mentioning my prior work on militias. I soon dropped any mention of my earlier work on militias unless directly asked about prior research. When I did bring it up, I made sure to let potential informants know that I viewed my work on Loyalists as a completely separate project. 15  Except for a shared unpopularity, my experiences researching the militia movement and Loyalism were quite different. My militia informants were sometimes paranoid and conspiratorial. The militia group I studied was also not as big as the Ulster Volunteer Force and as such did not have a discernible “constituency” in the way that the UVF did.

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In sum, I discovered during the course of my research on Loyalism that establishing trust with combatants is often about ensuring informants you do have something in common. Indeed, unlike informants from down the power hierarchy, where a dissimilar background is expected (the poor rarely assume other poor people will study them), and material fears of retribution by bosses, etc. need to be assuaged, paramilitaries needed reassurance that we had just enough in common that I could “get” them. In short, while they had weapons, they also realized the power of the pen. Their social dominance—backed by the gun—did not eliminate the fear and/or worry that attended the research process for informants. Surviving a Hostile Interview Sometimes, despite the best preparation and forethought, researchers will encounter a hostile informant. I had such an experience in 2005 during an interview with a Loyalist community worker. I began my interview as I usually did by introducing myself and my project. I then asked if I could tape the interview. The community worker responded with a forceful “no,” even though he had suggested it would be no problem to do so during our initial phone conversation arranging the interview. In response to what was likely my slack jaw line, he explained that an American researcher had previously misquoted him in print. As he told me about the encounter he grew visibly angry. I asked for details, but he refused to provide any. He then proceeded to lecture me on the problem with researchers. Academics, he told me, lacked common sense and practicality and were often obnoxious as well. To add insult to injury he suggested academics were prone to getting themselves into dangerous situations they could not easily get out of. I was taken aback. The interview had fast gotten out of my control. My efforts over the next hour to steer it back on course were futile. It seemed that I was in for a lecture and there was little I could about it unless I wanted to be impolite and leave. So, I sat there and took it. Although I was unable to use any of the interview in my subsequent work, it did provide me with two methodological insights. First and foremost, I realized that the “sins” of previous generations were still working themselves out and had made an unexpected appearance in my interview. Indeed, though I felt blindsided by my treatment at the interview, I realized objectively and in retrospect that my interviewee’s comments were not personal. Though I knew my future work might someday offend, I also knew I had no paper trail at the time to spur such a response. The experience did, however, give me pause. I made an extra effort after it to be as transparent as possible with my informants so that another researcher would not have to pay for my mistakes in the future. Second, I realized that Loyalists were keenly aware of the negative representations of them, and they resented outsiders who waltzed in and out of the conflict and with a few keyboard strokes did damage to their personal and political reputations. I had not, up to that point, done enough to acknowledge those fears and allay them upfront. Not doing so cost me an interview and the potentially important perspectives it could have given me.

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Conclusion Warfare is complex and there are many avenues from which to approach and explore it. Though the discipline of International Relations is where war is most frequently studied, scholars from across the social sciences have also delved into the topic, adding their own disciplinary and personal imprints on it. The goal of this chapter, then, is not to be prescriptive. Depending upon one’s discipline and purpose, studying up in the context of war may have little relevance. Indeed, though this chapter has spent a good amount of space identifying lacuna in IR which makes studying up applicable to it, the goal is not to debunk systemic or state-centric approaches so much as provide alternatives to them. Nonetheless, studying up is something that IR (and other) scholars can fruitfully apply to their work on warfare. Doing so not only helps us meet an intellectual goal—addressing a gap in the literature—it also helps us understand and hopefully respond to war in more comprehensive ways. When I first started studying Loyalist paramilitaries I was depressed about how little academic work I had to draw on. My canvas was nearly blank, and I had no idea where to start. During my research I was also continually shocked by how little policymakers in the province knew about the views of Loyalist paramilitaries. Although the details are beyond the scope of this chapter, I realized that their ignorance fueled the continuation of violence after formal peace was achieved. What, then, should we focus on when we study up, and how should we do it? My research suggests that we should treat paramilitaries as complex organizations whose interests are often distinct from (and sometimes counter to) those of the state they presumably defend. We must also approach paramilitaries with the understanding that they are not only more complex than we often think they are, but that they recognize how little we know about them. The research encounter with paramilitaries is not set up for smooth sailing, but navigating the chop is worth it when you find nuance and complexity you did not expect. Seeing the paramilitary world, unpopular though it may be, forces us to rethink our assumptions about paramilitary fighters in general, and the larger conflicts of which they are a part. References Angstrom, J. and Duyvesteyn, I. 2001. “Evaluating Realist Explanations of Internal Conflict: The Case of Liberia.” Security Studies 10(3): 186–218. Archibugi, D. 2003. Debating Cosmopolitics. London: Verso. Aughey, A. 1989. Under Siege: Ulster Unionism and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. London: St. Martin’s Press. Barkawi, T. and Laffey, M. 2001. “Introduction: The International Relations of Democracy, Liberalism, and War.” In Democracy, Liberalism and War: Rethinking the Democratic Peace Debate, eds T. Barkawi and M. Laffey. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1–24.

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Baxter, J. 2003. Positioning Gender in Discourse: A Feminist Methodology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beitz, C.R. 1999. “Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism.” International Affairs 75(3): 515–29. Bruce, S. 1992. The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, A. and Keohane, R. 2004. “The Preventive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Proposal.” Ethics and International Affairs 18(1): 1–22. Caporaso, J. and Levine, D. 1992. Theories of Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cebulla, A. and Smyth, J. 1999. “Disadvantage and New Prosperity in Restructured Belfast.” Capital and Class 60: 39–59. Christians, C.G. 2005. “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 139–64. Clausewitz, C. 1968. On War. New York: Penguin Classics. Decker, J.L. 1990–1991. “Terrorism (Un)Veiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algiers.” Cultural Critique 17: 177–95. Doyle, M. 1986. “Liberalism and World Politics.” The American Political Science Review 80(4): 1151–69. Ember, C., Ember, M. and Russett, B. 1992. “Peace between Participatory Polities: A Cross-Cultural Test of the ‘Democracies Rarely Fight Each Other’ Hypothesis.” World Politics 44(4): 573–99. Enzensberger, H. 1994. Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia. New York: The New Press. Fabre, C. 2008. “Cosmopolitanism, Legitimate Authority and the Just War.” International Affairs 84: 963–76. Finlayson, A. 1999. “Loyalist Political Identity after the Peace.” Capital and Class 69: 47–76. Fixdal, M. and Smith, D. 1998. “Humanitarian Intervention and Just War.” Mershon International Studies Review 42(2): 283–312. Frank, A.G. 1981. Crisis in the Third World. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers. Frank, A.G. 1966. “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review 18(4): 23–8. Fukuyama, F. 1991. “Liberal Democracy as a Global Phenomenon.” PS: Political Science and Politics 24(4): 659–64. Gallaher, C. 2007. After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-accord Northern Ireland. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gallaher, C. 2003. On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Garver, J. 2002. “The Security Dilemma in Sino-Indian Relations.” India Review 1(4): 1–38.

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Geva, N, and Hanson, C.D. 1999. “Cultural Similarity, Foreign Policy Actions, and Regime Perception: An Experimental Study of International Cues and Democratic Peace.” Political Psychology 20(4): 803–27. Gibson, N. 1988. “Black Consciousness 1977–1987; The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa.” Africa Today 35(1): 5–26. Glaser, C. 1997. “The Security Dilemma Revisited.” World Politics 50: 171–201. Graham, B. 1998. “Contested Images of Place among Protestants in Northern Ireland.” Political Geography 17(2): 129–44. Gray, C.H. 1997. Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. New York: Guilford Press. Hammond, J.L. 1998. Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Held, D. 1995. Democracy and the Global Order: from the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Henriksen, T. 1976. “People’s War in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 14(3): 377–99. Herz, J. 1950. “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma.” World Politics 2(2): 157–80. Herz, J. 2003. “The Security Dilemma in International Relations: Background and Present Problems.” International Relations 17: 411–16. Hutchinson, M.C. 1972. “The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 16(3): 383–96. Ignatieff, M. 1998. The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. New York: Henry Holt. Jervis, R. 1978. “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma.” World Politics 30: 167–214. Kaldor, M. 2001. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Standford: Stanford University Press. Kalyvas, S. 2001. “‘New’ and ‘Old’ Wars a Valid Distinction?” World Politics 54(1): 99–118. Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. 2005. “Participatory Action Research: Communicative Action and the Public Sphere.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 559–604. Lykes, M. and Mallona, A. 2008. “Towards Transformational Liberation.” In The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participatory Inquiry and Practice, eds P. Reason and H. Bradbury. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 106–20. Maoz, Z. and Russett, B. 1993. “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986.” The American Political Science Review 87(3): 624–38. McClintock, C. 1984. “Why Peasants Rebel: The Case of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso.” World Politics 37(1): 48–84. McDonald, R. 2005. “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the Troubles.” The Yearbook of English Studies 35: 249–63.

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Chapter 4

Getting in and Finding Out: Accessing and Interviewing Elites in Business and Work Contexts Shaun Ryan and John Lewer

It has been argued that the term “elite” “is so protean and porous that it is almost devoid of meaning” and that its use might best be as a heuristic device (Shore 2002: 3–4). Our interpretation of “elites” in a business context is not defined narrowly (Alvesson and Deetz 2000); rather, we envisage it as encompassing business owners, executives and senior management, key officials from industry/business associations and lobby groups—the “managerial class.” Following Welch et al. we could also add someone with “considerable industry experience and frequently also long tenure with the company; [and] possesses a broad network of personal relationships” (2002: 613). Many managers, especially those at the functional rather than the strategic level, straddle the often-confused conceptual and methodological divide between “elite” and “expert” (Littig 2009). Unlike other studies, we include senior trade union officials into our interpretation reflecting the interrelated interests and historic closeness of the relationship between unions and business and the rise of “bureaucratic corporate unionism” with its centralization of power, administrative and executive focus (Moody 2007: 196). Of course many in the labor movement maintain traditions of open engagement in public debate, however, and based on our experience and in discussion with colleagues, the rise of managerialism in unions and the associated further centralization of control by labour elites can be a significant barrier to getting good access to unions. Apart from being a category or group of respondents, these elites commonly act as gatekeepers to formal and informal organizations and institutions, granting permission to those researchers who satisfy tests such as confidentiality, the likelihood of harm arising from the research and the researcher’s credentials. Elites therefore “hold the keys” to getting in. In Berg’s terms this research phase involves “various techniques and procedures intended to secure access to a setting, its participants and knowledge about the phenomenon and activities being observed” (1998: 58). Drawing on the authors’ experiences in conducting organizational case studies and other research, this chapter begins with a brief overview of the case study method and the importance of qualitative interviews. It then outlines three research projects to illustrate our discussion. Following this we examine and discuss the

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challenges of getting into organizations and the potential difficulties associated with obtaining reliable and valid answers to questions. The Research Projects: Case Studies and Qualitative Interviews The case study has generally been the preferred research method in many fields of social science inquiry; especially management studies (Gummesson 2000). While, there is no general agreement as to what a case study actually is, it may be defined as “a research strategy or design that is used to study one or more selected social phenomena and to understand or explain the phenomena by placing them in the wider context” (Kitay and Callus 1998: 103). Kitay and Callus argue that a “case study” is not necessarily a method or research technique in itself. Rather, they argue, a case study should be viewed as a “research strategy that involves one or more techniques or methods” (1998: 103). Case studies have particular appeal to scholars of management. As a research method, the case study can illuminate organizations and allow insight into organizational behavior in all of its complexity. Case study research also allows researchers to contextualize their research, and aids in the understanding of social life (Kitay and Callus 1998: 104). Yin, whose work on the case study as a research strategy is widely cited, makes that argument that the case study, or, as he describes it, that “distinctive form of empirical inquiry,” is the “method of choice where the phenomenon under study is not distinguishable from its context” (2003: 4, 10). Case studies are a potentially powerful means of generating theory, new ideas and social change (Gummesson 2000: 85; Kitay and Callus 1998: 10). We acknowledge that business research in areas such as finance and accounting, and operations may be more “dominated by a concern with numbers and ‘things’” (Easterby-Smith et al. 2000: 42), but even the traditional “quantitative” areas of management and business yield fruitful opportunities for different methodologies. Indeed, well-known economist Michael Piore “happened into” open-ended interviewing “as a way of identifying structure of thought” (1983: 71, 82). He acknowledges a longer tradition of economists and qualitative research that has become marginalized with the ascendency of econometrics. It is our contention that interviews should be firmly among the repertoire of methodological tools available to researchers of business. Interviews represent a cornerstone of social science research. Rosenblum (1987) explains their character and complexity well: they are a “temporarily circumscribed instrumental exchange conducted by relative strangers that demands (1) intimacy yet impersonality and (2) professionalism amidst sociability” (388). Similarly, academic and business consultant Evert Gummesson argues that “among the methods available to the traditional researcher, qualitative (informal) interviews [italics in original] … provide the best opportunities for the studies of processes” (2000: 35). To that we would also add studies of management, business and labor elites.

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Study 1: Commercial Cleaning Cleaning is one of the largest occupations in Australia and cleaning firms are some of the largest employers of labor in the country (Ryan 2007). Yet, despite the size of the industry and the large number of firms within it, neither the industry nor cleaning work itself have until recently attracted much attention from academic researchers. Coyle (1986: 6), for example, argues that cleaning as an industry has been ignored: “just as the social value of cleaning is undervalued, and only noticed when it is not done, so cleaning as an economic activity has been considerably underestimated.” Even less is known about the work of managers within the industry. In this project the researcher made use of an ethnographic approach to the study of employment relations, labor management and the organization of work in the New South Wales commercial cleaning industry. Participant observation was adopted to examine the realities of cleaning work for cleaners and their supervisors, while qualitative interviews were used to gain insight into the culture and management of one of the Australia’s largest cleaning firms. Twenty-two interviews were conducted with managers of the case-study cleaning firm, and these were supplemented with interviews of key informants from other cleaning firms, the industry association, industry consultants, industrial advocates and union officials. The case of commercial cleaning is of some interest on two counts. First, it demonstrates that one’s status as an elite can be lost and regained. Secondly, its raises questions about “elite” status in an industry where the work and those undertaking it are stigmatized as “dirty” (Ashforth and Kreiner 1999). In most of Australia, a very considerable percentage of those engaged in commercial cleaning are migrants from a Non-English speaking background. A number of managers in the industry previously held “elite” status in their country of origin, before emigration to Australia and the non-recognition of their skills, qualifications and previous work experience led them to undertake employment in cleaning as a form of downward mobility. Through hard work and perseverance some cleaners were able to negotiate the corporate ladder and move into lower levels of management and eventually climb the rungs to senior and executive management positions. Despite rising into the executive levels, some managers admitted reluctance to publically acknowledging they work in “cleaning” (Ryan 2007). Although these few managers in cleaning may represent isolated cases, it does alert us to the under-researched area of the “reluctant” or “embarrassed” elite. Study 2: Plant Closures Plant closures are complex events, involving; in business jargon, multiple “stakeholders” not least the entire workforce. Closures are not uncommon (see Corman et al. in this volume). For example United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (2009) reported that in March 2009 alone, mainly due to the impact

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of the global financial crisis, there was a record 1,259 mass layoff events in the manufacturing sector affecting 155,909 workers. Despite their pervasiveness, few detailed studies have been published of closures which track the event from the announcement (or earlier) until the final day; a period which can vary from, literally, a few hours or many years. Of that which has been published, as Sutton (1987) noted, most concentrate on why organizations go into decline and even “die” yet, in contrast, limited research or conceptual work has focused on how the process of organizational closedown unfolds. In part, this strongly reflects the sensitivity of management elites to the closure decision; a sensitivity amplified if the decision is unexpected and has highly adverse consequences for the workforce, community and local economy (see Corman et al in this volume). When, in April 1997, BHP (now BHP Billiton) announced the closure of the firm’s steelworks at Newcastle on Australia’s eastern seaboard, the announcement offered a unique (and exciting) opportunity to closely analyse the management of a major closure event during the two and a half year period to the plant’s forecast final day in September 1999. Complicating the closure were three key factors: first, the iconic place held by the 84-year-old plant (or the “Works” as it was colloquially known) in the city; second, that the Works was almost fully unionized and, third, that BHP had publically undertaken previously to maintain steelmaking in Newcastle by replacing the integrated steelworks with electric arc furnace technology in the year 2002. Serious downsizing had reduced employment at the Works from over 12,000 to 4,000 from the 1980s; a downsizing which had been largely secured through union co-operation based on BHP’s drive to make the Works competitive and for steelmaking to be retained in the city. The closure announcement breached this undertaking (Lewer 2001). Given these circumstances, the research project required a carefully crafted strategy to “get in” by gaining the co-operation of management elites and the steel union leadership and for access to be granted by a company with a reputation for not openly encouraging scholarly inquiry from “outsiders.” BHP had, for example, previously threatened a researcher with legal action over his highly critical study of the company’s employment practices (Kitay and Callus 1998). Study 3: Trade Union History Project Although a number of biographies of labor activists have primarily drawn upon written documents, oral sources can provide a credible alternative replete with meaning (Portelli 1998). This project consisted of 30 oral history interviews conducted by one of the authors for the Trade Union History Project (New Zealand). Unlike the projects outlined above, this research was not undertaken on the basis of the confidentiality of the individuals involved. Respondents participated on the understanding of the creation of permanent record that could be accessed by the public. The interviews were semi-structured and ranged from three to eight hours in length. Drawing from extensive research on the individual and their particular union(s) questions explored the interviewee’s background and

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their union involvement and career. Other questions probed specific details such as their reaction to women (the majority of those interviewed were men), technology, the labor process, managerial imperatives; as well as reactions and responses to international events, politics, religion and industrial relations, depending on the age of the respondent, from the 1930s to the mid-to-late 1990s. One of the aims of the project was to capture the motivations and feelings of the individual. Where possible, the interviewer encouraged the use of self-reflection and many of the responses to questions asked related to relationships with other unions, political parties and the internal struggle within particular unions. Issues of personality and the perceived influence—both real and imagined—of Catholicism dominated some of the interviews. Getting In: Securing Access Although most textbooks on organization and management research methods acknowledge the importance of access in research design, few adequately address the often very considerable challenges this poses and, specifically, the manner in which it can be obtained without compromising the research. In our experience as researchers, teachers and mentors, it is this aspect of research which most focuses the mind given the consequences. It’s a truism that the success of a research project which relies on data-gathering from respondents and organizations turns on securing access or, simply, “getting in.” Sometimes you have to make do with what you can, and more often than not research is a product of convenience. As Fine and Shulman explain: “Ethnographers (and we would add all researchers of organizations and management) are more often beggars than choosers. Often we don’t contact the perfect organization, set an appointment with a top executive who can provide access … Instead we may have to rely on a convenience sample because that chosen site is what is available” (2009: 179). Less widely acknowledged in research design is access to the research approval process. By this we mean the researcher seeking and obtaining university approval and agreement in the form of the ethical approval, legal liability, insurance and safety clearances. In many respects the researcher and their intended research project must pass the gaze of other experts and their own elites in order to be validated. In the Australian context, for example, researchers in the social sciences must submit their research projects for peer review in terms of methodology and satisfy the forensic assay of a university’s Human Research Ethics Committees (HREC). Detailed participant information statements outlining the nature of the research, its potential use, publication, method, along with what is required from participants and any potential benefits or harm are required. In the case of interviews, consent is needed before the interview proceeds and participants must be given the option to review, revise, edit the interview transcript or even withdraw their participation. Increasingly, university HREC are less likely to approve sampling techniques based on “snowballing.” Unanticipated changes to

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the research design or method may require a variation in HREC approval. Overall, such are the HREC requirement it is interesting to contemplate whether famous research such as Milgram’s (1974) experimental study of authority and obedience and Humphreys’ (1975) investigation of casual gay sex in the Tearoom Trade would have been given ethics approval (see Calvey 2008 for a spirited defence of covert research). For research conducted off-campus (including qualitative interviews) the researcher may need to satisfy others in the university’s bureaucracy that the project complies with (complex) safety requirements for both the researcher and the participants. At one university these demand that when an interview is being conducted in a participant’s home the interviewer must ensure that any pets have been restrained, the route from the place of interview to the entrance door is memorized, if a firearm or other weapon is visible then the interviewer will leave and at prearranged times the interviewer will telephone a safety contact and that there are prearranged code words for hazardous situations (Corbett 2011). Because the process sets standards for all research no matter how benign, anecdotally, many researchers complain that while the safety concerns are understandably well-intentioned, in practice though they impose a farcical challenge which wags claim is “analogous to climbing K2 without oxygen.” Hints and Tips: Our Experience There is no typical research experience or one best way to go about research. Our advice is to encourage students and researchers to think laterally and to explore all avenues and potential leads. In our experience, there is little to be gained by blindly contacting organizations in the vain hope that a letter, fax or e-mail will be forwarded to the relevant person for consideration. Indeed, contact details on company websites or web-mails tend to lead to marketing departments who, in our experience, are singularly unhelpful in providing the direct contact details of senior decision-makers. We have lived through the experience of picking up the phone and making a “cold call” to an organization (often unsuccessfully). Elites and high-level organization experts surrounds themselves with “access barriers … personified in the form of secretaries [and] personal assistants” (Littig 2009: 104). The literature suggests that researchers who gain access to organizations do so through the services of an intermediary, personal contact within the organization (often a middle to senior manager level in functional department/division) or, follow in the footsteps of supervisors and researchers who accessed the same organization before them. In the case of interviews with trade union leaders (many of whom were retired) recommendations from others who had been interviewed proved helpful. Outside organizations such as industry associations/bodies, industry consultants and trade unions can prove to be pivotal in gaining access to a target organization. Students have attended industry conferences and trade shows in the hope of making an introduction with those who may grant them research access. If you

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are a university student, do not forget those organizations and firms who supply goods and services to your institution. After letters to employers and managers went unanswered and phone calls unreturned, one of the authors, in desperation, sought help from his university in seeking access to cleaning firms for the purpose of his doctoral studies. The academic responsible for facility management was sympathetic and made representations to the external cleaning contractor (the contract was worth millions of dollars) suggesting that they might like to take part in my (Ryan) research. Whether through genuine interest or wishing to please an important client, the CEO of the cleaning firm agreed to meet with the author and his research supervisor. Kincaid and Bright (1957: 305) explain that “executives are not likely to judge a request for assistance in a research project on its merits alone. Rather they tend to speculate on what a refusal would cost in public relations.” The reluctance on the part of the CEO to become genuinely involved in the research project was evident beyond being seen to do the right thing (during this time cleaning firms at the university were involved in subcontracting arrangements and under investigation by the union) and the researcher decided not to pursue this firm (Ryan 2009). In the end, by chance, one of the researcher’s professors suddenly recalled that he had taught a director of a cleaning firm during this person’s postgraduate study and that he would be pleased to write a letter on my behalf. This letter eventually led to the researcher gaining access to one of the largest cleaning firms in Australia. The researcher later found out the prestige of the professor and the perceived prestige of the university was an important factor in securing access. In effect, an elite—the professor—acted as an intermediary for the researcher to gain access to another elite—the director. In many cases, successfully obtaining access to an organization or business requires the researcher to act entrepreneurially. In granting access to a researcher managers may apply the test of “what’s in it for me,” or, “what we do we [the organization] get out of it.” As teachers of management we often remind our students of the importance of motivation in achieving personal and organizational goals. Obelene (2009: 191–4) discusses the importance of motivation in recruiting research participants and presenting research proposals that appear attractive and engaging. In the case of the cleaning industry senior managers agreed to be interviewed in part because of a memo sent from the executive asking for cooperation, and partly because of the curiosity factor of an academic taking interest in them, their work and their industry. For the interviews with trade union officials some individuals only agreed to an interview on the promise that they could “name the names,” bare all and expose the “conspiracy.” In the preliminary meeting the interviewer was often treated to detailed accounts of the sell-out of the union movement and the clandestine meetings between conservative politicians and the union elite. Disappointingly, when it came to the formal interview, however, the narrators usually feel silent. In other cases, ageing former union officials, aware of the number of biographies written about their colleagues and predecessors, were motivated by the opportunity to set the record straight and to tell their side of the story.

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It can be a test of one’s determination and perseverance to find out that others do not share your view that your research topic is the most interesting and important in the world. Research proposals should be written clearly and simply, with much of the academic rationale (and literature review!) left out or severely curtailed. If the organization is interested, you will probably be asked to attend a meeting or to give a presentation. We can’t stress enough the importance of appearing competent, having a firm grasp of your topic area, a willingness to answer questions and explain the potential benefit of your research, direct or otherwise, to the organization. Appropriate dress and appearing professional also helps. One of the authors was invited to meet with the chief executive officer of a large cleaning firm to discuss his research and to set the parameters of the study. He dressed conservatively, but noted on entry to the corporate offices that the staff (CEO excepted) were dressed more casually and the wearing of ties was absent. Not realizing that it was “casual Friday” the researcher assumed this was the norm, and in order to appear to “fit in” the next time he appeared at the corporate office was dressed less formally and without tie. The researcher was admonished by a senior manager and given instruction that wearing a tie at all times was essential while at corporate offices. Lesson learnt! Senior managers are often concerned with how you will present your findings and their organization. A willingness to listen to concerns and take steps to protect the identities of individuals and the organization (something HREC will require) will overcome obvious objections. Knowing your organization and industry/context within which it operates, coupled with a measure of good luck, can go a long way in securing research access. For example, one of the authors acknowledged to management the location of the organization within the grey sector of the economy, the marginalized nature of its workforce, the stigmatization of cleaning as “dirty work” and the perception of cleaning companies as “bad” employers. Unknowingly, the researcher had tapped into what management was currently thinking and was given unrestricted access to the organization and its people with the exhortation to “tell us how bad we really are,” as long as the company name was kept out of publication for five years. Cracking the suspicions of the elites managing BHP’s steelworks’ closure— from both the company and steel unions—similarly relied on the researcher knowing the industry and being known to its key gatekeepers. Approval was granted by senior management at BHP’s headquarters in Melbourne after a complicated “dance of seduction” which was timed to follow from when the conflict over the original announcement had declined—well over 12 months. Managers and unions were then more susceptible to flattering overtures of the “historical” imperative to “capture” the closure process. No doubt managers believed that, despite the workforce of 4,000 being made redundant and the loss of $A2.8 billion which the steelworks injected annually into the local economy, a sympathetic telling of their story was paramount. The steel union elites were also anxious to get on record their version of the closure, especially BHP’s mendaciousness over the decision and, importantly, how well the local managers and the workforce had responded to the “calamity” with such maturity (Lewer 2006).

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The Politics of Business Research Easterby-Smith et al. (2000) alert us to the politics of management research, although the argument applies equally to research in business more generally. They define “‘politics’ as concerning the power relationship between the individuals and institutions involved in the research enterprise; it includes the strategies adopted by different actors and the consequences of their actions on others.” Furthermore, they argue “[a]mongst these actors influence may be exerted over: what is to be researched, how, when, by whom; how information is used and disseminated; and how the products of research are to be evaluated” (2000: 44). In researching elites, the relationship between the researcher and the researched is more unequal, giving rise to the researcher having to engage in the “process of bargaining a study” (Obelene 2009). To a large extent all research is “bargained” and perhaps nowhere more evident is the influence of politics on the form of research design and access. Closely associated with this is the role of the researcher and whether or not they remain independent/distant or involved (Easterby-Smith et al. 2000: 33). Gummesson discusses the range of roles for a researcher/consultant of management research in organizations. These range from analyst, participant, therapist, organizational development interventionist, change agent, to “management-for-hire” (2000: 35–41). Each “role” requires different levels of access and participation within organizations. Indeed, access to organizations and their people will require the researcher to adopt a role. In our research projects the outcomes were determined by a combination of factors including those of the sponsoring organization, ethics (and the requirements of university HREC), the demands and interests of the elites and their organizations and the practicalities of time. For example, the list of potential interviewees for the Trade Union History Project was drawn up in consultation with, and scrutinized by the executive committee. As the researcher was working out of the office of a union, it found to be politic to include extra interviews of members from this union whom otherwise would not have been interviewed. Less overtly, in the study of the steelworks closure, managers and the union leadership felt no need to “control” the selection of interviewees given their confidence in their own positive narrative of the closure “story.” Sometimes, researchers may need to change the focus, process and design of their research to overcome concerns of the organization, business or individual under examination. At the end of the day it pays to bear in mind that it is your research project. If the compromises requested are unreasonable and if you are unable or unwilling to make changes then it will be necessary to walk away and find another organization to study. Perusing the relevant literature and consulting with informants within the industry, for example, consultants, industry bodies or unions, may help in preparing a research project that is well-informed and realistic before approaching specific organizations for access. Apart from securing access to the steelworks from the “dance” with the elites the researcher made a presentation to the steelworks’ central union-management

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Transition Steering Team (TST). Having representatives of the workforce not only formally approve the project but be enthusiastic towards it, was vital. It could not be easily assumed that the TST would be co-operative. Meeting the potential key informants was designed to demonstrate the bona fides of the researcher, explain that the research would be conducted according to the University’s guidelines and to answer any concerns that they may have had over the research. Such incisive action was necessary, in part, to prop up the company’s unprecedented invitation and to establish initial links with the informants. Full access was critical. Yin (1994: 49) points to the “potential vulnerability” of single case studies unless careful initial work is undertaken to “minimise the chances of misrepresentation and to maximise the access needed to collect the case study evidence.” Of course, it needs to be recognized that researchers are not unaffected by the “dance” to gain access nor from the on-going interaction with the respondents who are about to lose their jobs and, given the significance of work for many, their sense of identity. The extreme conditions created by plant closures do tend to concentrate the researcher’s mind. Closedowns are often highly emotionally charged events; characterized by mourning, anger, depression, sorrow, an ambiguous present and the fear of an unknown future (see Corman et al. in this collection). Writing up the steelworks closure project, the researcher felt equally compelled to record their obligations to the elites and all those who willingly provided access and data. In effect, this was an acknowledgment of the political relationships intertwined throughout the research. He wrote (Lewer 2006: iii): So it was looking into those worn faces of the TST members at our meeting on 19 July 1999. I felt an implicit responsibility to craft a research project which acknowledged the significance, even solemnity of the closure of their historic, unforgiving Works. It is my sincerest hope that this analysis of the exceptional performances achieved during the long closedown period has satisfied my duty (emphasis added).

Finding Out: Interviewing Organizational Elites The literature on interviewing elites can be contradictory and confused (see Aguiar in this volume; Tomic and Trumper in this volume). On the one hand the process of question design and implementing the interview apply equally to elites and non-elites; on the other, it has been argued that interviewing elites is different in that they “appreciate being treated as individuals” and “standardised interviewing is less effective” (Zuckerman 1972: 174). Given the variety of research situations it is not our intention to take readers through the process of constructing questions and implementing interviews. These are discussed in detail elsewhere (see Bryman and Bell 2007; Easterby-Smith et al. 2000; Minichiello et al. 1990). Rather, our aim is to outline some suggestions that we found useful in face-to-face interviewing.

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Hints and Tips: Our Experience While we have no wish to summarize the extant literature on conducting interviews, we offer the following tips. In our experience, where an elite’s time is more forthcoming, “story-telling” questions are useful whereby the respondent is asked to describe something and the interviewer follows with additional questions seeking clarification or explanation (Minichiello et al. 1990). Story telling is discussed in more detail below. Preparation As discussed, preparation and a professional demeanour are important in securing access to elites and organizations. Case study research requires the triangulation of data sources and the consideration of multiple sources of information; this also applies to interviewing. In our projects, interviews were organized around common themes and topic areas; but each was tailored and crafted for the individual. In preparing interview questions we recommend a thorough understanding of the business/organization where the elite is located, and the industry in which they work and their role and position. This can be obtained through background interviews or consultations with other key informants from industry associations, unions, and similar bodies. Time As Mintzberg (1975) highlighted over three decades ago in his classic article— “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact”—managers work at a relentless pace in fulfilling their complex roles and tasks. He contended that their own time was the scarcest resource managers had to allocate, particularly CEOs, those at the zenith of business elites. Accordingly, in our experience, recognizing time limitations, especially when interviews commonly run for at least an hour, should form part of the process in bargaining to “get-in.” Being upfront with expectations of the time required for an interview lets the researcher know how much time they can claim from interviewee. Understanding the time available may force the researcher to revise their research design. Where available time is limited, a more structured form of questioning may be appropriate. Location Consideration should be given to where the interview will be held. Many managers and organizational elites will wish to be interviewed in their working space, along with the attendant distractions, interruptions and (potentially) the contiguous display of their elite status. Our suggestion is, where possible, to find somewhere mutually convenient even given the pervasiveness of mobile phone and other invasive technologies. Moving from the office to a more neutral location can help

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restore some of the power imbalance between the elite subject and the researcher. In the steelworks cases study some of the elites were resistant to shift location. Interviews with senior managers were conducted in their vertigo-inducing glass walled offices in BHP’s headquarters tower in Melbourne; the managers no doubt comfortable in the display of their status. This resistance to shift could itself be relevant observation data. Going with the Flow (Or Running with the Story) Sometimes interviewing is like riding a raft down an unknown river. The journey can be full of trepidation and rapids lurk around every corner for the unwary. Michael Piore (1983: 72) argues that people have a story to tell and interviewees will use “questions as an excuse for telling their stories.” This can be disconcerting for the researcher/interviewer with their carefully crafted interview schedule. Piore (1983: 72) faced the alternative of letting the respondent tell their story or forcing them to treat the questions seriously, with the risk of loss of interest and a hurried response to questions posed. Through the stories told, answers to questions are often unwittingly given, and, time permitting, it is useful to let the respondent “run.” For Piore (1983: 81), “what interviews can reveal is not a set of specific answers to specific questions, individual bits and pieces of information. What they reveal are patterns of responses. Each answer, whether true or false, is a piece of that pattern.” Factors Affecting the Reliability of the Narrative One of the challenges encountered by researchers is when interviewees resist giving accurate or “straight answers” to questions, particularly those that deal with issues of “identity” and individual/organizational “responsibility.” Business elites, mindful of an outside audience often present an official narrative and history favourable to themselves and the organization. Although as researchers we are attracted to qualitative methods to address issues of the complexity, context and the persona (Gummesson 2006), it is often the personal that is excluded from business and management research. Interviews can be fraught with difficulties. As Winkler argues with respect to interviews of company directors (1983: 129–30): Like all accounts they are vulnerable to fallible memory and selective recall, but perhaps more than most accounts, elite renderings are vulnerable to selfjustification, the impulse to rationalize and to tidy, to conceal the illicit, to ascribe decent motives for action, to present the behaviour as the outcome of intention logically implemented, to interpret failure as the result of a recalcitrant outside forces rather than personal incompetence. Such laundering of reality does not imply more-than-normal duplicity on the part of elites, merely that the social

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expectations of those in leadership roles are more-than-normally demanding, the losses consequent on a fall from status are a larger, and hence the risks of candour correspondingly greater.

There are a number of reasons why responses given in interviews are laundered. Common barriers include: ideology and audience, loyalty to colleagues and the group/organization, organizational/collective identity, trivialization, official scripts and rhetorical discourse and the presentation of a favorable self-persona. Ideology and Audience The interview process revolves around relationships: the relationship between the researcher and the interviewee, “and that between the informant and [their] own historical consciousness” (Grele 1998: 45). Grele (1994: 3) contends “personal narrative[s] … are an occasion for the struggle of meaning and control of interpretation as well as identity formation, they are deeply embedded in ideologies.” In the oral history project involving union leaders it was evident that for many of the interviewees there was an uncomfortable fit between their espoused socialist ideology and support for reformist political parties and trade union activities. A number of the narrators were at pains to justify their action according to their own beliefs and ideologies. Most interviewees were aware of an outside audience of potential users and this tempered and shaped responses to questions. “The effect of an awareness of an audience of potential users is that it raises the level of ideological discourse beyond the immediate situation of the interview, and is, in effect, the audience of which the ideology is articulated” (Grele 1994: 5). Loyalty to Colleagues and Political Responsibility Many of those we have interviewed were reluctant to share their deepest personal responses—especially negative responses. We suspect this is out of a sense of loyalty to friends, colleagues, the organization, or, in the case of trade union officials, loyalty to the wider movement. A realization that it would be irresponsible and counterproductive to make public the less savoury or more contentious issues often shaped responses to difficult questions. Organization or Collective Identity In our experience there is a marked tendency for elites to speak collectively. Here, the individual becomes a contextualized self and speaks for or on behalf of others. The language used becomes the “we” not “I.” As Jo Stanley aptly puts it: ‘“asking did you …” means a collective and representative “you” plural, not “you” the singular and feeling being”’ (1996: 63). Therefore, responses to difficult questions become constrained to maintaining the facade of collective identity. Probing

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questions may be required to ascertain whether or not one is speaking on behalf of the self or the organization. Trivialization Closely related to the above is the idea of trivialization. The issues did not matter, or looking back now, were not important or were of little importance at the time. Often this relates to a sense of seeing the self as less important than the wider organization or movement. Trauma, Timing and Official Scripts For a number of people their own experiences of personality and politics within the union movement were too vivid and traumatic to be shared. Those activists forced out of positions or unceremoniously dumped were unlikely to be forthcoming on the events that led to their dismissal. For others, the relatively recent demise of the union movement and the perceived sell-out by the leadership, has not provided a time for free account and the chance to talk about the mistakes made, but has in fact meant a further retreat into the self. Most of us as human beings live by our formal narratives, our official scripts about how our life is and was, and how we felt about that. Psychologically it is hard to abandon these scripts to reframe, to disrupt the story we usually tell (Stanley 1996: 65). Rhetorical Discourse The use of rhetorical discourse by interviewees to construct a favourable presentation of the self can present distorted answers to difficult or complex questions (Futrell and Willard 1994). For a number of us social reality emerges from interaction and we construct our realities through negotiation and communication. Rhetorical interviewees solve the problems posed by complex situations by “redefining situations and selves, rules and roles” (Futrell and Willard 1994: 89). Following Futrell and Willard (1994: 98), the rhetorical interviewee is aware that I (the interviewer) want something from them. They can decide to give me the information I want but at the same time fulfill some other objective for themselves—the presentation of a “self-serving persona.” Through the use of rhetorical discourse individuals are able to justify their own actions and behaviors. In the cutthroat world of commercial cleaning where competitive tendering and mangers knowing they are “good as [their] last profit and loss statement,” managers were eager to impress upon the researcher their importance and commitment to the organization and their clients. In doing so, they were able to “justify” what was arguable a harsh approach to labor management (Ryan 2007) in pursuit of these goals. Furthermore, Berry (2002: 680) reminds us that:

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Interviewers must always keep in mind that it is not the obligation of a subject to be objective and to tell us the truth. We have a purpose in requesting an interview but ignore the reality that subjects have a purpose in the interview too: they have something they want to say. Consciously or unconsciously, they’ve thought about what they want to say in the period between the request and the actual interview. They’re talking about their work and, as such, justifying what they do. That’s no small matter.

Conclusion Research involves choice; choices over the phenomenon to be investigated, how the research will proceed (the design or strategy) and which data gathering methods provide the best-fit with the research objectives. Very complex philosophical questions, beliefs and assumptions intertwine this process. Questions such as “what is reality” (ontology) and “how do we know what we know” (epistemology) or, how researchers discover or frame that reality, force the researcher to make explicit the rationale or logic used to justify the research design. This reasoning over the choice from, for example, ethnography, historical enquiry, surveys and case studies represents the methodology; choices which often require the social scientist to “get-in” and to “find out.” As this chapter has shown from the analysis of the two case studies and the labor oral-history project, accessing and interviewing business and union elites in this “getting in” and “finding out” phases of the research poses not inconsiderable challenges. Perhaps analogous to a dance, the researcher has to construct the most tempting invitation to the potential elite partner to participate which, if successful, is followed by a form (or style) of dance which reveals from the partner, well, the desired data. Epistemologists may argue over this, but researchers would commonly endeavor to remain unaffected by the charms of the respondent elites. The dance analogy holds in that much confounds and confronts the exchange between (powerful) elites and the researcher. Indeed, as Hiller and DiLuzio (2004: 20) contend, there are very salient differences between the dance partners, or, as they described them—the researcher and the interviewee collaborators: “the researcher often has goals, deadlines, reports and a bank of literature with its interpretations which frame the project.” Alternatively, the interviewees often have an “intense experience” of “self-discovery” which may not be sufficiently acknowledged by the researcher. “Half-truth” or “superficial” responses can be the result. In the dance, the researcher must be conscious of the competing stakeholder views, the dominant narratives, especially those engendered as “legitimate” by the elites, and of the hidden, possibly, subjugated voices. In the end, well performed indepth interviewing with these elites done by manipulating levels of rapport and detachment can yield broad and deep evidence.

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Successful researchers in “studying up” understand the cardinal considerations which guide their work. Recognizing those factors which will affect the reliability of the narrative—elites especially are commonly affected by demands to package their data favorably for their audiences and to protect their interests—that in research sponsored by universities those who control access through ethics and other clearance processes represents formidable elites with demanding requirements that need to be satisfied and, finally, that “studying up” researchers often compete with others to be granted access by the management elites in business and labor organizations are central to this process. All this needs to be achieved without serious impediment to the research; a challenging yet, when done well, deeply gratifying outcome. References Alvesson, M. and Deetz, S. 2000. Doing Critical Management Research. London: Sage. Ashforth, B. and Kreiner, G. 1999. “‘How Can You Do It?’ Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity.” Academy of Management Review 24(3): 413–24. Berg, B.L. 1998. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (3rd edn). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Berry, J. 2002. “Validity and Reliability Issues in Elite Interviewing.” PSOnline, December, 679–82. Bryman, A. and Bell, E. 2007. Business Research Methods (2nd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Calvey, D. 2008. “The Art and Politics of Covert Research: Doing “Situated Ethics” in the Field.” Sociology 42, 905–18. Corbett, J. 2011. “OH&S Farce.” Newcastle Herald, 13 April. Coyle, A. 1986. Dirty Business. Birmingham: West Midlands Low Pay Unit. Easterby-Smith, M., Thorpe, R. and Lowe, A. 2000. Management Research. An Introduction. London: Sage. Fine, G. and Shulman, D. 2009. “Lies from the Field: Ethical Issues in Organisational Ethnography.” In Organisational Ethnography. Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life, eds S. Ybema, D. Yanow, H. Wels and F. Kamsteeg. London: Sage, 177–95. Futrell, A. and Willard, C. 1994. “Intersubjectivity and Interviewing.” In Interactive Oral History Interviewing, eds E. McMahan and K. Rogers. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 83–105. Grele, R. 1994. “History and the Languages of History in the Oral History Interview: Who Answers Whose Questions and Why?” In Interactive Oral History Interviewing, eds E. McMahan and K. Rogers. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1–18.

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Grele, R. 1998. “Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History.” In The Oral History Reader, eds R. Perks and A. Thomson. London: Routledge, 38–52. Gummesson, E. 2000. Qualitative Methods in Management Research (2nd edn). London: Sage. Gummesson, E. 2006. “Qualitative Research in Management: Addressing Complexity, Context and Persona.” Management Decision 44(2): 167–79. Hiller, H.H. and DiLuzio, L. 2004. “The Interviewee and the Research Interview: Analyzing a Neglected Dimension of Research.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41(1): 1–26. Humphreys, L. 1975. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Kincaid, H. and Bright, M. 1957. “Interviewing the Business Elite.” The American Journal of Sociology 63(3): 304–11. Kitay, J. and Callus, R. 1998. “The Role and Challenge of Case Study Design in Industrial Relations Research.” In Researching the World of Work. Strategies and Methods in Studying Industrial Relations, eds K. Whitfield and G. Strauss. New York: Cornell University Press, 101–12. Lewer, J. 2001. Strategic HRM and Organisational Performance under Extreme Conditions: A Case Study of Plant Closure, Organisational Renewal: Challenging HRM Conference. Nijmegen, Netherlands. Lewer, J. 2006. “‘Not Charted on Ordinary Maps’”: The Newcastle Steelworks Closure and the Closedown Effect.” PhD thesis, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle. Littig, B. 2000. “Interviewing the Elite – Interviewing Experts: Is There a Difference?” In Interviewing Experts, eds A. Bogner, B. Littig and W. Menz. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 98–113. Milgram, S. 1974. Obedience to Authority. London: Tavistock Publications. Minichiello, V., Aroni, R., Timewell, E. and Alexander, L. 1990. In-Depth Interviewing, Researching People. Melbourne: Longman. Mintzberg, H. 1975. “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact.” Harvard Business Review HBR July–August. Moody, K. 2007. US Labour in Trouble and Transition. The Failure of Reform From Above, the Promise of Revival From Below. New York: Verso. Obelene, V. 2009. “Expert versus Researcher: Ethical Considerations in the Process of Bargaining a Study.” In Interviewing Experts, eds A. Bogner, B. Littig and W. Menz. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 184–200. Piore, M. 1983. “Qualitative Research Techniques in Economics.” In Qualitative Methodology, ed. J. Van Maanen. London: Sage, 71–85. Portelli, A. 1998. “What Makes Oral History Different.” In The Oral History Reader, eds R. Perks and A. Thomson. London: Routledge, 63–74. Rosenblum, K.E. 1987. “The In-depth Interview: Between Science and Sociability.” Sociological Forum 2(2): 388–400.

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Ryan, S. 2007. “Dirty Deeds done Cheap? Employment Relations and the Organisation of Work in the NSW Commercial Cleaning Industry.” PhD thesis, Work and Organizational Studies, University of Sydney. Ryan, S. 2009. “‘On the Mop-floor’: Researching Employment Relations in the Hidden World of Commercial Cleaning.” In Method in the Madness: Research Stories You Won’t Read in Textbooks, eds K. Townsend and J. Burgess. Oxford: Chandos. Shore, C. 2002. “Introduction. Towards an Anthropology of Elites.” In Elite Cultures. Anthropological Perspectives, eds C. Shore and S. Nugent. New York: Routledge, 1–21. Stanley, J. 1996. “Including the Feelings: Personal Political Testimony and SelfDisclosure.” Oral History Spring 1996, 60–67. Sutton, R.I. 1987. “The Progress of Organizational Death. Disbanding and Reconnecting.” Administrative Science Quarterly 32(4): 542–69. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2009. Mass Layoffs Summary. US Department of Labor. Welch, C., Marschan-Piekkari, R., Penttinen, H. and Tahvanainen, M. 2002. “Corporate Elites as Informants in Qualitative International Research.” International Business Review 11, 611–28. Winkler, J. 1983. “The Fly on the Wall of the Inner Sanctum: Observing Company Directors at Work.” In Research Methods for Elite Studies, eds G. Moyser and M. Wagstaffe 1987. London: Allen and Unwin, 129–46. Yin, R.K. 1994. Case Study Research: Design and Methods (2nd edn). California: Sage. Yin, R.K. 2003. Applications of Case Study Research (2nd edn). California: Sage. Zuckerman, H. 1972. “Interviewing an Ultra-elite.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36(2): 159–75.

Chapter 5

Interviewing Celebrities: Strategies for Getting Beyond the Sound Bite Michael Ian Borer

A key difference between sociological field researchers/ethnographers and journalists/news reporters is that they (the media) describe what they see and hear at a particular moment, while we (sociologists) look for patterns among many moments and provide interpretations for what we see. That is, we put particular moments into a larger social and intellectual context. Sociological research, especially projects involving qualitative and ethnographic case studies, is about extrapolating from the specific and making connections, patterns, theories that tell us something about the world and the way people live in it. This is exactly what C. Wright Mills meant when he defined the sociological imagination as the explicit act of linking biography and history (Mills 1959: 5). Sociologists and journalists, however, do have a few important things in common. For one, we both hold objectivity as an ideal, regardless of whether or not we can ever achieve objectivity, or want to, or get the story absolutely right. But we can come pretty close sometimes, even after recognizing the polysemic and polyphonic nature of social reality. Second, we use multiple methods to build our case. These methods can include archival materials, our own firsthand observations, and interviews. Third, most of the time, our subjects, informants, and/or participants are common, everyday people. Sociologists who do the type of cultural research and analysis that brings them into people’s neighbourhoods, hangouts, and workplaces want to know something about the way people make sense of the world they live in, about their personal histories, about the things that mean something to them, about the ways they do things with other people, and where and why they do them. Sometimes we want to know more than people are willing to tell us. Sometimes we want to know more than people are able to tell us. And, sometimes, asking someone if they would like to be interviewed can give the wrong impression about our intentions and our projects. For the general public, “interview” can be a loaded term covering moments that range from flattering to downright intrusive and annoying. Living in what Paul Atkinson and David Silverman (1997) have correctly called “the interview society,” interviewing is no longer reserved for social researchers or investigative reporters, but has become the very stuff of life as members of society spend much of their time asking questions, being asked questions themselves, or watching

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television shows about people being asked questions and answering them in turn. Regardless of its increased use outside of academic spheres, the interview is still an important tool for acquiring information that cannot be gained from anonymous surveys. Acknowledging the interviewee’s perceptions of and about the “interview” is part of the sociological field researcher’s task of establishing rapport. Both the meaning of the interview and the ability to make interviewees comfortable enough to get honest and useful information from them differs greatly on the expectations and perceptions that the interviewees have of the field researcher. These expectations and perceptions are affected by the population that the interviewee is a representative member of and the overt, observable characteristics of the interviewer such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, style of dress, manner of speech, and general demeanour (see Pacholok in this collection). Much has been written about the potential bias arising from the effects of an interviewer’s personal attributes. Significantly less has been written about the interviewee’s expectations of the interview (Berg 2001: 86). This is especially true when the person being questioned is someone who has experience with being interviewed by the media. People who are accustomed to being interviewed by reporters and journalists, like heads of organizations, often speak for a corporate entity rather than about themselves. Conversely, popular culture celebrities often speak about themselves, but it tends to be in a very manufactured way partially because they are much more conscious of their presentation of self than the average person. Indeed, much of their fame is dependent upon that presentation, as well as the visibility of that presentation by multiple media outlets (Boorstin 1961; Gamson 1994; Rojek 2001). Within American culture’s dominant status hierarchy, and spanning across Western culture more generally, celebrities occupy a position near, and sometimes above, powerful elites like CEOs and political leaders (see Milner 2005). As such, the perspective of celebrities, and not just others’ interpretations on them, can potentially provide important insights about micro-processes like identity construction and macro-processes like social mobility (see Sternheimer 2011). Sociologists who want to study celebrities will likely encounter similar difficulties that some have had while conducting studies on, and with, other types elites. There exists a limited literature on doing “fieldwork in elite settings” that tends to focus on methodological problems involved with “studying up.” That is, when doing research on elites, how do we get past “organizational gatekeepers” and gain access to “important people?” How do we penetrate the boundaries and barriers of social class and prestige? Such issues can arise when interviewing elites who generally tend to question the researcher’s status, ability, and qualifications (Hertz and Imber 1993: 3–6; see also Morrill 1995; Gusterson 1997). None of these existing studies, however, address the issue that I am concerned about, the issue that I faced during my fieldwork with high-profiled professional athletes. And that issue revolves around the idea that public figures already have “interview repertoires” before we speak with them because of their past experiences

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in front of the camera and microphone. “Interview repertoires” are filled with sound bites that often pass as legitimate personal opinions and acquired knowledge. Because “interview repertoires” are stocked with bits of informal knowledge that people can rely on and recall when asked questions about themselves or other issues, interviewee answers become problematic as truth-claims. Pre-packaged sound bites, however, should not impede interviewers’ task or craft. Instead the interviewer—as evidenced by those who have experimented with the content and form of interview practices—must move beyond the static nature of traditional interviewing techniques by recognizing the interview as a micro-situation within a larger socio-cultural context (e.g., “the interview society”). Though studying pre-packaged sound bites can yield interesting findings about “interview repertoires,” they can also hinder the field researcher’s quest for relevant and useful, albeit necessarily subjective, information. I call this methodological and epistemological problem getting beyond the sound bite. As noted above, “interview” is a loaded term, and to persons who are accustomed to being interviewed by journalists, news reporters, and other members of the media, “interview” has a specific meaning. Just as the sociologist’s expectations are different than the journalist’s, so are our definitions of and reasons for doing interviews. But how do we show that to the celebrity interviewee? How do we get “backstage”? Is there even such a cognitive or emotional space we can acknowledge as the “backstage”? Assuming such a space exists, what happens to the status of our data if we can’t get there? The study of celebrity culture has gained popularity over the course of the last few decades (see Marshall 2009). Though some sociologists have conducted ethnographic/field research studies about celebrities and celebrity culture (e.g., Ferris 2001, 2004; Fraser and Brown 2002; Gamson 1994, 1998; Grindstaff 2002), no one has done sociological interviews with celebrities themselves. The closest that sociologists have come to conducting interviews with celebrities is Peter and Patricia Adler’s study about the players and coaches of a top-20 ranked college basketball team (Adler and Adler 1991). As such, these issues remain relatively unexplored. This is the subject of this chapter. Getting beyond the sound bite involves two separate but related problems. First, the sociologist must show celebrity interviewees that he or she is interviewing them for different purposes than searching for a quick and pithy quote to put on the evening news or atop an article in tomorrow’s paper. Then he or she must attempt to obtain “real” answers—note that “real” does not mean objective, but rather subjective—from them instead of accepting their rehearsed and rehashed sound bites. These sound bites do, however, have some value unto themselves, but for a different purpose. It’s like the difference between an advertisement for a used car and the car itself. One can study the advertisement to investigate what the owner wants potential buyers to think about the car. But studying the advertisement won’t tell you anything about how the car actually runs. Second, the sociologist must interpret information from celebrity interviewees that is inconsistent with what is publicly known about them from the media. Such

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interpretations can give us a more accurate picture of both the media’s coverage and, more importantly, the interviewee’s answers. In both cases, we are faced with a common methodological and epistemological problem that exists regardless of the social status or experience of our interviewees: must we always believe what people tell us? The quick is answer is, of course, “no.” But questions still remain about what we should and should not believe, how we can tell the difference, and how those differences can reveal important insights about persons’ interpretations of their social worlds. And interviewing celebrities adds even more complexity to these questions because of the learned “interview repertoires” and the flexible yet often impenetrable boundaries of their social worlds. Gaining Access to Fenway Park’s Celebrities My contact with human celebrities came during a project I conducted about a celebrity site: Fenway Park (see Borer 2008). Home to the Boston Red Sox since 1912, Fenway Park is the oldest active ballpark in major league, professional baseball. The prospective future of Fenway Park, renovate and restore it or remove it and build a new ballpark, has been a subject of heated debate in and around Boston since the mid-to-late 1990s. Boston’s ballpark has about 10,000 less seats than most other ballparks, which means that the organization may not be making as much money as they could, which, some argue, means that they don’t have the financial ability to put the best team on the field. Expanding the ballpark is impossible because it fits tightly into an already existing city block and, as physics and gravity dictate, you cannot build up without building out first. Though the organization has tried to cram seats into every space possible, questions remain about the economic viability of the ballpark, as well as its structural stability. As Fenway Park nears its 100-year anniversary, its future is still uncertain. We can learn a great deal about a culture by considering the importance people give to their buildings, especially significant edifices like celebrity sites (Borer 2006). The debate over Fenway’s renovation or removal highlights the meanings people invest in important and iconic places. In order to fully grasp the multiple meanings bestowed upon Fenway Park by multiple groups with varying interests and beliefs, I needed to employ multiple methods, albeit all with the intent to grasp those meanings from the persons’ who hold them. I set out to learn as much as I could about the ballpark, its history and its patrons, its architecture and its owners, its supporters and its dissenters. Moreover, I set out to understand how and why the reverence of Fenway Park does not secure its survival. The research design followed Joshua Gamson’s “tripartite model” for studying cultural objects, ideas, and norms. Gamson writes: In order to get a strong grasp of a cultural phenomenon, it is necessary to simultaneously study its production (the activities through which it is created), its thematic, narrative, visual, or textual content (what is being said in and

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through it), and its reception (how those encountering it use and interpret it) (1998: 277).

Put a bit differently, I wanted to track the circulation of the meaning connected to Fenway Park. That is, I was interested in the processes by which the meanings of the ol’ ballpark were and are produced and constructed, transmitted and disseminated, and received and interpreted. None of these activities is confined to one group. It would be a mistake to assume that the Red Sox ownership are the only producers of the ballpark, that only sportswriters disseminate ideas and information about Fenway Park, or that fans are the only persons who make up Fenway’s audience. The “three-pronged” practices of cultural production, transmission, and reception cross and blur group boundaries. As such, the players themselves emerged as an import locus of meaning construction and therefore needed to be interviewed. My approach to data collection was also “three-pronged,” or “triangulated,” to use a term popularized by Norman Denzin. Simply put, triangulation is the use of a combination of two or more research methods for gathering data about the same empirical case. “Because each method reveals different aspects of empirical reality,” writes Denzin, “multiple methods of observation must be employed” (1978: 28). While the term has been used to convey a technique that helps foster validation by verifying common findings, my claims are far more modest. Methodological pluralism will lead us closer to the truth about our subject of inquiry because we are able to offer, in good faith, perspectives other than our own. Nevertheless, we remain trapped in Zeno’s Paradox, cutting our distance to the truth in pieces ad infinitum. Even so, methodological pluralism leads to a greater breadth of knowledge than any single method, qualitative or quantitative, would permit. In order to paint the clearest, though not necessarily the brightest, picture of the ol’ ballpark, I employed separate but related methods: participant observation, intensive interviewing, and archival research. These three methods provided more than enough information to grant me at least some semblance of an authoritative voice to speak about Fenway Park and the roles it plays in and outside Boston. Moreover, such methods allowed me to describe the “what,” document the “how,” and interpret the “why” of Fenway Park’s status as a revered and valued place (see Katz 2001). Perhaps the most enlightening information came out of the over 100 interviews I conducted with people inside and outside of the city, many of whom were located through snowball sampling (Borer 2008). I wanted to hear their stories about Fenway Park firsthand. I wanted to hear the “unexpected” stories. As Ruth Behar writes: The beauty and mystery of the ethnographer’s quest is to find the unexpected stories, the stories that challenge our theories. Isn’t that the reason why we still go to the field – even as we question where the field is located – in the 21st

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I spoke with Red Sox fans, baseball enthusiasts, Boston residents that are not “into” baseball, local business owners and employees, sportswriters, architects, historic preservationists, and members of the Red Sox organization including former and current players and personnel. For the most part, my interviews took on two forms. First, I conducted semistructured, flexible interviews that lasted from 30 minutes to two hours. There was no correlation between the length of the duration and interviewees’ feelings or opinions about the ballpark or any of the related subjects that were broached. These interviews were conducted in my office, the workplaces of interviewees, the homes of interviewees, the Red Sox Spring Training facility and the press box at City of Palms Park in Ft. Myers, Florida, the Red Sox Clubhouse, the Red Sox executive offices, and inside and outside Fenway before, during, and after games. In mid-October 2002, months after I had decided that I would do a study about the debate over Fenway Park’s future, I entered the Red Sox executive offices at 4 Yawkey Way. I needed to talk to someone at the Red Sox to gauge the amount of access I would be granted. The Club Historian seemed like the most appropriate person with whom to make my first contact, my first point of entry. This proved to be true. Dick Bresciani, Red Sox Vice President and Club Historian, welcomed me into his office filled with Red Sox memorabilia, newspaper clippings, and awards that he accumulated over the course of his 30-year-plus tenure with the organization. Bresciani, or “Bresch” as he is known from the offices to the clubhouse, was intrigued about my idea and promised to do what he could to help make my time at Fenway worthwhile. When I spoke to him again about a year later, after my prospectus had been approved by my university’s Institutional Review Board, Bresciani came through on his promise. Not only did he give me a long list of names and phone numbers of both past and current Red Sox players and personnel, he made arrangements for me to have access to most of the games during the upcoming 2004 season. (Opening Day, a deep-rooted civic holiday in Boston, and the playoffs were the only games he could not get me into.) Throughout the 2004 season, Bresciani signed off on almost 20 “Guest” passes that I was supposed to wear around my neck as I roamed around the ballpark before, during, and after games, stomping on peanut shells, grabbing a hot dog and a beer every now and then, and trying to grasp all of the details of Fenway Park from the most grand to the most minute. Occasionally, I would stop to watch an inning or two, especially when Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez stepped to the plate. And, occasionally, I would roam around the executive offices and the team’s clubhouse in order to interview Red Sox players and personnel. Bresch was certainly an “organizational gatekeeper” as he gave me access and vouched for me when needed. Unlike Doc, who acted as William Foot Whyte’s confidant and point entry to a close-knit group of working class, local “corner boys”

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(1955), Bresch was not the focus of my field research. He was more of a navigator into and through the highly coveted realm of a nationally and internationally known celebrity culture. Whereas Doc helped Whyte gain “street cred,” Bresch elevated my status by granting me access across the often impermeable social world of celebrities. Why is This Interview Different than Other Interviews? Gaining access to past and current Red Sox players was easier than I expected, and, as discussed above, I have Dick Bresciani to thank for that. Getting these celebrities to tell me something that they actually meant, believed, or felt on a personal level was a harder task. Much of this difficulty stems from their familiarity with journalists’ and sportswriters’ agendas and the lack of familiarity with sociologists’ intentions and motivations. Based on their past experiences, the players interpreted the “interview” in a particular way that demanded them to play a particular role. As Robert Dingwall contends, “The products of an interview are the outcome of a socially situated activity where the responses are passed through the role-playing and impression management of both the interviewer and the respondent” (1997: 56). Celebrities are less certain about their roles in an interview with a sociologist than they are in an interview with a member of the media. Sportswriters have performed an important task in the construction and maintenance of the American sports culture and industry since the late 19th century (Kirsch 1989). They became even more relevant and significant in the 20th century with the advent of the newsreel and the television (Rader 1984). Not only did they bring news of and commentary about games to audiences that could not be present, sportswriters have also been some of the most ardent supporters of local teams, creating dramatic narratives in which stars play roles as heroes and villains (Reiss 1980). Such support conflicts with the supposed ideal of objectivity espoused by most journalists. But sports provide one arena where local reporters do not have to even feign detachment and neutrality. Actually, they are encouraged not to. They are expected to show joy when the hometown team wins and agony when it loses. It is as if they are supposed to feel the emotion with, and sometimes even for, the audience. How often have Bostonians seen CBS reporter Bob Lobel pout on their television screens after a Red Sox loss? How often do Dan Shaughnessy and Bob Ryan whine all over the Boston Globe about so-and-so’s problem with pitch counts or ground balls? Some of the bitterness has dissipated in Boston since the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 for the first time in 86 years and then again in 2007, but of course they were able to find something to complain about (e.g., how will Boston cope with winning?). The point is not that local sports reporters are purposely biased (though they are). Nor is it that Boston sports reporters are surly (though they are). The point is that the Red Sox players that I interviewed had been accustomed to a different type of interview than the one I conducted with them.

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Right off the bat (please excuse the pun), I had to present myself as something other than a reporter. This was sometimes difficult during the times I spent in the Red Sox clubhouse at Fenway Park and at City of Palms Park because I was required to wear a “Media Pass” around my neck in order to have access to those areas. Also, at Fenway, the clubhouse is filled with media personnel mulling around looking for exactly what I was trying to avoid—sound bites. And anyone who saw Bull Durham knows that baseball players practice their clichés.1 I heard them all, too. But, for the most part, with equal parts savvy and irreverence, I got past them. In order to obtain the type of information that I was looking for from the players, I dressed up the same question in a few different forms. Mainly, I wanted to know if and how the players, who work at Fenway Park, develop an emotional or meaningful attachment to the place. Most of the players answered my first question—why or how is Fenway Park important to the City of Boston—with a fairly generic statement about its “history.” But why would the ballpark’s history matter to players who did not grow up in New England, were not Red Sox fans, and who are always at risk of being traded to another team? How is Fenway Park’s history their history? How does it matter to them? That’s what I came for, that’s why I conducted these interviews. So I would press on and ask the next question—why? As a player, what does Fenway Park mean to them? Consider the following exchange I had with Red Sox veteran outfielder Ellis Burks. At first, Burks gave me a very standard answer to my question about Fenway Park’s importance, telling me that it has something to do with its history. When asked if the ballpark’s history affects where he stands regarding the debate about the future he replies with: “I don’t stand anywhere. This place is for the fans. It’s the fans who care about it and its history.” What Burks has said was not wrong, but I was after something else, something more, something deeper, something that revealed a little bit about his experience. I wanted to know how playing in a place like Fenway Park affects him, as a player. Instead of asking general questions that would allow him to answer with generic answers, I reshaped my question so it would be more personal and would, potentially, prompt him to talk about the ballpark from his point of view. I tried to change the scale of my question so he could move away from the somewhat amorphous and public history and move toward more defined and private biographical moments.

1  In the movie Bull Durham, which is about minor league ballplayers trying to make it to “the show,” Crash (played by Kevin Costner) tells Nuke (played by Tim Robbins), who is about to be called up to the big leagues from the minors, that “It’s time you started working on your interviews. Learn your clichés. Study them. Know them. They’re your friends.”

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MIB: What were some of your first impressions of Fenway Park when you first came here to play for the Red Sox? EB: When I was drafted by the Red Sox I knew nothing about the history of Boston, ‘cause I’m from the West. So I knew about the Dodgers and the Giants. But when I came here they told me about all this history, and wow, I mean I heard about Ted Williams and Yastrzemski, but I never saw them play. So when I get here, there was a lot to be learned, and it’s very interesting. It’s not like “oh yeah, nice ballpark, it’s a little old, but you know” [laughs]. Seriously, there’s a lot of stuff that went on here before I got here. There are things you want to know. You step on this field; it’s more than just hitting the ball, base hits, homeruns. It’s about going out there and busting your ass because all these great players were here before you, busting their ass.

When the question was framed in a personal way that allowed Burks to talk about himself, about his point of view, rather than simply as a player, or for that matter as an informant (the ethnographer should always be concerned with alienating his or her interviewees as subjects), he spoke freely about what it means to him to play in Fenway Park. A similar exchange occurred during my conversation with Red Sox centerfielder Johnny Damon, whose nickname (“Caveman”) and shaggy look belie the thoughtful man under all that hair. After a few clichéd comments about the rich history of Fenway Park and the passion of Red Sox fans, I asked him about the ballpark as his place of business. MIB: Even though baseball is a game, you are paid to play it. Is Fenway Park your office? JD: It’s hardly about work. I mean, baseball was a dream, and Fenway Park is part of that dream. … It’s a great park in a great city, and I was fortunate enough to share it with my son. He got to go behind the scoreboard, and I got see him look at all the cool things and see how he looked at the ballpark, and just think it would be a shame to lose something like that. … There’s too much emotion here to think of this place as work.

Even as a player, Fenway Park is a place that Damon values so much that he wanted to share it with his son. This type of answer moves considerably beyond the quotes that you would find in the sports sections of the Boston Globe or the Boston Herald. Most importantly, Damon’s statements reveal an important lesson about the ballpark and the player-place relationship. In these cases, getting beyond the sound bite involved reframing the original questions in more pointed and personal language that allowed the players to talk for themselves rather than for the team, the city, or some other type of corporate identity.

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Local Knowledge and the Public Record Because most people that most sociologists interview do not have a public record of their thoughts and opinions (though new social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are changing that), the interviewees’ presentation of self is often taken as a given. Of course, the ethnographer should always be cautious and aware of fraudulent testimony from interviewees, but, in most cases, no other information exists to verify an interviewee’s statements outside of interviews with other members of the same population. And even that can be tenuous. But celebrities, especially local sports stars, are given ample column inches to speak their mind, or at least have their statements printed. When Curt Schilling signed with the Red Sox on Thanksgiving Day of 2003, a few weeks after Boston lost a heartbreaking playoff series to their long-time rivals the New York Yankees, he was immediately welcomed by Red Sox fans because of his skill at the game and his knowledge of it. Moreover, during and after his contract negotiations with Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein, Schilling posted a few messages under the name “curt38” on the Red Sox official fan forum message board at www.redsox.com and on the fan-based website “The Sons of Sam Horn.” In mid-December 2003, Schilling visited Fenway Park for the first time as a member of the Red Sox. Schilling met members of the local media and season ticketholders (who were allowed into the team’s clubhouse as part of a Christmas celebration ticket sale). Speaking about his new home, Schilling reportedly said: It’s a different world, it really is. The Red Sox are the only team in baseball without a home state – they have a home portion of the country. The New England states are Red Sox territory. You’re talking fourth- and fifth-generation Red Sox fans, as opposed to fourth- and fifth-year [Arizona] Diamondback fans. There’s a different feeling, there’s a history here. … This ballpark [is] the first park I’ve ever played in where people come to the game to be at the park, which is cool. As long as we win, it’ll all be good and well.2

Even though he was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan growing up, Schilling said his first “vivid” baseball memory was of Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent’s 1978 playoff homer against the Red Sox in Fenway Park. “That’s history,” said Schilling. “I know it’s painful history but every year is a new history, and they brought me here to change that history.” Based on comments like these, as well as his excellent start to the season that helped foster Boston’s acceptance of him, I looked forward to interviewing Schilling. 2  Quoted in “Schilling Pays Visit to Fenway,” Mike Shalin, Boston Herald, 14 December 2003.

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Before a game in July 2004, a game that Schilling was not pitching, I saw Schilling sitting in front of his locker having a leisurely chat with Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek (who I interviewed later that day). I approached Schilling and we had the following exchange: MIB: Would you be interested in talking about Fenway Park for a few minutes? CS: No, not really, not right now, I don’t have time. MIB: I’m doing a study on the relationship between the ballpark and the city. CS: Okay. I haven’t been here long enough, so I wouldn’t have much for you.

I am relaying this botched interview, not because I was offended about being shrugged off by a potential interviewee, but because it holds an important lesson. Even though that interview only lasted less than thirty seconds, it’s still data. Schilling’s declaration—“I haven’t been here long enough, so I wouldn’t have much for you”—is inconsistent with what I knew about him from the media. Without getting into an analysis of his public persona, I am more interested here in the status of his comments. If I did not have the proper “local knowledge” about Schilling from the media, I may have misjudged his statements. Does someone have to play at Fenway Park for a certain amount of time before they understand its meaning or gain some type of sentimental or emotional attachment to it? In this case, the public record of Schilling’s opinions and understanding of the ballpark, as evidenced in the reported quotes above, helped me avoid deriving a false conclusion from my data. Here, “getting beyond the sound bite” meant having enough local knowledge about the celebrity to be able to compare what they have said on record in other outlets with what they have said in an interview. The acquisition of local knowledge, then, is a necessary antidote to the problem of false testimony. Acquiring this type of knowledge, however, does not require full immersion into the culture of one’s subjects. “Going native,” in many cases, can be far more risky than it is rewarding (Monti 1992). Gaining local knowledge is about immersing oneself in the data and not necessarily in the culture in question. And that data does not exist unto itself. It must always be interpreted within a particular social and cultural context. In the case of celebrities, that context is defined by their elevated status and by roles they play as a mass mediated commodity (Ferris 2007). Celebrities: An Untapped Population There is no quick and easy fix to the problems discussed here. Sociologists must tread cautiously once we enter the media-saturated environment of celebrity culture since it is a social world where sound bites are the norm of communication. And perhaps sound bites are the norm in other social worlds too where the rhetoric of catchy sayings and slogans trump the substance of arguments and debates. Nevertheless, the world of celebrities, and not merely celebrity culture, has yet to

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be uncovered by sociologists even while the general public is fed regular doses of “entertainment news” from their televisions, computers, and grocery lines. When we finally do start talking to celebrities, and we should because they offer another angle on whatever issue we are investigating, I have suggested two ways to get beyond the sound bite. First, we must recognize that celebrities have interview repertoires that help them answer our questions yet not necessarily in the ways we want them to. As such, we need to ask and re-ask the question that we want answered and not be satisfied with the generic, the commonplace, or the clichéd (unless, of course, that is the focus of our study). I found that asking more personal questions, though not necessarily more intimate questions, allowed the players a chance to give me more subjective responses. These personal statements, of course, are what we use to uncover patterns and make generalizations about social actions and beliefs. Second, because past interviews of most, if not all, celebrities and public figures are available as part of the public record, we can compare their answers to our questions to those from other sources. Having a high amount of local knowledge about the celebrity, as well as the media sources that have discussed, quoted, or interviewed him or her, will help sociologists avoid making false conclusions about their celebrity interviewee and about the broader subject of inquiry. As such, getting beyond the sound bite is more than just a goal. It is a methodological necessity. The difficulty of gaining access to celebrities is certainly a large reason for the lack of studies of celebrities rather than studies about celebrities. And once we get to them, there are, as I’ve discussed in this chapter, other hills we must climb. I maintain, however, that it is worth it. It’s not enough to simply talk about how they are revered by fans and “obsessed” devotees as “replacement gods” (Cashmore 2006) or how they are sold to us by capitalistic system that threatens our democratic culture (West 2005). By actually talking with them, by conducting sociologically-sound interviews with them, we can do two important things simultaneously. First, we can gain new insights about our main topic of inquiry from the vantage point of those who have experienced and exist atop the American, Western, and perhaps global status hierarchy. Jay Leno’s view of the automobile industry is certainly different, though of course not better, than my mechanics or a laid-off factory worker from Detroit. Second, we can re-humanize celebrities. Despite “reality” television’s attempt to show that celebrities are “just like the rest of us,” programs that follow celebrities into their everyday lives add to rather than detract from the celebrities’ status. If we can get to them and talk to them, perhaps we, and not the media industry, can reveal the this-worldliness of celebrities by showing that they deal with similar situations and stressors as everyone else. Though it’s too late to clip Icarus’s wings, it’s not too late for today’s celebrities. Maybe that’s what they need. And maybe it’s what we need too.

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References Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. 1991. Backboards & Blackboards: College Athletics and Role Engulfment. New York: Columbia University Press. Atkinson, P. and Silverman, D. 1997. “Kundera’s Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of Self.” Qualitative Inquiry 3: 304–25. Behar, R. 2003. “Ethnography and the Book that was Lost.” Ethnography 4: 15–39. Berg, B.L. 2001. Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Boorstin, D.J. 1961. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Event in America. New York: Harper and Row. Borer, M.I. 2006. “The Location of Culture: The Urban Culturalist Perspective.” City & Community 5(2): 173–97. Borer, M.I. 2008. Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark. New York: New York University Press. Cashmore, E. 2006. Celebrity Culture. London: Routledge. Denzin, N.K. 1978. The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill. Dingwall, R. 1997. “Accounts, Interviews and Observations.” In Context and Method in Qualitative Research, eds G. Miller and R. Dingwall. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ferris, K.O. 2001. “Through a Glass, Darkly: The Dynamics of Fan-Celebrity Encounters.” Symbolic Interaction 24: 25–47. Ferris, K.O. 2004. “Seeing and Being Seen: The Moral Order of Celebrity Sightings.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 33: 236–64. Ferris, K.O. 2007. “The Sociology of Celebrity.” Sociology Compass 1(1): 371–84. Fraser, B.P. and Brown, W.J. 2002. “Media, Celebrities, and Social Influence.” Mass Communication & Society 5: 183–206. Gamson, J. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gamson, J. 1998. Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grindstaff, L. 2002. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gusterson, H. 1997. “Studying Up Revisted.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20: 115–19. Hertz, R. and Imber, J.B. 1993. “Fieldwork in Elite Settings.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22: 3–6. Kirsch, G.B. 1989. The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838–72. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mills, C. Wright 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milner, Jr., M. 2005. “Celebrity Culture as a Status System.” The Hedgehog Review 7(1): 66–77.

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Monti, D.J. 1992. “On the Risks and Rewards of ‘Going Native’.” Qualitative Sociology 15(3): 325–32. Morrill, C. 1995. The Executive Way: Conflict Management in Corporations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rader, B.G. 1984. In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports. New York: Free Press. Riess, S.A. 1980. Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rojek, C. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Sternheimer, K. 2011. Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility. New York: Routledge. West, D. 2005. “American Politics in the Age of Celebrity.” The Hedgehog Review 7(1): 59–65. Whyte, W.F. 1955. Street-Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 6

Examining Elites Using Qualitative Media Analysis: Celebrity News Coverage and TMZ Christopher J. Schneider

Media are a powerful and dominant social institution. Media package and disseminate information, and people increasingly rely on this information to aid and inform their views of the social world. This includes understandings about celebrities, a group recognized as elites (Mills 1956). The existent research literature that “studies up” (i.e., research that examines elites including celebrities), has been stunted by two basic concerns: researcher accessibility, and conceptual issues over what constitutes an “elite.” Using qualitative document analysis as a methodology, and TMZ as a case study, I will show how to successfully move beyond these concerns, while demonstrating why understanding the place of celebrities in society remains an increasingly important scholarly endeavor for those social scientists who “study upward.” Sociologists, have in various ways, investigated issues consistent with an upward gaze. Consider, for instance, Weber (1966); or Simmel’s (1971) more specific work on nobility—these two examples have provided important insights into our general understandings of, and perhaps to a lesser degree, about social class. In regard to social class, any serious sociological study about elites must pay homage to C. Wright Mills. Revered among the most prominent sociologists of the 20th century (Miliband 1962), Mills’ work beyond The Sociological Imagination (1959) continues to remain largely overlooked. While the breadth and depth of Mills’ substantive body of work is especially remarkable considering his untimely death, his trilogy of work on the developing power structure of America—The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), and The Power Elite (1956), remain especially significant for understanding power relations in the social world. According to Mills (1956): To understand the middle classes we have only to see what is actually around us, but to understand the very top or the very bottom, we must first seek to discover and describe. And that is very difficult to do: the very top of modern society is often inaccessible, the very bottom often hidden (p. 363 emphasis in original).

Mills (1956) details the developing connections between the military, economic, and political sectors of American society, together representing the composition of what Mills called “the power elite.” While Mills (1956) warned more generally of

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the changing power structure of America, others like Baltzell (1958), a member of the upper class, and himself interested in the development of class authority, drew more specific distinctions between individual elite and upper class members of the social order. In the face of limited researcher accessibility, Nader (1969) implored social scientists to direct their research upward, or “study up,” to better understand the public sphere, and perhaps more importantly, to recognize the impact that public institutions have upon individuals. Despite such a worthy call, the aim of “studying up” has been further complicated over concerns about research ethics codes. For instance, Galliher (1973) suggested that the American Sociological Association (ASA) modify its Code of Ethics to allow more flexibility for scholars when researching public officials and other “elites.” This suggestion was ignored (Galliher 1980). Conceptual issues have also problematized the approach of redirecting the gaze of the social sciences upward. Domhoff (1967, 1970), for instance, examined institutional leadership on the basis of a somewhat limited set of categorical determinations of social class (see also Zuckermann 1977). While beneficial, this work is criticized for not being systematic enough (Kerbo and Fave 1979). Similarly, other empirical research examining elites remains limited, due to its strict reliance upon predetermined indicators of social class (Dye 1976; Freitag 1975; Mintz 1975); while other research examines elite statuses, including different “types” of “elites” (Keller 1963). Moreover, considerable diversity as to what exactly constitutes “elite status” has further complicated this research. In lieu of some of these concerns, more recent research has shifted attention upon methodological issues, including the incorporation of feminist methods (Kezar 2008; see also Pacholok in this volume), and the use of qualitative interview techniques (Odendahl and Shaw 1995), including interviewing elites themselves (Hertz and Imber 1995). Nevertheless, much of this research does not account for the central role that media (as an elite institution itself) plays in shaping public perceptions about “elites.” I address this matter by suggesting that social scientists examine media documents as one way to “study upward,” a process that would allow researchers to gain partial insights into the lives of elites, particularly celebrities—a group recognized among elites (Mills 1956), and therefore inaccessible to researchers. Mills (1956) devoted an entire chapter of The Power Elite to celebrity, and while he concedes that celebrities may not “really run things” in the sense that other “elites” might (Mills 1956: 93), understanding the place of celebrities in society remains important for understanding our social world, because it tells us something about how elite status is reproduced in the social world. While the composition of celebrities—understood, in general terms, as names that are celebrated (Mills 1956)—continues to change, public interest in, and media coverage of, celebrities has increased dramatically over the past few decades. Celebrities have indeed become more common as a result of the expansion of mediated forms of communication, and getting researcher access to these celebrities (see Borer this volume), remains a developing area of scholarly

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interest. Social scientists face more obstacles than others (e.g., journalists) when seeking to interview celebrities, because their scholarly investigation—always subject to research ethics board approval, additional authorization by way of media credentials, security clearances, etc.—is often required. For some of these reasons, and due to the limited amount of research that utilizes interviewing as a primary methodological technique when studying celebrities, I instead propose an alternative methodological approach (outlined below) on the basic assumption that celebrities remain largely inaccessible to social scientists conducting research in this area. The sociology of celebrity is an emerging field of scholarly research (Ferris 2007). Recent works have specifically addressed issues of fame (Braudy 1986; Cowen 2000), stardom (Dyer 1998; Gledhill 1991; Giles 2000), tabloid culture (Glynn 2000), and celebrity power (Marshall 1997). Much of the literature, however, is theoretical, rather than empirical (Ferris 2007)—abstractions that, Mills would suggest, distract from the tasks of the social scientist (Mills 1959). In the spirit of C. Wright Mills, I consider that as historical conditions change, so also do meanings associated with celebrity and celebrity status. These meanings can be located in media reports. These documents are sociological data, representing recorded snippets of culture (Altheide and Schneider 2012). Some important questions to consider in this context include: What kinds of celebrities exist today, and how is this reflected in media? How many and what kinds of media outlets exist today? What are the relationships between celebrities and these forms of media? How are celebrities managed in these media? I will focus much of my attention upon such questions in an effort to demonstrate how we can examine media as a way of “studying up,” absent some of the above noted problems: i.e., researcher accessibility and conceptual issues (e.g., defining elites/celebrities). Media Technologies It has become increasingly difficult to resist mass media and the “experience of meanings” that they provide (Mills 1956). Media provide a framework for understanding the place of celebrities in mass society, since celebrity status must be “expressed by nation-wide means of mass communication” (Mills 1956: 71). There were just three major American television networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) in the 1950s, when Mills was writing. The emergence of a plethora of communication and information technologies in the last thirty years has contributed to the mass proliferation of media in our modern epoch: an ecology of communication, or “the structure, organization, and accessibility of information technology, various forums, media, and channels of information” (Altheide 1995: 2). These advancements contribute to the expansion of celebrity culture in daily life. Media are an important and basic feature of our everyday lives, and are perhaps the only contemporary institution that most (if not all) people now share with one another. Consider that much of our understandings about the social world beyond

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the scope of our everyday lives draw from media (i.e., agreement reality vs. experiential reality). For instance, much of everyday (Western) knowledge about the recent conflicts in the Middle East draw from media. Relatively few individuals in the West are likely to have actually spent time in war zones in the Middle East, or to have directly (or even indirectly) known someone who has spent time in either Iraq or Afghanistan. However, most people seem to have at least some working, albeit vague, knowledge of the situation in this region of the world. This mediated information contributes to individual and social understandings, opinions, and beliefs about war and conflict, in this instance—and, perhaps, even the role of government in such situations. These beliefs can influence real actions such as affecting voting behaviour, facilitating resolutions to invade countries (e.g., Iraq), or perhaps prompting individual enlistments into the military. This demonstrates how media have consequences for practices in daily life. The consequences of these situations can be very real, and sometimes even deadly. It can then be ascertained that media help to define situations and social reality. This has been demonstrated to be the case with issues like fear and terrorism (Altheide 2002). I do not mean to suggest that media are necessarily the single, or even primary catalyst for facilitating such actions or understandings (i.e., the effectsbased approach)—but rather, that media contributes in large part to how social reality is constructed and defined by the everyday member—a perspective more in line with an institutional based approach (i.e., perception of reality drawn from various social institutions [Ericson 1991; see also Doyle 2006]). The private lives of many—but none more so than celebrities—have increasingly becoming a matter of public fixation. The ecology of communication (Altheide 1995), including the integration of existent media technologies into singular devices (e.g., cellular devices that can be used as a phone, video and picture camera, Internet browser, text messaging device, video game, etc.), has no doubt driven most of these changes, altering social reality in the process, and blurring boundaries between public and private spaces. For example, consider the privatization of public space (e.g., listening to music on a portable music player); or, the publicization of private space (e.g., speaking on a cell phone in a public space, such as a city bus). These activities can now actually occur using the same device. Such portable communication and information devices (for example, cell phones outfitted with cameras, video recorders, and the Internet), allow individuals to produce recorded documentation of everyday life. Some of these documents are reproduced in mass media reports. These documents can be mundane (e.g.., pictures of cats), or striking (e.g., videos of police brutality), and can be shared individually among family and friends (text and/or email messages)—or, publicly on the Internet, with the entire world. The interpretation of mediated meanings can, just the same as mediated information about Afghanistan, have real and profound consequences in daily life. More so than ever before, people rely on media in order to increase their understandings about everyday life (and this includes celebrities and celebrity status). Media create, shape, modify and disseminate information about celebrities,

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which in turn contributes to popular understandings about these very celebrities. Celebrities rely almost exclusively on media for dissemination of knowledge about their status, and the public relies on these very same media not only to learn who is a celebrity, but to then seek and/or discover information about these celebrities. Media produce this relationship, and investigating this process provides the social scientist with insight about how celebrity status is reproduced in the social world. Below, I provide an example of a method used to investigate this process in greater detail— but first, I turn my attention to celebrity gossip webpage Thirty Mile Zone (TMZ). The Emergence of TMZ Celebrity gossip webpage Thirty Mile Zone or TMZ, a reference to the 30-mile studio radius around the downtown Los Angeles corridor where Hollywood film shoots and celebrities are often located, was officially launched online in early December 2005. The following year TMZ jumped to the number-one celebrity entertainment website, outpacing popular celebrity sites E! Online, TVGuide. com and People.com. According to founder Harvey Levin, “[w]e’ve become like The Associated Press in the world that we cover” (Weiner 2007c: 1). While other (televised) celebrity media exists (e.g., Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood), the growth and popularity of the online TMZ site can be attributed to the use of technology—i.e., online video. In 2005, TMZ was at the forefront of the use of videos on the Internet. TMZ online, hosted by AOL (one of the largest media companies in the world), is dedicated entirely to reporting celebrity gossip and celebrity news. This is another feature of its early success as a celebrity gossip source: a 24/7 information platform. Most mainstream media now use a similar framework. TMZ online is among the most popular destinations for Internet users for celebrity gossip, receiving millions of unique visitors each month. Launched in September 2007, the televised version of TMZ was the top rated show in syndication less than one month after its premier. The success and popularity of TMZ attests to the public interest in celebrities as well as the subsequent demand for increased media coverage. What makes TMZ unique for our consideration is the methods that they necessarily use to acquire some of their content on celebrities. While TMZ will not comment specifically on how they acquire information, their sources are often anonymous, and those who do acquire video, and various other content (e.g., legal documents), are rarely held accountable for stalking, criminal harassment, or the unauthorized publication of otherwise sensitive or legally protected materials. Even in the face of police investigations over such concerns (e.g., the publication of the Chris Brown/Rihanna domestic assault photographic evidence), Harvey Levin has stated that “We [TMZ] do not break the law, trespass, invade privacy, [or] chase’’ (Hamilton 2006: 1), and even while paying for tips that are reportedly fact checked, Levin has denied any misconduct, including paying police officials.

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Social scientists are not authorized to use such tactics as TMZ does, in their own research of elites, even though such tactics would undoubtedly be beneficial—particularly when considering issues of researcher accessibility. As an organization (ethical or not), TMZ is outside of the scope of various university and professional ethics restrictions (and seemingly, even the law). Yet various recordings, documents, videos, and photographs continuously appear on TMZ. Examining these possible “fruits of the poisonous tree” would conceivably allow social scientists to indirectly move beyond some basic issues of researcher accessibility. Regarding conceptual matters, the very people selected and targeted by TMZ (and other celebrity media), have already been identified as celebrities, by definition—otherwise, they would not be selected and targeted for coverage. Using TMZ as a case study addresses the two most basic shortcomings of “studying up” as outlined in the research literature: researcher accessibility, and concerns with defining “elites” (celebrities). TMZ itself is a useful resource for understanding—at least in part—the lives of celebrities, on the one hand, and for getting a better sense of public perceptions of celebrities on the other hand. I focus my attention upon the latter approach. Whether this information is, in actuality correct, is of less importance than the issue of whether people believe this information to be true or accurate. This approach can be better understood by examining media that use TMZ as a legitimate and acceptable news source, a process that provides such information to a much larger audience. It should be noted that even while many of the tactics employed by TMZ and its fellow celebrity media brethren may in fact breach various university and professional ethics standards, we should be mindful that this has not prohibited contemporary scholars from drawing upon similar instances of these questionable tactics in their own research (e.g., the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments). My point is that, simply because data may have been collected unethically, that possibility should not necessarily preclude researchers from accessing such data. To reiterate, my basic contention here is that we should pay close attention not only to the materials that TMZ collects (whether ethically or not), but also how other media use these materials in their reports, a process that demonstrates the importance of media documents as products of celebrity culture that also have the potential to actually shape celebrity culture in and of themselves. Qualitative Media Analysis There are a number of qualitative procedures and strategies used for examining media. The social scientific study of mass media has advanced quite considerably over the last 50 years; a more recent development is qualitative media analysis (Altheide and Schneider 2012). Document analysis is important because documents can be collected and analyzed to better understand culture, including the place of celebrities in culture. Documents are understood as anything that can

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be recorded and retrieved for analysis, including, but not limited to: photographs, emails, videos and films, music, newspapers, and news transcripts (Altheide and Schneider 2012; Altheide, Coyle, DeVriese and Schneider 2008). Qualitative document analysis (QDA) is an amalgamation of ethnographic content analysis and participant observation. On the one hand, content analysis studies the communicative feature of media, while on the other hand; participant observation allows the researcher to gain intimate familiarity with the mediated content. The researcher learns what to look for, what to track (including words, terms and phrases in documents), and what kinds of questions to ask of documents—a research process that is self-reflexive, allowing the researcher maximum flexibility when locating data materials and identifying and revising research questions (Altheide and Schneider 2012). The researcher remains an active participant throughout the duration of data collection, coding and analysis, and during the drafting and final write up of the results. Qualitative document analysis, then, is the process of immersing oneself in media documents (data) at the intersection of ethnographic content analysis and participant observation. It is here that the researcher can systematically collect multiple documents and then place these data in an analytical context for empirical examination (Altheide and Schneider 2012; see also, Altheide 1987). I employ this methodology below as a way to “study up,” to show how media produce the relationship between celebrity reliance on media for dissemination of knowledge about their status, and how the public relies on these very same media to learn meanings about celebrities. Emergent media technologies (as noted above) have contributed greatly to the never-as-before widespread availability of media documents—including pictures, videos and text, all useful for the study and advancement of scholarly research pertaining to mediated life. Documents, recognized as recorded products of culture, are not unlike ethnographic field notes, in that media documents are also “reflexive of the process that has produced them” (Altheide and Schneider 2012: 6). Contemporary technologies have aided considerably with the collection of media documents for analysis. Let us briefly consider two of the more popular and user-friendly databases useful for both students and practitioners engaged in qualitative media analysis: Google News and Lexis-Nexis. Google News (www.news.google.com) is an aggregator of news (with no human editors) that sorts articles published online within the last 30 days. A computer algorithm selects news headlines based how or where stories appear on the Internet. Launched in September 2002, the service now scans more than 25,000 sources for up-to-the-minute links to current news. Individuals can conduct “advanced news searches” that search for select words or phrases, and can even choose search returns from a select news source, author, or location. This service is free, and available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. More advanced, paid subscription-based services, like Lexis-Nexis, are also available. Lexis-Nexis is the most comprehensive document database available to research practitioners and scholars who study documents. This service has access

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to billions of documents from more than 45,000 sources. Advanced searches of news publications dating back to 1980 include newspapers, magazines, wire services and broadcast transcripts, among other sources. These data can be very easily searched, located, and downloaded directly to a personal computer with the click of just one button. More documentation exists today of everyday life (“elites” included), than has ever been available before in all of recorded history. These documents can be collected and systematically analyzed, using qualitative media analysis—a process that allows us to gaze upward in ways that were not possible in the past. To advance this approach, I outline this process below (including my selection of data), and provide a brief case study of TMZ-produced materials that were reproduced in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. When considering documentation produced by an organization like TMZ, we must be mindful that such recorded instances, e.g., paparazzi stalker videos, tend to be isolated singular incidents. Individually, these documents can be analyzed only semiotically, not systematically (see e.g., Altheide and Schneider 2012; Berger 2005; Manning 1992; Manning and Cullum-Swan 1994). However, utilizing qualitative document analysis can aid in understanding, in a more developed and systematic way, how such instances are used by other media (Altheide and Schneider 2012). Examining these instances provides insight into how celebrities are defined and understood. When examining media documents (through the process of emergence), we can locate various themes and frames consistent across documents; a process that gives us more systematic insight into how celebrities are understood on the basis of TMZ’s coverage of their lives. As a consequence, collecting and systematically examining documents gives the researcher a sophisticated and more complete (although, never absolute) sense of the topic at hand, i.e., celebrity. More importantly perhaps, this process allows the social scientist to generate greater insight into things like the perceived (whether real or not) wealth and power of celebrities, a process that contributes to the definition of the situation. The definition of the situation forms the basis for analysis of social situations. This process allows for everyday members to interpret social reality. Celebrities are celebrated because they have prestige, “and they have prestige because they are thought to have power or wealth” (Mills 1956: 83, emphasis mine); that is to say, others need only define celebrities as powerful and wealthy members of society. Such perceptions can have real and profound consequences in everyday life. Consider various automobile accidents resulting from paparazzi induced car chases. Indeed, this was determined to be a contributing factor in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on August 31, 1997. The mere perception of her status (and the belief that she was in the car) led, in part, to the circumstances surrounding her death. This perspective, advanced by W.I. Thomas, holds that “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This includes the process of “studying up” in the very manner that we initially come to recognize and define celebrities as celebrities, even prior to determining which particular

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celebrities to research or interview. The historical circumstances leading up to this selection process can be located and analyzed in media documents. The process of data collection begins with a very basic idea of a research topic. With a topic in mind (e.g., celebrities), the researcher first enters words and terms (e.g., “celebrity”) into a searchable database, like Lexis-Nexis. Retrieved articles are then reviewed and used to help further refine and direct future search parameters (e.g., “celebrity,” “TMZ,” names of identified celebrities, etc.). This approach is inductive (Glaser and Strauss 1967) and allows for the direct selection of documents that are identified as appropriate for key issues associated with “celebrity” identified during the preliminary search criteria (Altheide and Schneider 2012). The researcher then develops a draft of a research protocol or instrument in order to aid with the data collection process. A protocol, or data collection sheet, consists of a short (no more than a dozen) “list of questions, items, categories, or variables that guide data collection from documents” (Altheide and Schneider 2012: 44). The protocol categories emerge and change according to the modifications of the search criteria and search results. When one reaches a point of saturation (Glaser and Strauss 1967) (i.e., no new themes, frames, formats or discourse emerges from the returned data), the protocol draft can then be considered revised and completed (Altheide and Schneider 2012). The process of data collection is used to generate theory (a process known as theoretical sampling [Glaser and Strauss 1967]), which then allows researchers to make comparisons between existent data (i.e., terms/themes), in order to test analytic categories present in media documents (Altheide and Schneider 2012). These data are selected and coded for further analysis, in order to better understand the meanings and process of the research topic. Short written summaries of those documents selected for further analysis should be added to each protocol document (Altheide and Schneider 2012). The data from each protocol along with summaries of each document should then be integrated with the researcher’s interpretations of the topic into an early draft of what will later become a final manuscript (Altheide and Schneider 2012). I briefly demonstrate this process below in a case study of celebrity news coverage and TMZ. Celebrity News Coverage and TMZ The collection of data consisted of media reports culled from Lexis-Nexis from December 2005 (when TMZ was launched) to December 2010. I began a preliminary search of the Lexis-Nexis database with “TMZ,” which returned thousands of results. In order to narrow the parameters of my search, I refined my subsequent search to include only results from the New York Times (USA) and the Globe and Mail (Canada). These two publications serve as major media agenda setters (Chomsky 1989), national papers of record, and target a substantial geographical terrain, which would be likely to gain the most exposure across much of North America. The search results returned 223 reports from the New York

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Times and 162 reports from the Globe and Mail, a total of 385 reports where “TMZ” appears. Repeat reports were eliminated. These data were then reviewed for emergent frames and themes. A frame refers to boundaries, or how an issue will be discussed. In the examined reports, TMZ was often referred to as a celebrity and gossip muckracking organization (website and television program). The context of these frames were mostly negative, as demonstrated, for instance, in Harvey Levin’s many reported statements in defence of his organization. This changed after TMZ broke some important stories (mainstream media news coverage in the two examined publications). The most notable stories, in terms of coverage in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, included: (1) Mel Gibson’s July 28, 2006 arrest for drunk driving in Malibu, California (TMZ reportedly posted the first mug shot and initial details of Gibson’s anti-Semitic and sexist rant directed at the arresting officers); (2) Michael Richard’s (Seinfeld’s “Kramer” character), November 20, 2006 racist tirade captured by a cellphone video at a Los Angeles comedy club; (3) Alec Baldwin’s April 19, 2007 infuriated answering machine message directed at his 11-year-old daughter; and (4) Michael Jackson’s June 25, 2009 death (reported by TMZ before any other media organization). Coverage of these stories contributed to the development of some basic TMZ related themes drawn from the data. A theme refers to a recurring topic or topics associated across reports. The most thematic-oriented TMZ-produced storyline involved pop singer Britney Spears, once referred to by Levin himself as “Old Faithful” (Navarro 2007: 1). In another report, Levin noted, “Britney is gold, she is crack to our readers,” continuing, “Her life is a complete train-wreck and I thank God for her every day” (Carr 2006: 1). An analysis of these hundreds of reports produced the following themes: (1) domestic issues (e.g., violence, disputes and altercations, sex, infidelity, divorce, pregnancy, children); (2) law (e.g., legality/illegality, arrests, probation, DUI, assaults, jail/prison time, lawsuits); (3) death (e.g., drug overdose, suicide); (4) body image (e.g., gendered issues of weight management); and (5) general foibles and misbehaviour, or normative transgressions (e.g., racist and sexist threats or utterances). I wish to stress here the importance of the media production of images and discourse consistent with the above-identified themes, in order to demonstrate how meanings attributed to various celebrities, in turn, help to shape public perception of these very same celebrities. These reports help to define situations, up to and including who is designated celebrity status. A basic argument is that media organizations—in this case, TMZ—and media coverage of TMZ-produced stories in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, determine what is significant and newsworthy; that is, under what circumstances celebrity events become newsworthy. Analysis of documents helps us to better understand this process. To reiterate, examining media reports enables scholars to move beyond conceptual issues (i.e., those people targeted by media like TMZ and other media are, by definition, already celebrities), as well as issues of researcher accessibility

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(researchers are not restrained by institutional review boards, or even the celebrities themselves). Examining media documents also contributes to the limited empirical research literature on celebrities as noted by Ferris (2007). In terms of analysis, documents identified during the research process to be most consistent with the emergent themes (those outlined above) should be selected and examined for further in-depth analysis. For example, in a recent study of student cheating, nine of 155 thematically representative media reports were identified and selected for further analysis (Schneider 2011). The concern is less with the quantity of documents rendered by the search, and more with the theoretical richness of the sampled data. In terms of the four notable TMZ stories outlined above, Mel Gibson and Michael Jackson stand out for the sheer amount of significant media coverage each received during the examined five-year period. While other examples (e.g., Britney Spears, also noted above), are perhaps equally noteworthy, it was “TMZ’s story about Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant, a break that made the new Web site’s [sic] reputation back in 2006” (Cieply 2008: 7). Consistent with this perspective, a theoretical sample of half-a-dozen unique and thematically representative articles from the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, consistent with some of the themes outlined above, were selected for further analysis. A Case Study: Coverage of Mel Gibson Drunk Driving Incident Mel Gibson has enjoyed celebrity status for decades. Discussion of and about Gibson’s various recent mishaps were located across a series of reports over the examined five-year time span, including, most notably: reports of his 2006 drunk driving arrest, and his 2010 recorded threatening phone rants directed at his former girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. My focus concerns reports of Gibson’s “antiSemitic rant” as this event was identified (e.g., evidenced in the above quotation), as among the most significant TMZ-produced stories of the five-year time span. These were sorted from other gathered data. The articles were sorted once again for those framed in terms of Mel Gibson (i.e., the parameter of what was discussed), or those articles in which a dominant theme reported on was Gibson’s 2006 arrest for drunk driving. Mel Gibson was arrested on July 28, 2006 for drunk driving in Malibu, California. This incident was not disputed in the collected documents. The arrest was initially reported and described by police as “without incident” until TMZ published four additional pages of the original report (which was not provided to any media) that documented Gibson’s alcohol-laced anti-Semitic tirade directed at the arresting officers (Globe and Mail October 14, 2006). According to the “leaked” four pages of the full report, written by Officer James Mee (the arresting officer), Gibson reportedly stated, among other things, “Fucking Jews, The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” (Globe and Mail July 31, 2006: 1). When this additional information was made public by TMZ (and reported in

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the New York Times and the Globe and Mail), suggestions of a police cover-up, and the favourable treatment provided to Gibson because of his celebrity status, quickly followed. Some officers offered accounts published in response to these accusations. Sheriff Lee Baca, for instance, was quoted as saying, “There is no cover-up,” … “Our job is not to [focus] on what he said. It’s to establish his blood-alcohol level when he was driving” (Globe and Mail July 31, 2006: 1). Mention of Gibson’s blood-alcohol level, however, was conspicuously absent from the New York Times report that broke the TMZ story (this was later reported by the Globe and Mail at .12—above the .08 legal limit). Steve Whitmore, an official spokesperson for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department (which had initially declined to offer any comment on the details of the arrest) later noted in response to allegations of a cover-up: “The [Los Angeles] district attorney has the entire case now,” continuing, “We [Sheriff’s department] gave them everything we have” (Weiner 2006b: 1). The matter was also addressed by Mel Gibson’s publicist, Alan Nierob, who commented: “This report was leaked within minutes of its happening, and it’s anything but a cover-up, and certainly anything but preferential treatment,” Mr. Nierob said Monday of his client. “He’s been held to a much higher situation. You show me the cover-up” (Weiner 2006b: 1).

The reported discussion of a cover-up by all parties directs the focus and attention of the reader away from Gibson’s arrest, while also illustrating the process through which celebrities like Mel Gibson are managed in media reports by media agencies (e.g., TMZ, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail), reporters (e.g., Allison Hope Weiner), press agencies (e.g., Associated Press), agents of the state (e.g., James Mee, Lee Baca, Steve Whitemore), publicists (e.g., Alan Nierob), and even the celebrities themselves (e.g., Mel Gibson). This demonstrates that celebrity status is more than just names that are celebrated (Mills 1956). Celebrity status has become a multi-mediated social event (sometimes in real time) with many involved players—and the media are the “field of play.” How these players “play the game” in the “field of play” can modify or change how celebrity is understood. This management process is continually negotiated. For instance, an important thing to stress in this case, is how these various reported accounts redirect the original source of the problem (i.e., Gibson’s undisputed arrest) to the (alleged) misbehaviour of others (i.e., law enforcement officers). The shift of the arrest (illegal) to normative transgressions, i.e., inappropriate behaviour (legal), provides the context for accounts that can more readily explain the reported inappropriate behaviours. Indeed, this process better allows for Gibson’s own management of his actions by way of two issued apologies (July 29 and August 1, 2006). These apologies surfaced as dominant themes. Consider the title of a New York Times report published on July 30 as “Mel Gibson Apologizes For Tirade After Arrest,” or the title of a Globe and Mail report published the

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following day as “Mel Gibson Sorry for Racist Rant.” These titles (along with other published apologetic statements), suggestive or otherwise, illustrate the importance of mediated discourse connected with Gibson that contributes to the presentation of a favourable or desired public perception. In a statement issued by Gibson’s publicist Alan Nierob, published in the New York Times, Gibson indirectly addressed the anti-Semitic statements in question: I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said, and I apologize to anyone I may have offended (Weiner 2006a: 1).

The concern, as Gibson implies, is less with his formal arrest, and more with what he may or may have not said during that arrest. His statement effectively allows this to remain unclear. The basic issue here is self-control: control of antiSemitic feelings, and control of alcohol consumption. The questionable remarks, whether anti-Semitic or not, were made under the influence of alcohol. This was not disputed. Gibson noted that he was taking “necessary steps to ensure my return to health” (Globe and Mail July 31, 2006). In another report, TMZ’s Harvey Levin noted, “The days when publicists could simply will something away are gone forever,” continuing, “This stuff doesn’t disappear. It must be managed” (McDougal 2006: 6). The option for “recovery,” to manage the situation into a favourable definition of oneself, is another reported (and newsworthy) feature of celebrity status. Examining this process further, remains an important feature of understanding how elite status is reproduced in the contemporary social world. Discussion and Conclusion Public interest in media coverage of celebrities has drastically increased over the past few decades. Technological advancements have enabled the conditions necessary to allow for these increases, including increased documentation of celebrities. These documents can be gathered and systematically analyzed to provide new insight into celebrity status, and can therefore reveal parts of the top of society, a space once entirely inaccessible. Reports of celebrity gaffes, foibles, and even illegal actions, such as arrests for drunk driving, are now sourced and managed in media. This is especially the case for people such as Mel Gibson, who are finding it more difficult to manage favourable impressions in the public realm. Meanings of celebrity status can be located in media documents, allowing scholars who “study up,” or study celebrities, to move beyond conceptual issues; those targeted by media like TMZ are, by definition, celebrities. These instances also allow researchers a vantage point from which to peer into the lives of celebrities, a perspective which otherwise may not have been accessible to them (researchers are often restrained by institutional review boards, and/or the

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celebrities themselves). These “vantage points” can be located in documents, and they reveal previously unavailable empirical changes in normative culture. The Mel Gibson case above, for instance, highlighted how the acceptance of antiSemitic remarks was entirely inappropriate, and was not to be tolerated. Fifty years ago this story would almost certainly not have not made it to press, and in the unlikely event that it had, Gibson’s remarks probably would not have received such extensive coverage. People rely on media in order to help them to understand everyday life, including celebrity status. News media generate the social and historical circumstances under which celebrity status is reproduced. This process has changed considerably over the last few decades. The published content is less important; in other words, what is published does not necessarily need to be true and/or accurate. What is significant, is how media reproduce meanings about the place of celebrities in everyday life. Celebrities rely on media for dissemination of information in regard to their status, and the public relies on media to learn about celebrities. Examining this process in society remains an important link to understanding our social world, because of the fact that it tells us something about how elite status is reproduced in the social world. This chapter: (1) contributes to the two most basic shortcomings of the current research that “studies up” (i.e., researcher accessibility and conceptual issues); (2) updates some of the work of Mills (1956); and (3) contributes to the developing sociology of celebrity research literature. The future direction of this research rests with new developments in media, including social media. Future research, for instance, might consider exploring how celebrities like Charlie Sheen tend to move away from mainstream mass media, toward the realm of social media (e.g., Twitter), in order to disseminate information, and to more effectively manage their own impressions of self. Qualitative document analysis could be used to collect and examine these media documents (e.g., “tweets”). Such instances help us to better understand both celebrity status, and the role of media (including social media), in everyday life. This could well be, I surmise, part of the research and discourse on this subject as we move into the future. Acknowledgements I would especially like to thank Ariane Hanemaayer and Jim Schneider for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Globe and Mail, The. 2006. “Mel Gibson Sorry for Racist Rant.” The Globe Review, July 31, p. 1. Globe and Mail, The. 2006. “L.A. Sheriffs Look at Deputy in Probe of Gibson Leak.” Weekend Review, October 14, p. 5. Glynn, K. 2000. Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Hamilton, W. 2003. “Repulsed yet Watching All the Same.” The New York Times December 3, Sec. 4, p. 5. Hertz, R. and Imber, B. 1995. Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. Keller, S. 1963. Beyond the Ruling Class. New York: Random House. Kerbo, H.R. and L.R. Della Fave. 1979. “The Empirical Side of the Power Elite Debate: An Assessment and Critique of Recent Research.” Sociological Quarterly (20): 5–22. Kezar, A. 2003. “Transformational Elite Interviews: Principles and Problems.” Qualitative Inquiry (3): 395–415. Manning, P. 1992. Organizational Communication. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Manning, P, and Cullum-Swan, B. 1994. “Narrative, Content and Semiotic Analysis.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 463–84. Marshall, D.P. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miliband, R. 1962. “C. Wright Mills.” New Left Review (May/June): 15–20. Mills, C.W. 1948. New Men of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace. –––. 1951. White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press. –––. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. –––. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. McDougal, D. 2006. “When Celebrities Insert Both Feet.” The New York Times July 30, Sec. E, p. 6. Nader, L. 1969. “Up the Anthropologist-perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. D. Hymes. New York: Random House, 284– 311. Navarro, M. 2007. “Britney’s Loss, Their Gain.” The New York Times October 7, Sec. 9, p. 1. Odendahl, T. and A.M. Shaw. 2002. “Interviewing Elites.” In Handbook of Interview Research: Context & Method, eds J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein. Thousand Oaks: CA: Sage, 299–316. Schneider, C.J. 2011. “Constructing the Student Culprit.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 11(5): 434–45. Simmel, G. 1971. “The Nobility.” In Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. D.N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199–213. Weber, M. 1966. “Class, Status and Party.” In Class, Status and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, eds R. Bendix and S. Martin Lipset. New York, NY: The Free Press, 21–8.

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Weiner, A.H. 2006a. “Mel Gibson Apologizes for Tirade after Arrest.” The New York Times July 30, Sec. 1, p. 15. –––. 2006b. “Mel Gibson: The Speed of scandal.” The New York Times August 1, Sec. C, p. 1. –––. 2006c. “The Web Site Celebrities Fear.” The New York Times June 25, Sec. C, p. 1. Zuckerman, A. 1977. “The Concept of Political Elite: Lessons from Mosca and Pareto.” Journal of Politics (39): 324–44.

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Chapter 7

Overlooking the Workers: Community Leaders’ Perspectives on Plant Closures and Economic Recession June Corman, Ann Duffy and Norene Pupo

“John Deere Welland Works will close within 12 months,” declared the company executive from head office in Moline, Illinois to an audience of 800 waged and salaried workers in Welland,1 Ontario. By the time of the announcement in September 2008, John Deere had been a mainstay on the Welland industrial landscape and many local residents thought that the plant would escape the numerous plant closures that had devastated the Welland and Niagara Regional economies. The John Deere workers were blindsided by the closure proclamation. They froze in disbelief; some were enraged, but most stood in silence knowing that most “good” jobs within the area had already vanished and the regional unemployment rate was at a record high. By the time John Deere executives announced the plant’s pending closure, the City of Welland had already experienced the effects of globalization—industrial devastation, hollowed out communities, an eroding tax base and a decaying infrastructure. On the street, community and social services were overwhelmed with displaced workers searching for subsidized housing, emergency food, addiction and personal counseling, and jobs of any kind. Observing a steady decline in economic and social conditions and the signs of a community in distress, we developed a study exploring the relationship between the repeated and extensive displacement of workers and patterns of community commitment and civic engagement. In writing the project proposal, we debated the purpose of our study, and as critical sociologists, posed the questions, “Sociology for Whom?” and “Sociology for What?” (Burawoy 2005a: 380; Carroll 2004). Along with our primary focus on the fate of displaced workers in Welland, we also embarked on a related study of the economic upheaval in Welland and the response of community leaders to the prospects of unrelenting economic uncertainty. To help provide context for our study of displaced workers, we began to explore the response of local governments and agencies to the waves of job losses 1  Welland is a city of 50,000 located within the Niagara Region in southern Ontario. Known as the city where “rails and water meet,” historically Welland was a central hub of industry.

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within the community. We targeted individuals who held leadership positions (both formal and informal; governmental and non-governmental), by requesting interviews, by attending public events to hear leaders’ presentations and gauge the public’s reactions, and by reading official statements and programs of the leaders’ organizations. Together, the community leaders we identified—an eclectic group of politicians, union presidents, directors of public agencies, clergy, educators, trainers and journalists—would provide insights into various pathways proposed to meet this daunting economic crisis. We were intent on exploring, from the leaders’ vantage points, what factors may have contributed to the plant closures and bankruptcies, why had the once bustling, industrial landscape in Welland been turned into rust heaps and brownfields and what strategies for improvement were worth consideration. This chapter makes the case for examining the actions and responses of various levels of elites, including corporate executives, politicians, state officials, local directors and community advocates as they “manage” the crisis facing their community. We consider the methodological complexities of studying various types of elites and raise questions regarding the locus of power and decision-making within a local context. While local leaders, regardless of organizational affiliation and position, agreed that the litany of plant closures, layoffs and industrial setbacks had had disastrous consequences for the community, and that corporate executives and political figures in seats of power at national and international levels were to blame, the local leaders still repeatedly turned back to these powerful elites living far from Welland to address the community’s crisis. We argue that despite an apparent critique of the private sector amongst local community leaders, in their search to regain economic stability, jobs and community strength, local leaders “gaze upwards,” overlooking the feasibility of involving workers, unions and community activists in finding solutions and in supporting alternative forms of economic enterprise. Studying Elites: Methodological Issues Scrutinizing the economic downturn in Welland prompted us to probe the multileveled structure of responsibility within the community. The questions of how decisions affecting the lives of workers and their families are made and who makes them are critical to our understanding of the economic collapse. Our study aims to unravel multi-levels of actions, including, executive decisions that led to plant closures, local management decisions regarding communications to workers, political responses of the local officials, and reactions of the community. Approaching the study from a critical sociological perspective and committed to the tenets and practice of public sociology (Burawoy 2005; 2004), we were clear about “whose side we are on,” but remained challenged by the seeming neutrality embedded in local leaders’ discussions of the factors contributing to the economic downturn as well as their proposals for economic renewal. As we interviewed

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elites within various levels of decision-making hierarchies, we faced issues related to power, access and positionality. “Studying up” is essential to clarifying the cloud of mystery surrounding the devastating announcements of plant closures, plant bankruptcies and lockouts in communities across Canada and internationally. This research involves not only studying individuals that hold leadership positions but also examining the economic and political structures and processes that generate the degrees of freedom available to these individuals and the hegemonic ideologies that consistently limit their conceptions of possibilities and alternatives. An extensive literature exists that focuses on this contemporary “logic of capitalism” and the shifting parameters of capitalist reality (for example, see Chomsky 2004; Klein 2007; Pupo and Thomas 2010; Smith 2010). The Corporate Elite Acquiring access to production in plants located around globe has situated corporate managers to shift production to maximize profit-making opportunities in light of exchange rates, state policies, labor unrest and other contingencies. At intervals, over the 20th century, trade agreements, entered into by the Canadian government, ensured that products, such as cars, would have a proportion of the finished product “made in Canada.” These agreements provided incentive to keep manufacturing jobs in the country. More recent trade agreements, based on “free trade” practices, had given CEOs the easy option to move to locations with the lowest production costs. Responding to these economic and political factors, CEOs (primarily foreign-based) made decisions to shut plants in Welland and to downsize over the past three decades. As a result, Welland workers repeatedly lost jobs to people living in the southern United States, Mexico and Asia. Our study of displaced workers in the Welland community focuses on three main sites: John Deere, Atlas Specialty Steels, and Henniges Automotive, all primarily foreign-owned companies. Although Atlas and Henniges experienced a steady turnover of ownership, the companies’ headquarters are located in the United States (John Deere and Henniges) and Korea (Atlas). The exchange rate of the Canadian dollar increased production costs for John Deere in Canada relative to Mexico. At the time of the collapse of the Asian stock market, the Korean owners of Atlas Specialty Steels bled the Welland factory to infuse funds into their Korean operations. Henniges, the rubber processing plant, had changed ownership four times in a decade. Each owner was based in the United States and none evidenced an interest in the long-term survival of the plant in Welland. The last owners had successfully purchased several rubber plants in Canada, the United States and Mexico and, having acquired the competition, were proceeding to consolidate production. In closing the Welland plants, the individuals responsible were responding to the imperative of “profitability” and were bound by economic and political processes that spanned the globe.

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The steelworkers who lost their jobs in 2003 with the bankruptcy of Atlas Specialty Steels plant in Welland had made steel products for a succession of companies, none of which were located in Canada.2 From 1963 to 1985, Rio Algom Limited (a division of RTZ) owned the plant. RTZ had formed in 1962 through the merger of two large mining companies, British-based Rio Tinto Company and the Austrian-based, Consolidated Zinc Corporation. During the 1960s, the megalithic corporation developed production of copper in South Africa, uranium in Nambia, iron ore in Australia, copper in New Guinea, bauxite and coal in Australia, diamonds in Argle, and gold and coal in Indonesia. During the next two decades, the corporation diversified into producing products for the automotive industry and the production of cement, chemicals, oil and gas. By the late 1980s, after a strategic review, RTZ started to divest its non-mining assets. In 1989, Sammi Corporation, based in South Korea, acquired the steel plant in Welland. Short of money to finance their South Korean business interests, Sammi drained profits from the Welland plant and by 1997 Sammi Atlas, Inc. filed for protection from its creditors under the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act (C.C.A.A.). This Act provides time for companies to rearrange their affairs to avoid immediately proceeding to bankruptcy. Creditors took over the company in 1998 and then sold the Atlas operations in Welland to Slater Steel Inc. in 2000. The saga then continued with Slater applying under C.C.A.A. for bankruptcy protection in 2003. Slater liquidated and shut down the plant, leaving the employees jobless and with devalued pensions. A capital management company, Centre Properties, then acquired the Welland plant in 2003 and held it idle.3 The idle plant was then purchased by MMFX in 2006 and a subsequent application was made under the C.C.A.A. in January 2010. By that summer, the holders of the debt acquired the plant under the new name ASW Steel Inc. The plant continues to sit idle with a minimal staff. The corporate story of Henniges, the rubber automotive plant in Welland, was similarly complex.4 By 2004, the rubber plant had been sold several times and 2  The information on the history of Atlas Specialty Steels in Welland was taken from the following sources: “Welland Steelmaking Facility Detailed History.” Internal document, Atlas Specialty Steels, Welland; Rio Tinto. 2011. Available: http://www.riotinto.com/ aboutus/history.asp; http://www.riotinto.com/documents/Investors/dicsep06.pdf; “Sammi Group Acquires Atlas Stainless Steels, 2 Other from Slater Steel Inc. Available http:// www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/ Thomson M&A/Sammi Group asquires Atlas Stainless Steels 2 Other from Slater Steel Inc-116319040; “Agreed to Acquire Atlas Specialty Steels. Available: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-65775050.html. Accessed March 10, 2011. 3  Slater Stainless Corp., a subsidiary of Slater Steel, entered a definitive agreement to sell substantially all of its assets located at Atlas Specialty Steels facility in Welland, Ontario to Centre Steel Holdings Ltd. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1g1-118495100. html. Accessed March 10, 2011. 4  Information on the history of Henniges in Welland was obtained from: “GenCorp Signs Definitive Agreement to Sell GDX Automotive Business.” Available: http:// phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=76297&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&

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was owned by Cerberus Capital Management. Cerberus, located in New York City, is a privately owned investment company with holdings around the world. Cerberus operated the plant in Welland under the name Henniges and under the management of GDX (Cerberus). MAPS (Wynnchurch Capital Ltd) acquired the plant in December 2007. Wynnchurch, with a head office in Illinois, is a private investment fund with experience with corporate carve-outs and restructuring. Wynnchurch acquired ownership of seven comparable rubber plants located in Canada, the United States and Mexico. By purchasing much of the competition, production could be rationalized in fewer plants. Littlejohn & Co, with headquarters in Connecticut, acquired majority share of the rubber plant division on November 30, 2010 to add to its portfolio of $2.3 billion. Littlejohn & Co. subsequently announced the closure of the Welland plant effective Fall, 2011. The ownership of John Deere Welland Works did not have as complicated and checkered a past as Atlas or Henniges. Yet as John Deere is a multi-national company with production facilities strategically located on almost all continents that produce for consumers around the world, the plant in Welland became subject to the same corporate pressures to consolidate and to shift production to plants with prospects of higher profit margins.5 By the early 2000s, head office shifted the reporting structure by moving the Welland plant from the agricultural division. The new managers had had no personal experience with the Welland operation. In 2007, John Deere continued to set up factories in Asia and Mexico and in 2008 they developed further joint ventures in India and China. When they announced the closure of the Welland plant in the Fall of 2008, they were already positioned to shift production of the product line to plants in the U.S. and Mexico. These three exemplars, while not a complete chronicle of the economic upheavals in Welland, certainly underscore both the importance and complexity of “studying up.” Trying to gain access to the process of decision-making and to the key decision-makers is not only impractical, but often impossible as well. Within multi-national corporate structures, decision-making processes are complicated, often with no one individual or small group of individuals taking responsibility. Rather, decisions are attributed either to a “faceless” Board of Directors, or to a myriad of faces within the upper echelons of power.6 In our study, determining id=592178&; http://www.cerberuscapital.com?About.aspx; http://investing.businessweek. com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapld=6477460HeadofficeinIllinois/ hadexpwithcorporatecare-outsandrestructuring; http://www.hennigesautomotive.com/ documents/American ExecutiveArticleJuly2009HiRes.pdf. Accessed March 10, 2011. 5  Information on the history of John Deere in Welland was obtained from: http:// www.deere.com/wps/dcom/en_US/corporate/our_company/about_us/history/history. page? Accessed March 10, 2011. 6  Michael Moore’s film, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, examines the “persona” of the corporate entity and the “facelessness” of corporate decision-making, arguing that corporate greed, rather than human consideration, propels the capitalist system. Economic decisions that impact thousands are based on the logic of corporate growth and profit, or capitalism for capitalism’s sake.

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the names of those who had made the critical decisions to downsize and then shut down the plants in Welland was a convoluted process. While John Deere had enjoyed a relatively stable corporate structure over its hundred plus years, both Henniges and Atlas had been held by four successive owners over a six-year period prior to the closure notices. According to workers and union officials we interviewed, at these plants each group of directors and/or owners had in their own way contributed to the declines which ultimately led to closure in the case of John Deere and Henniges, and forced bankruptcy in the case of Atlas. Although tracking ownership is usually straightforward, acquiring the names of the CEOs in each company responsible for critical decisions is impossible, especially given the lack of access to changes in management hierarchies within each company over the relevant time period. Even John Deere, a company characterized by a relatively stable structure, underwent corporate reorganization on occasion. The plant in Welland, we learned, had reported to several different branches of the parent company within the last five years prior to the closure. Beyond the ability of corporate leaders to assure their personal privacy with a wall of administrative assistants and personal security measures, efforts to access chief executive officers and directors for interviews is further complicated by retirements, transfers and promotions. In the context of companies that operate production facilities around the globe, managers are frequently relocated as they climb the corporate ladder or they may be temporarily transferred to branches in need or to set operations straight. In these situations, executives are on a mission to “cure corporate woes” and may not physically connect to the community or to the workers whose lives are most deeply affected by their decisions. Under these circumstances, tracing specific decision-making is unrealistic. In Welland, for example, local managers were assigned to their positions for only a few years before corporate shakeups displaced them to new locations. According to unionists we interviewed, even contract negotiations were often carried out by an outside team of negotiators for the company. Had we acquired the names of the relevant corporate executives to interview, it is most probable that they would not be willing participants in our study.7 Corporate executives have nothing to gain by subjecting themselves to pointed questions regarding their decisions to close plants.8 Moreover, in their powerful positions, members of the elite are protected by teams of lawyers who advise them on statements for public disclosure and private secretaries and administrative staff 7  Examinations of the role of corporate elites have been notoriously dependent on public information as opposed to in-depth interviews (Clement 1975; Carroll 2004). Research that has targeted individual corporate leaders has tended to focus on the personality and psychology of the person as opposed to a class analysis (Newman 1999). 8  Reflecting Michael Moore’s feckless efforts to speak with corporate executive Roger Smith, a local Welland filmmaker who travelled to Dearborn to speak with John Deere, executives following the plant closure was summarily denied admittance to corporate headquarters (film – Dear John).

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who screen calls and correspond with the public on their behalf. In addition, it is incorrect to assume that the local elites we interviewed would act as a go-between, connecting us to relevant members of the corporate elite. Despite the momentous impact of John Deere’s closing, after almost a century of operation in Welland, John Deere executives made no effort to contact union representatives or the Mayor of Welland. Rather than attempting to contact senior executives for interviews, it may be more fruitful to engage in critical discourse analysis, (see Carroll 2004: 225–31) by examining scripts—including their actions and interactions in political and corporate circles, public pronouncements, media presence, interrelations with other elites, along with company documents and policies—in order to make sense of the direction of decisions affecting any one community. Examining scripts and the public face of the companies may have provided insights regarding the direction of company policy, including decisions to streamline operations or to move operations to lower-wage markets. Interviews with individual corporate executives were not key to our analysis. Instead we designed the study to focus on unmasking the logic of capitalism as it operated in a particular context and on the general process of decision-making whereby the desires of shareholders are prioritized over the livelihoods of workers and the well-being of communities. To that end, we explored the ways in which local elites understood their communities and the roles they embraced in addressing the economic upheavals. Local Elites Here we focused on three main questions: how politicians and economic development officials at the municipal level conceptualized solutions to promote development and to provide employment opportunities; how directors of social agencies conceptualized their roles; and how union leaders and activists responded. Power relations and status differences between the research team of university professors and the community leaders who agreed to be interviewed varied depending on the type of leadership position. For this study, our employment at the university did not impede our access to participants or their willingness to provide information and discuss issues candidly during the interviews. We were able to maintain our integrity by representing our research focus accurately when asking for interviews with the local elite because they shared with us a profound dismay at the decisions taken by out-of-country corporate executives. In general, participants were openly distressed at the human costs of plant closures and were frustrated by the lack of resources available to them to assist those in need. However, for the most part, local leaders were unable to envision solutions outside of the capital-labour relationship or to envision a process whereby members of the local community would be invited to fully participate in solution-seeking exercises.

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The local leaders we interviewed provided some context for the study of displaced workers we were about to embark upon. They shared concerns over the present and future prospects for Wellanders, reminisced about the city’s former economic vibrancy, and described changes in local demographics, cultures and politics, thereby providing us with some insights into the history and pulse of the community. Those in management positions in community organizations (e.g., churches, food banks, women’s shelter, schools, social welfare agencies) were keen to document the devastation experienced by their clientele and to outline the actions each was taking in light of limited resources. Local politicians were eager to have a platform both to express their anguish over the plant closures and to outline policies and programs to address the new economic reality. Union officials were sympathetic to our stated intention of examining plant closures from the vantage point of the abandoned communities. Recognizing that we were “on the same side,” they did not hesitate to discuss the unions’ understanding of the job losses and, after discussions, provide us with their membership lists for our interviews with displaced workers. Local corporate managers, left in the throes of overseeing vacated factories and dealing with emotional and sometimes volatile labour forces, were also forthcoming as their long-term allegiance to the multinationals they worked for had been broken. They too faced limited job prospects and/or personal upheaval. Given the general alignment of interests at the local level, we did not encounter interference, disruption or any concerns regarding the integrity of the project. A complicating issue for researchers studying elites is that the participants’ identities can easily be determined by the nature of their positions and as a result anonymity can not be guaranteed. Both in our consent form as well as in our preamble to the interview, we explained that we were speaking to them in their official capacities and would not be inquiring about their private thoughts on the issues at hand. Although interviewees occasionally asked to speak “off the record” or that tape-recorders be (temporarily) turned off, overall participants were not reluctant to divulge their positions on the plant closures and economic collapse of the city. In fact, a number of participants volunteered to “go on record” with their observations and actively sought to publicize their thoughts and positions on the issues. We did not encounter much hesitancy in interviewees’ frankness about Welland’s circumstances despite their awareness that their identities could easily be matched to commentaries by virtue of their local positions. However, this willingness of the local leaders to be open with their comments and analyses likely reflects their relatively minor decision-making roles and relative powerlessness within broader structures of power. Frustrated by their inability to access loci of power and control, including the chief executive officers of corporations with branches in the community, or to significantly impact the direction of change, they sometimes invited opportunities to stand apart from “crass capitalism” while casting themselves as champions of the community.

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Studying Up, Understanding Power Our case study of plant closures and economic devastation in Welland, Ontario provides us with an understanding of levels of influence and distance between local community-based decisions and ultimate seats of power and control. In most instances of plant closure, community members, including those in leadership positions, had no advance warning regarding the shutdowns, dates of closures, plans for the plant sites, or related fallout from the decisions. As a result, most of the plans to deal with the consequences were reactive. When displaced workers turned to their community for support, they were often puzzled by the lack of a coordinated “safety net,” and concluded that they had been abandoned by their community, raising questions about their civic rights and social citizenship. While workers attributed closure decisions to “corporate greed” and the ravages of globalization, acknowledging levels of power and control beyond the immediate factory gates, they seldom distinguished amongst elites, casting local leaders together with those who hold the true reins of power. “Studying up” allows us to unravel webs of power and locate decisions affecting the local through a “global” lens. “Studying up” allows workers to understand that there was nothing at the local level that could have been done to prevent the closures. Despite meeting and even exceeding production targets, holding outstanding safety records, maintaining a highly skilled and committed labour force, accepting concessionary bargaining and manufacturing products of the highest quality and standards, the corporate decisions remain loyal to the logic of global capitalism with little or no allegiance to any particular local community. From this perspective, corporate headquarters do not owe the workers and their communities official explanations for their decisions and this leaves local leaders and displaced workers guessing and grasping for clarification and, often, forced to rethink their assumptions about fairness and justice. In this context, local elites are often without resources to significantly affect solutions and often perceive a restricted array of options. Corporate Decisions and Devastated Lives Decisions to close or downsize plants have immediate impacts on the affected workers and their families. However, with the enormity of the waves of plant closures in Welland, the entire community was transformed, shattering dreams of early retirement, small business success, and young workers’ plans for a settled life near family and friends. High rates of unemployment increased caseloads of community agencies and had a ripple effect on local small suppliers, restaurants and stores (Brownlee 2009; Niagara This Week 2009). The idle industries and growing brownfields call attention to those who profit from closure decisions and to a callous economic system fixed solely on the profit motive and stubbornly oblivious to the well-being of communities. The plant closures in Welland had immediately terminated employment for thousands of people and would deny future generations access to “good” jobs.

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The closure of John Deere Welland Works in 2009 put 800 people on the streets. The earlier closures of Ucar, Wabasso, and Atlas Speciality Steels had cost the community close to 2,000 jobs.9 With the recent announced closure of Henniges, a plant that employed over 1,100 workers in 2001, the remaining 300 people with active employment rights lost their jobs at the end of 2011 (St. Catharines Standard). The decimation of manufacturing jobs has led to a decline in labor force participation in Welland. In 1971, 44.1 per cent of Welland residents in the labor force had manufacturing jobs; by 2006, only 21.2 per cent of those in the labor force had manufacturing jobs (Census of Canada). In addition, the security and economic rewards of the remaining jobs have often been seriously undermined. Local politicians, union presidents, directors of employment centers, school principals, social service managers, religious leaders, journalists, and displaced plant managers all expressed dismay at the decisions by CEOs to close plants in Welland. They elaborated on the impact for the individuals affected and the consequences that rippled throughout suppliers, stores, the housing market and so on. Without regular paycheques, people cut back on spending. As a result, stores, restaurants and car dealerships closed doors, throwing yet more people out of work. With secure work quickly vanishing in the community, people were scrambling to apply for employment insurance, retraining programs, and elusive new jobs. A counselor at one of the help centers described the desperate attempts to find work that he observed on a daily basis: They had a job in Welland at John Deere for $30 per hour and they got laid off. Then they were lucky enough to get one for $20–$25 per hour. A lot of those people came back for employment counseling a third time and we placed quite a few at Can Grow in Niagara-on-the-Lake, but the whole place closed down. Now they are coming back for number four job, [asking] ‘what am I going to do?’ And the jobs they are looking at are $10–$12 per hour.

A number of union officials spoke with great concern for their membership and for others who have lost their jobs due to closures and downsizing. As one union leader said, “We’re finding that people are having to take two or three jobs if they can find them. And a lot of them are really part-time jobs, maybe a week here, a week there. We’re finding a lot of people, now that their unemployment is about to start running out … aren’t finding work at all.” Similarly, religious and other community leaders observed that most of the new jobs, such as in call centers, result in people living in poverty: “The call center doesn’t pay what the steel industry does. The result is we have what we call the working poor; they are people who still have a full-time job but they’re still living in poverty. So they’re gainfully employed but they’re not gaining anything.” 9  These job loss figures were published in a series of articles in the local paper, The Welland Tribune, between September 2, 2008 (at the time of the announcement of John Deere’s closure) and June 1, 2009.

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Local leaders also recognized the domino effect of closures at the local level. Factories supply inputs for each other and when the factory at one end of the chain closes, all the factories down the supply chain are hit. Small companies, such as those providing cleaning services to larger companies or those selling pizzas and clothes to workers, lost business as the large factories closed. Even schools would close as younger families relocated to find employment. One of the union leaders explained: When one disappears, they are all hurt. You have Welland Forge who supplies product to the automotive industry. Henniges supplies product to General Motors and Chrysler. Lakeside does some axle tubing and it just goes on and on and on. The E.S. Foxes of the world, the cleaning companies. It is very frightening when you realize that for every one job in automotive, there is seven tied to it. This becomes very frightening when you realize that the economy is close to collapsing if you lose any large section of the automotive industry in this province.

Closures of factories in Welland have pushed people onto the streets to look for increasingly elusive jobs. At the same time they have depleted municipal revenues at a time when people must rely on their government for support. Corporations opportunistically locate factories to their advantage, induce longterm commitments from their employees and then eliminate jobs, abandon the factories10 and leave the town reeling in their wake. In this scenario, “studying up” and engaging in public sociology by tracking corporate decisions and challenging corporate responsibility should be on all critical research agendas. Assigning the Blame: The Companies and the State To document the consequences of plant closures and layoffs and to capture the workers’ thoughts on why the plants closed, we proceeded to interview individuals (both waged and salaried) who had lost their jobs at John Deere and Atlas Specialty Steels, and those who were experiencing precarious employment at Henniges Automotive. Many of these people felt betrayed by executives managing the company for whom they had toiled in a responsible manner for years. They were struggling to find the answers they rightly deserved. Corporate Callousness, Corporate Strategy From the vantage point of Welland’s displaced workers, nameless strangers— CEOs in grey suits—in distant boardrooms controlled their fate, ruined their 10  Welland is rife with massive industrial complexes that have been abandoned. While a few have been demolished, most remain as rusting testimony to a once thriving economy.

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livelihoods, and ransacked their community with little or no explanation for their actions. Workers who made steel products at Atlas, who built heavy equipment for John Deere, and who made rubber automotive parts saw themselves as responsible people who had reported to work on time, met production quotas and quality checks, endured grueling working conditions day after day, year after year. Those factors that they controlled—quality of the production and the productivity and safety record of the plant—were not given as reasons related to closure decisions. In early September 2008 John Deere staged the announcement of its decision to close the Welland plant. The “30 second” carefully orchestrated announcement had been clothed in secrecy. After the public statement, the American CEO, escorted by a retinue of security personnel, boarded his private jet and returned to Michigan. Further declarations regarding the fate of the Welland site, the move of the product line to the Deere plants in the United States, and the construction of a new plant in Mexico were pending. The CEO had not given any reasons for the closure and did not answer any questions at the plant. Later, he would refuse to meet with union officials eager to negotiate to keep the plant open. Every advance was rebuffed. Workers and their families in Welland were left without answers as to why their future economic security was suddenly in jeopardy. Speculation was rampant among those losing their jobs. Some feared that tougher environmental guidelines in Canada were to blame; others worried that plant unionization was the root cause. A few months later, once the closure process was well under way, some of the capable employees who were soon to be jobless were approached to train the unskilled Mexican workers. Those who agreed did so in order to extend their employment at John Deere for a few extra weeks. They were flown to Mexico, reassembled “their” machines they had disassembled and packed up in Welland, and then taught the Mexican workers how to operate them. The workers who refused the Mexican trip felt that accepting this offer was a betrayal of the union “brotherhood,” a distasteful form of collusion with the corporation that had put them all out of work. Needless to say, a sizable rift amongst the workers developed over this issue. Many of the John Deere workers had also experienced firsthand or through friends and family in the community the same black hole when Atlas Specialty Steels announced its closing in 2003. After a series of ownership changes—from Americans to Koreans to Americans—the plant was basically abandoned. From a peak of 3,000 workers, a small staff remained in 2011 to make daily rounds of the site to prevent vandalism. Coherent explanations were also never forthcoming and, once again, workers were puzzled by the decision to close a plant that continued to turn a profit. Ironically, a number were relieved when they found employment at the ill-fated John Deere plant. A similar scenario played out at the announcement of the closure of the Henniges Automotive Plant in 2011. Employees had noticed that management had rerouted production for their regular customers to sister plants. They had foreseen the possibility of closure but were powerless to prevent this decision. A

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co-operative union and concessionary bargaining accomplished nothing. Officials who interacted daily in one capacity or another with the people who lost their jobs grappled for answers as to why corporate managers, heading company after company, closed their Welland operations. They could point to pieces of the puzzle but found weaving these pieces into a coherent critique of neo-liberal policies and capitalist production practices elusive. While a thorough analysis of this political myopia is not possible here, a wide range of research documents the inadequacies of current popular understandings of even the most basic aspects of the capitalist enterprise. As widely discussed in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the majority of economists did not foresee the catastrophic slump or its long-term implications (Duffy 2011). Subsequent events merely underscore that: “We have created an ersatz capitalism with unclear rules—but with a predictable outcome: future crises …” (Stiglitz 2010: 296). In this context, it is not surprising that while it is clear that decision-making sets the stage for upheaval in communities, the motivations and considerations embedded in these decisions remain confusing and opaque (Albo 2010; Klein 2007). In our Welland research, politicians, union officials and directors of community organizations and agencies certainly identified the vulnerability of industrial workers to the decisions made by corporations and government agencies. Municipal politicians, including the Mayor, explained the succession of closures in relation to the search for cheap labour by companies operating in a global context: “All of the factors are global in nature. We’re just caught in the middle of it, just a small town caught in the middle of all of it.” The Mayor admitted that he felt a sense of powerlessness in face of “global decisions.” And powerless he was. Despite the devastation that news of plant closures would bring to the City, even the Mayor—the top city official—was not given any advance warning before the formal announcement of John Deere’s closure was made. Symbolic of the relative position of local and international leaders, the formal statement was made solely by the head of the corporation and there was no representation from the union, government officials or political leaders. Further, although the Mayor, along with a number of other city and political officers, attributed the string of closure decisions to natural processes of economic globalization, they either refused or were unable to engage in a critique of this way of doing business. Not surprisingly, among the most articulate analyses of the plant closures were those provided by leaders with a history in the labour movement, including current and past union office-holders and a number of others working in political and educational circles or in social service agencies. These community leaders noted a clear connection between a corporate agenda of maximizing profits, cutting costs, and closing plants in Welland and the predominance of neo-liberal policies of the state. Few, with the notable exception of a local religious leader, extended the analysis to a critique of capitalism per se. Further, despite the devastating impact on the local communities and on the lives of residents, the leaders did not express concern about increased social instability and upheaval as likely outcomes of this predatory capitalism. Indeed, only relatively recently has the main stream media

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made connections between corporate greed, growing inequality and global social protests against oppression (Stiglitz 2011). Pointing to the prevalence of cheap labour in China and Southeast Asia, one of the union officers we interviewed explained the predicament faced by the local steel pipe industry: “We can’t compete at the same level as them. [Asian] pipe adversely affects us because they will sell it for almost half the price of what we would normally be able to sell it for and they flood the Canadian market.” A local federal politician and former union activist who previously worked as an assembly line worker in the auto industry described the “corporate way”: “‘Lets do it’ and then when it is all over ‘Lets go do it somewhere else because now it’s cheaper there.’” The unionists pointed out that production costs in many countries are also lower because companies do not have to absorb the costs of Canadian environmental and safety regulations. One union local president explained: “They said that they could make more money in Mexico. Well, of course, there are no environmental laws; they have no health and safety issues. It goes on and on. So, of course, they could make more money.” Successive turnovers of ownership and changing corporate ownership arrangements have often signaled trouble down the road, according to union leaders. One leader we interviewed observed that when an American investment firm owned the company for a couple of years: “it’s all fast turnover, fast money, guaranteed to get our shareholders their money, guaranteed to get as much money out as fast as possible, and don’t worry what’s going to happen 10 years down the road.” Despite the “investment” designation of the owner, the firm did not invest in the plant for a long-term return. Rather, “they ran it into the ground. They won’t do investment into the plant unless the plant generates cash flow. [If] you’re going through a tough time, the only way to get through it is to diversify; they won’t give you money.” These comments clearly suggest a shifting logic in contemporary capitalism and a rejection of the bitter lessons of the 1930s. Politics of the State: Collusion with Corporate Objectives Within liberal democratic states, degrees of freedom to effect policy are limited by the relationship between states and economies. Providing a stable investment climate becomes the measure of successful government. A stable investment climate is seen as the way to ensure corporate investment, corporate profitability and job creation (Panitch 1977; Panitch and Swartz 2008). As well as pointing to the profit incentives for companies to search for cheap labour, union activists listed a litany of complaints against the state, citing in particular, government policies that promote flexibility for companies to produce at the source of cheapest costs outside Canada. One activist clearly identified the main issue, arguing that economic downturns are “not a problem with the city. It’s not a problem with the workforce; it’s not a problem with the people of the city. It’s a problem with our government letting it happen,” allowing corporations to move from Canada.

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A major concern amongst the activist leaders were free trade arrangements, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Mexico signed by Conservative Prime Ministers allowing companies to produce outside Canada and import the product into Canada. One of the unionists who had turned to regional politics declared that job loss was due to “free trade not fair trade.” A political ally claimed: The ultimate decision maker is the trade policy, especially free trade – where a multi-national, or tri-national or global-national, like John Deere can simply move its operation to wherever it wants, in this case, primarily to Mexico, regardless of whether the local plants are operational, efficient, or profitable. If it thinks it is going to enhance its corporate interests somewhere else, off it goes. Free trade allows it to do that. The North American Free Trade Agreement lets them go wherever they want, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.

One of the local union presidents who had faced job losses to factories outside of Canada presented a detailed analysis of procurement policies and content law. In his words: The Canadian Navy right now is buying frigates from outside of Canada, rather than spending taxpayers’ dollars on Canadian ships. Those facilities remain idled with thousands of workers unemployed while the Canadian frigates are being built in China. What’s happening to us now is because we don’t have a content law, which would be perfectly legal under NAFTA and the FTA.

Another union president supports the need for legislative support to help stem the tide of jobs flowing from communities. His local competes for work with sister plants in the United States and elsewhere in Canada. He has seen work leave the Welland plant for alternate sites outside Canada due to the lack of a fair playing field in terms of government policies: “It’s going to go some place in the States where they don’t have to pay taxes or the hydro. Then it’s going to go down to Mexico. It’s only a matter of time before everything goes. Until there’s a fair playing field out there, these are only short-term fixes.” Union officials recognize that governments’ “ultra conservative fiscal policies” ignore the needs of people: I don’t know if you want me to get into a political rant, but I honestly believe there has to be a balance between being conservative and being socialist. There has to be a balance, right? You can be fiscally conservative, but socially minded. … I think what’s happened in North America is that people have been so keen on being conservative to the point where you forget that this company is making so much money. They lay off all of these people. They are fiscally conservative to the point where they’re cutting, cutting, cutting. Who’s going to buy that car? Who’s going to buy that house? You don’t have the people earning the kind of

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Further, the free market-free trade approach operates in a similar vein regardless of the colors of the government of the day, according to one of the local union presidents: [Prime Minister] Harper is very free market. Harper hasn’t done much for the manufacturing sector in Canada. It has been an extremely disappointing term with him. I’m not sure what the Liberals would have done. I know that they tell us now that they would do something, but when they are in power it’s a whole different story. … I tend to think that they would have addressed the problem, although our last Liberal Prime Minister had his steam ship lines flying flags of convenience from other countries. So I am not so sure he would have addressed the issue either.

Although a number of the local leaders we interviewed had developed an analysis of the pitfalls of a deregulated free market for the working class, only one identified the issues as directly associated with “capitalism.” One of the local activists is a Catholic Priest whose parish runs a food bank and who has personally organized a number of forums to draw attention to the problems of poverty and unemployment in Welland. Having lived in Welland for decades and having witnessed the once prosperous city become overridden with people living in poverty, he explains: … [The economic downturn] pokes holes in this whole mythology around capitalism. Capitalism sucks, it does. This market economy – free market – it’s dangerous. We’re all paying for the free market. We can’t trust them. You can’t trust GM and you can’t trust Chrysler.

For the local leaders engaged in activism within the community, the profit motive, or as some said, “corporate greed” drove the decisions at corporate headquarters to abandon plants and downsize production in Welland. The compulsion of doing business according to “the profit motive” is so normalized that these decisions, though regrettable, are deemed logical. By means of studying up, those engaged in critical action research may not only scrutinize the decisions and actions of elites, but may also initiate discussion on other alternative courses of action for economic development and prosperity. All the members of the local leadership, regardless of organizational affiliation agreed that the litany of plant closures, layoffs and industrial setbacks had had disastrous consequences at the local level. They typically placed the blame on individuals, primarily corporate executives and politicians who were often unknown and living far from Welland. Local leaders saw these individuals responding to the

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imperative of the profit motive and bound up in global processes. Yet, despite their apparent critique of the private sector, in their search to regain economic stability, jobs and community strength, community leaders both overlook the importance of involving workers and their organizations in finding solutions and they, as a group, do not actively promote alternative forms of economic enterprise, such as worker or producer cooperatives or state enterprises. By focusing on a critique of the economic conditions calling forth an unrelenting devotion to the profit motive, the practice of studying up holds the possibility of providing answers to those whose lives have been wrenched into despair. In the context of an economically devastated community, the practice of studying up exposes the actions of elites and their commitment to a global corporate agenda. On the local level, the elite primarily concerned itself with maintaining the infrastructure in order to attract new businesses, and in doing so there was rarely an articulation of ideas that deviated from traditional corporate practices. To effect change that would make a difference in the lives of workers and their families, displaced workers, rather than executives and members of the Chamber of Commerce, should take centre stage in community development forums. A participatory action approach would build on the base of workers’ knowledge and skills to search for alternatives within the community. Studying up demonstrates the importance of capturing community power, following up with concrete community action and employing a diversity of ideas that might reflect the community’s interest on the ground while taking into account gender, race and class issues. Bound by Convention Local officials—from unions, employment agencies, newspapers, political offices, and social service agencies—identified the vulnerability of people in Welland to the complusion of companies operating within a deregulated free market economy. Embedded in their comments are expressions of their relative powerlessness. They recognize that their good intentions can not stay the unrelenting economic upheaval felt by people at the local level as transnational companies respond to global pressures to maximize profits in a deregulated environment, facilitated by the state’s promotion of a neo-liberal agenda. Given the destruction of their community and the human tragedies they observe on a daily basis, they hope, against their better judgment, for an influx of jobs that will re-energize the economy, bringing healthy paycheques, benefits and pensions to the Welland working class. Realistically, they understand that the industrial job losses are permanent and that a “good” manufacturing job reminiscent of those held by the majority of Welland’s workers in decades past will no longer be available, making economic security increasingly elusive. With the realization that neither the development of new multi-national industries nor the passage of procurement and content laws are forthcoming, local leaders, many of them activists themselves, point to the importance of building a

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politicized, connected and active populous, declaring that the workers in Welland and surrounding communities will have to forge their own “better world.” These aspirations, however energizing to community members, did not translate into a comprehensive action plan. Local economic development corporations linked to the City of Welland and the surrounding Region of Niagara generally conceptualize displaced workers as “talent pools” rather than as active participants in shaping the futures of their communities. Neither displaced workers nor their union representatives are invited to sit on these economic development boards. Instead the boards’ directors are managers of local businesses, local politicians, civil servants and representatives from the public educational sector. Voices of working people are generally absent from the table. Yet, these “talent pools” are encouraged to train for appropriate, as yet non-existent, new jobs. Ironically, to access training money from the federal government, unemployed workers face the daunting task of demonstrating that the training they undertake will be related to specific employment opportunities. To achieve the stated mandate of “economic growth,” the economic development board and member agencies have developed strategies that rely exclusively on promoting private sector growth through tactics such as creating “a competitive business environment”, targeting “strategic employers,” and marketing the “Niagara Brand.” Fostering worker or producer cooperatives or state-owned corporations are not considered and when one of the Board directors was encouraged to pursue such options, he recoiled in apparent dismay. The local business elite and the political representatives on the economic development agencies remain firmly committed to a discourse that privileges private sector investment, with profits generated by waged and salaried employees and distributed to owners and/or shareholders. Studying the actions of the elites associated with the development agencies is an integral part of exposing the inadequacies of the lifelines extended to unemployed workers, and is especially critical when new jobs are not available. Although the future of the displaced workers rests with decisions made by economic development agencies, the workers themselves have no voice at the table and are not supported or mobilized to participate in alternative economic arrangements.11 Rather, the rhetoric of “maximizing profits” and “private sector investment” continues to eclipse any discussion of new economic models. Even among the more politically astute community leaders, there are few strategies put forth such as organizing the unemployed and developing a strong sense of activism within the community. Among those who “talk the talk,” they are usually without resources to effect workable solutions and often perceive a limited array of options. To some degree they too are guilty of overlooking the workers, 11  One of the interviewees from Atlas Steel discussed the fact that the drop forge remained a viable economic unit in terms of the production of specialty steel. As the plant wound down, a group of workers discussed the possibility of hiving off this production unit and running it themselves. Apparently, the idea was met with silence rather than support.

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in that they tend to “buy in” lock, stock and barrel to corporate whims. The case of the economic destruction of the City of Welland provides us with no evidence of a “class war” marked by clearly delineated political sides. There have been no demonstrations in the streets, burning of effigies, or smashing the machines following any of the plant closure announcements. Nor were there marches on Parliament. Other than the few workers who chose to ignore their foremen’s warnings of possible disciplinary actions and vented their anger inside the factory gates, the community, the local leaders and the workers themselves accepted their fate in silence. The public discourse embraced the notion of the formidable power of capital and the futility of engaging in strategies for change. References Albo, G. 2010. “The ‘New Economy’ and Capitalism Today.” In Interrogating the New Economy, eds N. Pupo and M. Thomas. Toronto: UTP Education, 3–20. Brownlee, A. 2009. “Recession Linked to Increased Abuse.” Niagara This Week September 17(10): 51. Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “The Critical Turn to Public Sociology.” Critical Sociology 31(3): 313–26. Burawoy, M. 2005a. “Rejoinder: Toward a Critical Public Sociology.” Critical Sociology 31(3): 379–90. Burawoy, M. 2004. “Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Possibilities.” Social Forces 82(4): 1603–18. Carroll, W. (ed.). 2004. Critical Strategies for Social Research. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Carroll, W. 2004. Corporate Power in a Globalizing World. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, N. 2004. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Clement, W. 1975. The Canadian Corporate Elite. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Duffy, A. 2011. “Families in Tough Times: The Impact of Economic Crises on Canadian Families.” In Canadian Families: Diversity, Conflict and Change, eds N. Mandell and A. Duffy, 4th edn. Toronto: Nelson Education, 164–210. “Henniges Closing in Welland, 300 People Losing Jobs.” St. Catharines Standard. Retrieved April 13, 2011, http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ArticleDisplay. aspx?e=3000350. Klein, N. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. Lammert, M. 2009. Dear John: A Documentary. Moore, M. 2009. Capitalism: A Love Story. Distributed by Overture Films, United States.

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Niagara This Week. 2009. “Applications for Welfare, Subsidized Housing Soar.” June 19: 15, 18. Newman, P.C. 1999. Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited. Panitch, L. 1977. “The Role and Nature of the Canadian State.” In The Canadian State, ed. Leo Panitch. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 3–27. Panitch, L. and Swartz, D. 2008. From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms (3rd edn). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education. Pupo, N.J. and Thomas, M.P. (eds). 2010. Interrogating the New Economy: Restructuring Work in the 21st Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education. Smith, M. 2010. Global Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Company. Statistics Canada. 2010. Table 282-0008 – Labour Force Survey Estimates (LFS), by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), Sex and Age, Annual (Persons unless Otherwise Noted), CANSIM (database), Using E-STAT (distributor). Retrieved July 13, 2010, http://estat.statcan.gc.ca/cgiwin/cnsmcgi.exe?Lang=E&EST-Fi=EStat/English/CII_1-eng.htm (published June 26, 2010). Stiglitz, J. 2010. Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Stiglitz, J. 2011. “Of the 1%, by the 1% for the 1%”. Vanity Fair May: 126ff.

Chapter 8

The Globality of Globals: From Floating to Escape Routes1 Anthony Elliott

Is the new mobile economy breeding a new global elite? In the past, the price of admission to the world’s richest elite was vast holdings of land and industrial plant, ownership of massive factories and control over large workforces. Today, and by contrast, membership of the global elite is reconfigured both in terms of the “new flexibility” of the weightless, information economy and (perhaps above all) the speed of mobilities. The generation of great wealth among the ranks of the ultra-rich or global elite—whom can be called, following Bauman (1998: 99), “the globals”—has occurred in an economic context of the widespread financial deregulation of markets and the comprehensive privatization of “social things” (Lemert 2008). Seeking to capture the socio-economic contours of the new economy, analysts have spoken of an age of “turbo-capitalism,” “late capitalism,” “neo-liberalism,” “disorganized capitalism” and “liquid modernity” (e.g., Bauman 2000; Jameson 1999; Lash and Urry 1987; Luttwak 1998). There have been many economic and financial developments that have shaped the emergence of our new mobile age of light, disorganized capitalism. These developments are complex, and some of the most significant of these economic transformations include: the collapse of Bretton Woods; President Nixon’s repudiation of gold in the 1970s; the oil shocks of 1973; the Wall Street crash of 1987; the dot-com bubble and subsequent wreck; the 9/11 terror attacks; and, the global financial meltdown of 2008. Against this socio-economic backcloth, several factors are worth noting at the outset as regards today’s globals—particularly if we are to adequately distinguish them from the global elite of yesteryear. Firstly, today’s globals—operating in an institutional context of fast-paced networking and mobile life—are, for the most part, relatively unconstrained by nations, national societies or communities. I will return to this point in more detail later in the chapter, but for now note that the international mobile realm of the 21st century is the first to generate a socio-economic elite that is genuinely global. Secondly, not only are the assets and financial holdings of globals truly staggering (as will be shortly reviewed), but the speed and dynamism with which globals generate, increase and multiply their total annual incomes has intensified on a dramatic scale (Haseler 2000: 4–7). 1  I would like to thank Dr. David Radford for his editorial assistance with this chapter.

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From foreign-exchange dealing on Wall Street to software innovation in Silicon Valley, globals command vast personal agglomerations of wealth, travelling in transatlantic private jets to designer mansions dotted around the world. Crucially, the private jets are an indication not only of super-wealth but of the highly mobile nature of globals themselves and of their money—shifting as they do between various countries and regions, tax-regimes and legal systems, whilst living extraordinary sumptuous lifestyles well over and above even the highest standards of “locals” living in territorially fixed societies. How should today’s global elite be studied in relation to new mobility systems unleashed by the global economy? What are the consequences for social inequality of a new super elite? This chapter examines in detail the mobile lives of globals, situated in the broader context of sweeping changes to national economies, identities and cultures. The chapter begins by reviewing different kinds of evidence which support the claim that the globals—as a new social class—have recently emerged. It is argued that, whilst there is evidence which indicates the rise of a new global elite as a superclass, what is absent from recent discussions is any sustained consideration of the “experiential texture” of the lives of globals, as well as the rich networked individualism such lives entail. Recognizing the importance of outlining how this research informing the following discussion was carried out, the second section of the chapter considers the methodological theory and praxis that underpinned the study of moving targets such as mobile elites. In an attempt to overcome the limitation of much sociological research, as outlined above, the next section of the chapter outlines a case-study of one such global high in network capital. In the final section, some more general lines of analysis from the case-study are considered, highlighting the central social forms in and through which the identities of globals are constituted, reproduced and transformed. The Globals: Emergence of a New Mobile Elite? Mega-wealth has become a master signifier of the new global economy, generating in the process many new kinds of mobility, place and identity. Today’s cultural fascination with mega-wealth is increasingly in various displays of conspicuous, lavish consumption—from SUVs and diamond-encrusted mobile phones to personal jets and 500-foot yachts. The global electronic economy generates not only great wealth, but forms of power and privilege for a new elite that transforms previous kinds of class antagonism and social inequalities. Winner-takes-all global capitalism generates new and extreme types of inequality. Contemporary sociologies of wealth, financial power and studies of the super-rich suggest various indicators of widening social inequality (Walby 2009). These indicators include:

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• The United Nations World to Work Report, which underscores that the gap between high and low wage earners increased dramatically since the early 1990s, with inequalities across 70 countries projected to remain excessive as a result of the global economic crisis of 2008 (UN News Center 2008). • The United States Congressional Budget Office 2008 Review, which reports that income for the bottom half of American households rose 6 per cent since 1979 whilst the income of the top 1 per cent skyrocketed by 228 per cent (CBS News 2008). • Across North America and Europe, the pay of chief executive officers grew exponentially—in Europe from 40 to 300 times that of the average employee; in the US, CEOs of the 15 largest companies earned 520 times more than the average worker in 2007, up from 360 times more in 2003. • The wealthiest 1 per cent of United States households had a net worth that exceeded that of the bottom 95 per cent of households in total. • Forbes 2008 Rich List identified 1,125 global billionaires (the first time the list had crossed into four figures). The total net worth of these individuals was $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from 2007 (Kroll 2008). Throughout the 2000s, up until the global financial crisis of 2008, hedge-funds, securitizing and other kinds of highly speculative financing were core ingredients in how globals made their wealth. The growth in the numbers of wealthy, not only the rich but also the ultra-rich, has been staggering. Robert Frank (2008) estimates, for example, that since 1980 in the United States alone the number of millionaires rose from half a million to 10 million, while the number of billionaires spiked from 13 to over 500. Whilst there was a marginal growth in wealth of those at the bottom of the employment ladder (especially immigrants), the incomes of the middle threefifths of the American workforce went into decline in real terms. In this connection, Corey Doglon’s (2005) eye-opening study of the lavish lifestyles of the Long Island super-wealthy captures well how the lifestyle of globals is intricately interwoven with a low-wage working class and stagnating lower middle class. Analyzing these various indicators of growing social inequality has involved social researchers and journalists considering different aspects of peoples’ lives and occupations, encompassing material differences but also symbolic and cultural differences (see Froschauer and Wong in this volume). Karen Ho’s (2009) ethnological research on Wall Street, for example, uncovers how highflying financiers project from their own daily experience of trading things and cutting deals onto the wider economy by seeking to make everything “liquid” or tradable—including the jobs of middle and low income earners. Gillian Tett (2009) has traced rising inequalities of wealth to the intensive short-term deal-making of investors and bankers, specifically the role of credit derivatives in the lead up to the global financial crisis of 2008. But perhaps nowhere is the proliferation of inequalities more discernable today than as a result of mobilities. In The SuperRich: The Unjust New World of Global Capitalism, Stephen Hasler underscores the importance of mobility thus: “super-rich multimillionaires are the world’s

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true global citizens—owing loyalty to themselves, their families and their money, rather than to communities and territorial boundaries… Their money is highly mobile, and so are they themselves, moving between their various homes around the world” (2000: 3). Access to new, complex and digitized mobility systems—from mobile phones and computer databases to yachts and private jets—is thus central to contemporary global experiences of great wealth, power and prestige. Yet the rapid increase in the wealth of globals during recent years has occurred at the cost of unprecedented levels of poverty. As Edward Luttwak notes: “all countries that have undergone turbo-capitalist change, from the United Kingdom to Argentina, from Finland to New Zealand, now have their new billionaires or at least centi-millionaires, as they all have their new poor” (1998: 5). To which it might be added that one central defining feature of the new poverty to which Luttwak draws attention concerns its embedding in complex systems of immobility—for example, the contracted cleaning staff that service the business and first-class airport lounges that globals routinely pass through. In sociological terms, the emergence of a new super elite should be cast against the backdrop of the institutional shift from organized, solid modernity to disorganized, liquid modernity (Bauman 2000; Lash and Urry 1987). The idea here is that the “shake out” of nationally organized economies and societies by the dislocating processes of globalization have penetrated all the way down to the restructuring of work, the professions, social divisions and status processes. John Scott expresses this as follows: “national capitalist classes themselves are being increasingly fragmented along the lines of the globalized circuits of capital and investment that they are involved in” (1997: 312). Scott’s assessment of the logic of wealth transformation occurs from the standpoint of methodological nationalism, with the “global” represented as an external force rewriting the “local.” However, if we switch optics and consider the question from a more global perspective, we begin to see that these changes are even more far-reaching. Specifically global finance, new technologies and multinational firms are creating highly mobile, detached forms of professional and executive experience that are transformational to the new economy. Toward a Sociology of Global Mobile Elites: Research Methodology This research is drawn from a five-year theoretical and empirical study of contemporary mobile elites, which I term “the globals.” The aim was to develop an investigation of mobile elite life-strategies and their cultural complexities as wrought by the advent of advanced globalization: this involves exploring, among other things, individuals’ understanding of themselves, others and their geographical, social and virtual locations in the world. The research was specifically focused on mobile identities, with particular reference to the theoretical paradigm of “mobilities” (Elliott and Urry 2010; Urry 2007). The research

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avoids simply rehearsing or repeating what has already been investigated on the relations between identity, work and globalization (e.g., Sennett 2000). Rather, the research developed new methodological approaches for mapping the impacts of transnationalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism upon elite mobile identities in the field of work. The values of the new economy are especially evident here in a number of cutting-edge fields, such as financial services, high-tech industries and in the media, and it is for this reason that this research was primarily concerned with global mobile identities. The project involves multiple research strategies, and will extend the new methodological approach of “mobile methods” (Büscher, Urry and Witchger 2010). Mobile methods—such as “mobile shadowing” and “mobile free-association interviewing”—are especially well suited to investigating global elites and the mobile lives conducted and performed in transnational business mobilities. The approach is narrative-centred, exploratory and psycho-social in design. Specifically, this methodology builds upon recent innovative work in psychodynamic, narrative and “mobile free-association” analysis (Elliott and Urry 2010; Frosh et al. 2002; Hollway and Jefferson 2000). In-depth interviewing “on the move” unsettles the impression management techniques of interviewees, and is likely to bring to the fore emotional contradictions, tensions and difficulties (Elliott 2008). There is now a substantial body of research in psychodynamic, narrative and discourse traditions of interview procedures, and the proposed synthesis of these traditions is appropriate to this research programme because: (a) psychoanalytic approaches engage with the complex ways individuals emotionally invest positions of discourse and subjectivity (Hollway 1984); and, (b) materials produced are of sufficient detail to facilitate investigation of complex research ideas. The research involved recruitment of 75 “globals” for in-depth individual interviews. Interviews were conducted with global mobile elites working in Australia, Singapore, Japan, the UK and Europe. The aim was to interview subjects in individual interviews, seen twice each. The relatively small numbers of interviews are not viewed as problematic, since the research methodology is based in the psychodynamic and social-theoretical traditions and does not seek to make statistically informed generalizations. The approach is narrative-centred, exploratory and psychodynamic in design: in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with global mobile elites through which the research team listened to people, alone and in groups, explain themselves, their fears and hopes of globalism. Drawing from and reflexively engaging with the social theory of global identities detailed above, the aim was, among other things, to distil difficulties, contradictions and ambiguities which appear in these personal accounts of identity, work and globalization. The methodological approach builds upon recent innovative work in psychodynamic, narrative and discourse analysis (Frosh et al. 2002; Hollway and Jefferson 2000), and in particular seeks to extend and refine the “clinical interviewing” technique described by Hollway and Jefferson (1995, 2000). A major concern of the interviews was to allow for reflection upon and reappraisal

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of interviews’ narratives, and hence subjects were interviewed twice. The research team paid particular attention to the gaps in the discourse of interviewees, particularly the contradictions, silences and other absences in their narrative accounts of identity. There is now a substantial body of research in psychodynamic, narrative and discourse traditions of interview procedures, and the synthesis of these traditions carried out within this research was considered appropriate because: (a) psychoanalytic approaches engage with the complex ways individuals emotionally invest positions of discourse (Elliott 1996; Hollway 1984); (b) the narrative tradition characteristically focuses on the impacts of sociality and culture as mediated through the life-history and autobiography; and, (c) materials produced are of sufficient detail to facilitate investigation of complex research ideas. In addition to interviews, in-depth observational studies were also undertaken of organizations that deploy extensive international fast-travel of global elites. This research involved the sustained shadowing of key individuals as “moving targets” within particularly emblematic mobile organizations. This included observing the daily organizational practices that promote and accelerate international travel and fast mobilities, with specific attention to investigating how key individuals contingently maintain business and social connections across varied and multiple distances (Thrift 2004; Urry 2007); sitting in on meetings between local and visiting overseas staff; and observing the encounters, events and understandings of such actors in order to explore the mobile practices of organizational life, rather than only focus on the exciting or idealized narrative accounts that sometimes characterize semi-structured interviews (Holton 2008). Given the lack of research on the changing character of organizational practices in relation to global business mobilities, the focus of this ethnographic research is less concerned with the “takeup” rates of international fast-travel and more concerned with the complex internal refinement of embryonic extant organizational practices. When researching these kinds of emergent organizational practices of global elites, the project adopted the ethnographic methods of organizational observation, especially the ideas of relayed creativity and distributed innovation (Born 2005). Case-Study: Mr W This third section of the chapter presents a case-study of a member of the global elite I have called “Mr W.” “Mr W” is, in fact, a composite description amalgamated together from two of the interviews that were conducted. The descriptions from these two interviews were used to form “Mr W” because, taken together, the two interviews highlighted, and were representative of, certain key themes that were consistently repeated throughout the 75 interviews that were conducted among members of the global elite discussed in this chapter.

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Mr W, an investment banker, sits in a plush London office, monitoring the FTSE.2 A bank of screens displaying movements across world markets remains a constant presence throughout the first interview. But, they are not a distraction to the interviewee: Mr W answers all questions thoughtfully and carefully, whilst all the time keeping an eye on the ratings of the large banks, investment houses and insurance companies. The interviews with Mr W had been scheduled several months in advance of the researcher’s trip to the UK. As a result of the 2008 global economic meltdown, however, the first scheduled interview was cancelled at short notice due to his need to travel to the United States. An impromptu interview was subsequently arranged (again, at very short notice), as the day following the interview Mr W was leaving the UK for 10 days further travel in Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Such scheduling and re-scheduling, most often last minute, was an integral aspect of Mr W’s daily working life. Mr W got rich investing other people’s money in short-term money markets, futures and hedge funds. He then got even richer through investments made in the rapid industrialization of China and India, as well as the buying up of cheap stocks in the leading Asian economies. Armed with an economics degree from the University of Chicago, he was one of the few who smelled trouble with the American sub-prime housing crisis of late 2007, and made the calculated move to sell up his own investments across world stock markets. He subsequently began putting his money to work elsewhere, and decided that the time was right for a change of job along the way. As a reward for timing the market to near perfection, he took three months off work. During that time, he and his wife—a successful business woman in her own right—holidayed at various exclusive resorts. The remainder of the time they divided their time between their four homes; they also commenced renovating a mansion recently purchased in Brittany. At the time of interview, Mr W had been heading up a private investment bank in London for three months. He explained that the global crisis of 2008 represented an enormous professional challenge, though also noted that his working schedule didn’t really changed from what he was doing previously. “Usually I am up at around five in the morning and at the office by six-thirty. I meet with clients throughout the day, which more often than not involves email and phone calls— unless I am meeting with a client for lunch. I go home at about seven, have dinner, and try to find some time to talk on the phone with my teenage daughter—who is at a private boarding school. Then it’s back to the paperwork and late night conference calls.” The late night calls, it transpires, are routine: Mr W is part of his bank’s Global Leadership Program, which involves dealing with the New York office several times a week. All this is presented as “routine,” although tellingly 2  The case study of Mr W derives from research funded by the Australian Research Council, 2008–2011. Mr W is a composite figure of several people interviewed for this project, and this fictionalized character has been deployed in order to disguise individual identities.

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Mr W casually mentions that he is often abroad for work. As it happens, he was working away from home on a staggering 268 nights in 2007—a figure calculated by his secretary at the conclusion of our first interview. Life in the fast lane of investment banking has changed enormously in recent years, mostly as a result of communications and travel revolutions. Investment bankers cultivate the look less of the dashing businessman than of the prosperous tourist: expensive suits, open neck designer shirts and lots of business/first class travel. Mr W is able to travel the globe so regularly partly because the individuals and firms which employ him demand this and partly because new information technologies make it so easy to track and trace the movements of his staff back in London. The elite network of globals in which Mr W operates is one of short-term projects, business-on-the-move and continual mobility. What supports the flowing work worlds of such globals, however, are the largely immobile staff based at head offices. Implicated in all global mobile lives are various immobility regimes (Urry 2007). That mobility is always intricately intertwined with immobility is a point that clearly applies to Mr W’s professional and personal situation—for example, he and his wife employ a live-in housekeeper as well as a personal assistant. The personal assistant is charged with “organizing” their professional and social lives, right down to “scheduling” weekend get-togethers with their daughter, often in far-away cities where one of the parents is located for work. As regards work itself, Mr W’s extensive mobilities depend primarily on the management strategies he deploys for running the office at a distance. “One thing I’ve learned over time in the management of staff,” he comments, “is that you get the best out of people by leaving them to get on and produce, but also keeping tabs on their productivity and performance just so that people know that they must deliver.” From such a calculated and detached perspective, Mr W is able to retain management control without being overly burdened by the daily detail of the office. As a result, he estimates that only around 15 per cent of his time is ever spent on management or administrative duties. Attachment is the prevailing vice of those who have not managed to adapt to the new ethos of “flexibility” promoted by the global electronic economy. Without explicitly saying so, Mr W makes it evident that there is little room in his professional life for attachment to colleagues or places. The new regime of short-term projects, episodic contacts and fast assembled/disassembled teams means that the course of his daily life has little sense of continuity or routine. Mr W captures this nicely in his self-description of professional roles and responsibilities: whether performing as investment banker, or a manager, an expert on hedge funds, a networker or real estate guru, it is part of Mr W’s talent to make any contradictions between these roles appear untroubling. Indeed one of the most noticeable aspects of his working life, as he recounts it, is the requirement to continually shift between different sectors of the broader economy; almost all aspects of the global marketplace and its dazzling new technologies are used by Mr W to fashion and restructure his

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working life involving continual mobility, detached cooperativeness, short-term connections and networked associations. Overall there is much that is supremely attractive, indeed seductive, about Mr W’s professional life of intensive mobilities and fast happenings. A vast income, luxury residences, global travel, high social connections, and a “designer” lifestyle: Mr W confides that he and his wife are the envy of their friends and acquaintances. Intriguingly, the relentless demands of travel and networking arising from his job aren’t experienced as constraining. Far from the stereotypical “time poor” senior executive, he describes how he finds himself “plunging” into ever-new projects, work tasks, or networked possibilities. In fact, the global lifestyle which allows Mr W to “get away from it all” (the office, colleagues, family) recasts him as someone always getting ahead of themselves. He is, on his own reckoning, always planning and re-planning the future. His professional networks appear to feed ongoing financial and work possibilities which drift in his self-imposed manoeuvrings and compulsive reinventions of self. If Mr W’s world of corporate entries and exits engenders increased personal freedom, this is partly because he is a self-described “global,” and certainly a man hugely rich in network capital. As he navigates the complex systems of the global economy (electronic money flows, financial databases and the spreadsheet culture of investment banking) with ease, Mr W’s language is resolutely that of the corporate “insider.” But there are significant limits here as well. First, there is a familiar conflict between the global and the local which raises seemingly insurmountable dilemmas as regards Mr W’s experience of the world. He describes, for example, a sense of feeling overwhelmed—“sometimes I become quite flat”—upon returning home from corporate travel. He talks about his family’s demands on his time; his daughter has suffered from various illnesses (including eating disorders) in recent years, and he finds himself carrying out “make-up” or “repair” time in their relationship when making time to see her after periods away. Then there is his marriage: “it’s odd going from weeks of phone calls and texting to sitting opposite each other in the kitchen.” And, finally, the demands of his staff. He finds it irritating that his staff so often present issues as urgent the moment he arrives home—just when he is trying to “catch up” with domestic demands. Second, switching between the time of work-related travel and the time of routine practices is unnerving to him. There is undoubtedly a somewhat cold, detached pleasure which he derives from the “empty time” of global roaming—airport check-ins, first class lounges, limousine transfers, hotel business suites. These are sites where obligations to others are minimal, and Mr W can engage his passion for de-contextualized living to the hilt. The more fixed social relations he experiences in London, by comparison, are drab.

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Global Mobilities: On the Arts of Elite Escape The new institutional mobile realm, with its ever-changing, frenetic networking, promotes a novel relationship to the self, to other people as well as to shared cultural life among present and aspiring members of the global elite. As we can glean from Mr W’s experiences, the new institutional regime puts a special emphasis on swiftness, speed, weightlessness, dexterity and flexibility (Bauman 2000; Elliott and Urry 2010; Sennett 2000). These are ideological values coveted by advanced capitalism; but the point to note is that they press in deeply upon the self. Subjected to these institutional changes, the globals have been the fastest to embrace this ideology. There are six important forms in and through which the making and remaking of the lifestyles and life-strategies of global elites now occurs. These social forms comprise detached engagement; floating; speed; networked possibilities; distance from locality and, mapping of escape routes. Firstly, life in the fast lane with other globals requires a sense of detached engagement. Such engagement through disengagement ranges from “dropping in” to organizational discussions through email whilst working abroad to the monitoring of professional contacts in thick networks. It is also evident that the prospects for the detached engagement of individualized actors increases the higher one is within an organization or firm. At the top, crisis is normalized and change ever-present, and so shifting from one network to another network with speed and agility becomes central to professional and personal success. Knowing how to move in the networked world, perhaps even more so than the acquisition of specific technical skills themselves, is fundamental to what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2007) call “the new spirit of capitalism.” As Boltanski and Chiapello summarize this ethos, the global business elite are “putting an accent on polyvalence, on flexibility of employment, on the ability to learn and to adapt to new functions rather than on the possession of skills and acquired qualification, on the capacity to gain trust, to communicate, to ‘relate’” (2007: 187). We should perhaps note that the inverted comma here around “relate” does not, in our view, indicate a lack of expenditure of emotional energy invested in work and professional networking. On the contrary, and as Mr W’s narrative indicates, many globals feel themselves to be taxed to their limit in terms of their daily communications and relationships with colleagues. The point is that less and less often in today’s fast-paced mobile world does the growing speed of networked communications lead many globals to “open themselves up” to others. From one angle, this is hardly surprising. Living in networked time means being continually on the move, both physically and emotionally. Second, abetted by various economic forces including financial deregulation, globals turn towards floating both their organizational responsibilities and their control over subordinates within firms. By floating, I mean to stress the collapse of managerially structured executive routines, as well as of the mentality of long-term “careers” (Sennett 2000). To say that mobile-driven organizations promote this floating orientation is to say that, like all obsolescent paradigms, the “scientific”

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approach to management which dominated the advanced societies during the late 20th century—involving the continuous presence of executives and ongoing surveillance of employees—has become a formidable barrier to progress in the early 21st century. By contrast, and strikingly, the new approach to management involves a kind of non-management. The French economist Daniel Cohen (1998) says of today’s global business elite: “there are no more white collars who give orders to blue collars—there are only collars of mixed colours who confront the task they have to resolve”. The task to be resolved, we might add, is more often than not an episodic project—each of which creates further opportunities for networking as well as the likely improvement in opportunities for employment elsewhere or further promotion. This is why floating is both network-driven and self-interested. Mr W could afford to start job discussions with other companies so soon after commencing his new executive position because much of his working time is spent on short-term, fast-changing projects. Not only is there the opportunity to engage in these networking discussions with other senior professionals, but the networked identities promoted by mobile organizations seem to demand this of these individuals. Third, globals define their identities increasingly through the intensity and extensity of their mobilities—especially its speed. For example, Mr W is arguably a new kind of global to the extent that he is a technician of speed—always on the move, ready to travel at a moments notice, adept at navigating the corporate sensation of speed and global shift of movement. Multi-tasking across space and time is part of this; but another part is thinking and acting in instant-response mode—as the next corporate directive arrives by email, text, fax. It is as if, shifting through the fast lanes of the global electronic economy, part of Mr W’s talent is to “swoop down” on particular corporate institutions, possible mergers or financial deals and show companies how they have become trapped in set ways of doing things. Note again, though, that it is the speed of Mr W’s command over mobilitysystems that makes a difference to the financial world in which he moves. He is at the centre of global finance working in London; he is ever-ready for “virtual consultation” via his mobile or video-conferencing; he arrives to “lock in” the deal (in Singapore, Hong Kong or Dubai) and then, just as swiftly, has exited. “Speed of movement,” writes Zygmunt Bauman, “has become today a major, perhaps the paramount factor in social stratification and the hierarchy of domination” (2002: 27). Mr W’s speed of movement is necessary to “keep up” with the networking, deal-making and swirl of contemporary market forces. Fourth, globals organize much of their professional and personal lives in and through networked possibilities—the basis upon which those high in network capital achieve ever higher forms of connectivity with other globals via networks, connectors and hubs. Here the “networked” dimensions of the self, in contrast to the self as a generic phenomenon, presume a reflexive architecture of informational connections. How far certain individuals are able to exploit networked possibilities depends to a large extent on how rich they are in terms of informational connectivity.

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Fifth, if globals are intricately interwoven with culture of global capitalism, this is partly because they have learnt the language of cosmopolitanism. As a political doctrine, cosmopolitanism is concerned with—among other things—what we owe each other as persons as the result of a shared humanity (e.g., Appiah 2007). As an element of the lived experience of the elite we are considering here, however, the cosmopolitanism of globals retains the more attractive qualities of the high culture propagated by political theorists and philosophers, but combines this with an understanding of “humanity” fashioned in the image of the consumerist space of designer brands and opulent living. That is to say, this is a version of cosmopolitanism which fits hand in glove with the values of transnational corporations, or as some have dubbed it a kind of depoliticized postmodern culture (Eagleton 2000). Elsewhere this has been termed “banal globalization” (Szerszynski and Urry 2006). What can be said is that this is a worldview pitched towards the post-national or transnational, certainly as far as business, economics, media, information and technology are concerned. As such, distance from locality—expressed as distaste for traditional identities and communities—is a key social form influencing the making of identities of globals under conditions of mobile life. Finally, the mobile life of globals is almost exclusively about elsewhere. Much of Mr W’s professional and personal life, for example, can be seen as a detailed mapping of possible escape routes. We are, essentially, talking about life experienced as a series of exits. From this angle, each exit is in turn followed by new entrances. And these entrances then entail further exits. This notion of escapism raises, of course, the thorny question of what it is, exactly, that globals are escaping from? For those preoccupied with escapism, the lure of what one is escaping to is often imagined as altogether different from what one is escaping from. However, this is rarely the case. Adam Phillips, in a recent study of escapism, writes: “If we privilege what we are escaping from as more real—or in one way or another, more valuable—than what we are escaping to, we are preferring what we fear to what we seem to desire” (2001: 26–7). Fear, in this context, is the prospect of being overwhelmed by anxieties that concern entrapment, fixity, enclosure. Dread of immobility penetrates to the very roots of the psyche, partly because to be immobile in a society of intensively mobile processes is a kind of symbolic death. By contrast, to be “on the move” provides a mode of orientation which, on the level of daily life, provides for a sense of independence as well as feelings of emotional security. The ultra-mobilities of globals might thus be seen as an attempt to “master” an otherwise unsettling and dangerous world: the capacity to always be elsewhere is the capacity to thwart whatever debilitating circumstances arise within local contexts (Iyer 2001).

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The Self-Stylization of Globals The life of the global can be thought of as a kind of aesthetic performance. That is to say, the power and prestige of global elites is less a pre-existing social or structural category than it is a type of identity that has to be enacted, performed and represented to others.3 Just as Mr W performs a global elitism for others through his relentless business travel, incessant virtual communications and lavish lifestyle, so other globals around the world undertake the ongoing daily work of an unconscious enactment and subjective representation of this new elitism. Throughout the last 10 to 15 years, sociologists have sought to understand better the social practices which affirm a sense of exclusivity, superiority, status and wealth. These social practices of “distinction,” to invoke Pierre Bourdieu’s term, turn increasingly on the symbolism of luxury, exclusiveness and expense in legitimating the growing separation between global elites and the less well off. Many sociologists have emphasized in this connection the key significance of society’s shift from industrial to post-industrial economies, bound up as this has been with a thorough-going transformation away from production and towards consumption. In looking for clues as to what such large-scale shifts in the economy entail for today’s inequalities of wealth and status, social theorists have concentrated in particular on the social value derived from consumerism and consumer capitalism. One influential argument is that disorganized capitalism differs from organized capitalism through, among other things, its increasing semioticization of economic life (Lash and Urry 1994). A focus on the growing semiotic dimensions of the new economy—finance, information technology and the service sectors—has also been pivotal to much recent social science research (du Gay and Pryke 2002). Movement—relentless, tireless, burdensome—has become the degree zero of contemporary societies, at once an index of social status (ranging from enforced migration to luxuriant global tourism) and the medium through which social relations are organized. It is not only that many people are travelling faster and further than in any previous historical era, although that is surely the case. It is rather that more and more people voluntarily travel without end—without ever arriving at a final destination—and that such travel in itself confers prestige, power and symbolic status. The mobile world, for its part, opens up to a new reckoning of economy and the political, and in the process confers an endlessly expanding multitude of new possibilities, pleasures and perils. The desirable life is not only about money and possessions; it is about mobilities, the capacity to escape—to be elsewhere. Mobility status today stands for an addiction to power and pleasure.

3  Social science research concerned with wealth and power has, for the most part, been preoccupied with the descriptive or objective description of elitism. See, for example, E. Carlton, The Few and the Many: A Typology of Elites, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996 and M. Dogan, Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power, Leiden: Brill, 2003.

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Today the styling and stylization of “the global” has become an increasingly well-identified social figure. As the spending and investment strategies of the wealthy reaches such unprecedented levels as to generate an increasingly separate economy of the super-elite, globals undertake a series of stylizations aimed at the pursuit of luxury, good taste, exclusivity, authenticity, glamor and knowledge. From Bulgari luxury fashion goods to Bentley convertibles, from Louis Vuitton luggage to Prada designer clothes: the gap between wealth and extreme wealth is more and more defined through the acquisition, consumption and display of expensive goods, products and services. Whilst others can no doubt be found, globals have one key lifestyle thread in common: relentless travel. Whether illustrious investment bankers, new economy entrepreneurs or globe-trotting architects their lifestyles were linked through chauffeured limousines, airport business-class lounges and five-star hotels. Life “on the move” was at once personally exhilarating and professionally taxing, but all agreed that they felt at the edge of a massive cultural shift. For few of the old social coordinates (career, family, social routine) held much weight any longer; life at the top had moved on at least for these interviewees, and this seemed to produce lifestyles that were mobile, weightless, plural and freeing. It was as if, for these globals, someone had said “you don’t have to live the way your parents did.” Quite a number of these interviewees were people born into considerable wealth, and so their childhoods had been filled with travel, journeys and adventures. But these were still mobilities with a fixed reference point of “home” at the back of their minds. By contrast, the world of mobilities lived by many globals today is more rootless. With homes dotted throughout the world, endless business travel and family life restructured around episodic get-togethers, the old social coordinates divided between firmly around work and home have somewhat evaporated. Communication analysts Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (2006) have sought to probe the semiotic conditions and consequences of what they call “super-elitism,” specifically with reference to the stylization of elites in frequentflyer programmes. Frequent-flyer programmes, they argue, at once generate social anxieties about status and confer symbolic prestige and power upon its members. According to this view, the normative production of luxury is intricately interwoven with a personalized framework by which “rewards,” “awards,” “privileges” and “entitlements” accrue to identities marked as “elite.” This framework extends from material benefits such as wider cabin legroom or priority airport check-in to more semiotic indulgences such as luxury brand champagne or the refined elegance of business and first class lounges. As Jaworski and Thurlow note, “frequent flyer programmes go to great lengths to promote design over substance, seducing passengers with the expressive utility of things and appealing to the indefinable nature of ‘good taste’. Given the relative immateriality but semiotic potency of all these resources, frequent-flyer programmes are thereby able to fabricate an aspirational lifestyle by which to stylize their passengers as distinctive and superior” (ibid: 131).

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To adequately generate all these new desires, affects, aspirations and addictions, as well as inscribe them with broader symbolic markers of distinction, the intensive mobile fields of globalization must do more than rely on attitudes of distinctiveness and superiority. In the society of multiple and intensive mobilities, the gap between those keeping on the move and those less on the move—to say nothing of those not moving at all—is of fundamental significance to contemporary boundaries between self and others. “To travel,” as Robert Louis Stevenson famously put it, “is a better thing than to arrive”—which in our own time of interdependent digitized systems of mobility has been raised to the second power. We are dealing, then, with a symbolic register in which anxiety becomes expressed in and around the differentiated field of mobilities. “Keeping on the move” appeals increasingly as a glamorously stylish life-strategy, linking as mobility does with new possibilities of desire, difference, otherness, exotica and plenitude. Concomitantly, and from the other angle, fears of “getting stuck” become debilitating. Globals, Mobilities, Space Since globals are largely de-anchored from traditional social coordinates of routine work, family commitments and community responsibilities, the experimental nature of their lives—the thrills and spills of globality, as it were—is particularly pronounced. To navigate these professional and personal complexities, globals employ a number of mobile life-strategies to create novel connections with their own identities, the lives of others and the wider network society. This chapter has identified various identity forms used by globals—consisting of detached engagement, speed, networked possibilities; distance from locality and the mapping of escape routes. The social practices of globals suggest the new formulation of mobilities and mobile lifestyles. It must be acknowledged, of course, that the ultra-mobile ways of living charted by globals remains a form of life conducted by only a small elite. Nevetheless, it is the mobile lifestyles of globals that are routinely held up as a normative ideal by many sections of society—especially in popular culture and the media—and in turn mimicked by many other people across lower social strata. The cultural influence of globals, in other words, should not be underestimated. References Appiah, K.A. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Bauman, Z. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity. –––. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. –––. 2002. The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity.

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Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. CBS News. 2008. “Rich/Poor Income Gap Widening to Chasm.” Retrieved April 1, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/03/earlyshow/living/ money/main4068795.shtml. Cohen, D. 1998. Richesse du monde: parvretes des nations. Paris: Flammarion. Dolgon, C. 2005. The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise. New York University Press. du Gay, P. and Pryke, M. (eds). 2002. Cultural Economy. London: Sage. Eagleton, T. 2000. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott, A. and Urry, J. 2010. Mobile Lives. London: Routledge. Frank, R. 2008. Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. New York: Three Rivers Press. Haseler, S. 2000. The Super-Rich: The Unjust New World of Global Capitalism. London: Macmillan. Ho, K. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press. Iyer, P. 2001. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, & the Search for Home. New York: Vintage. Jameson, F. 1999. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kroll, L. 2008. “The World’s Billionaires 2008”, available from 5 March 2008, Fortune Magazine. Retrieved April 1, 2010, http://finance.yahoo.com/bankingbudgeting/chapter/104557/The-World’s-Billionaires;_ylt=AqbOGjBvWGzzXe zTVP26NB4y0tIF>. Lash, S. and Urry, J. 1994. Economies of Signs and Spaces. London: Sage. –––. 1987. The End of Organized Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lemert, C. 2008. Social Things. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Luttwak, E. 1998. Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy. London: HarperCollins. Phillips, A. 2001. Houdini’s Box: On the Arts of Escape. London: Faber and Faber. Scott, J. 1997. Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sennett, R. 2000. The Corrosion of Character. New York: Norton. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. 2006. “Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar.” British Journal of Sociology 57(1): 113–31. Tett, G. 2009. Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. New York: Free Press. Thurlow, C. and Jaworski, A. 2006. “The Alchemy of the Upwardly Mobile: Symbolic Capital and the Stylization of Elites in Frequent-flyer Programmes.” Discourse and Society 17(1): 99–135.

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UN News Center. 2008. “Income Gap between Rich and Poor is Huge and Growing,” Warns UN Report. Retrieved April 1, 2010, http://www.un.org/ apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28590&Cr=INCOME&Cr1=ILO. Walby, S. 2009. Globalization and Inequalities. London: Sage.

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Chapter 9

Studying Immigrant Entrepreneurs: From Ordinary to Big Players in the Transnational Capitalist Class Karl Froschauer and Lloyd L. Wong

This chapter examines and assesses the various qualitative methodologies that researchers use, or could use, to study elite immigrant entrepreneurs. Most of them are ordinary business owners, whereas a few are part of the Canadian elite or global super-elite. Gaining access to elites, by virtue of who they are, can be difficult for researchers (Hertz and Imber 1995a: viii). Nevertheless, as other chapters in this volume and the literature demonstrate, researchers can overcome the difficulties and barriers to elite access. Elites can be characterized in terms of the wealth they own (Davies 2009; United Nations University 2006). The 16th World Wealth Report of 2012 (WWR 2012) indicates in 2011 a total of 11 million rich people owned investable wealth of more than one million dollars; among them were 100,000 people worldwide that were super-rich, owning more than $30 million (WWR 2012: 6, 8). Canada in 2011 had 280,000 millionaires (0.8 percent of its population) and among them a small fraction of super-rich, including immigrants (WWR 2012: 9). In recent decades, immigration societies, such as Canada, have designed their immigration policies to recruit globally, including from Asia, the wealthiest one percent. Countries have great influence over migration policies that allow those who achieved elite status, including entrepreneurs and investors, to migrate. The majority of countries belonging to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) “have adopted migration policy measures in the recent past that apply specifically to foreigners willing to migrate in order to create or operate their own business or invest capital in the country” (Desiderio 2010: 63). Such policies favor migrants that attained elite status in terms of wealth and corporate experience abroad. This change indicates that many countries have developed less egalitarian and more elitist immigration policies. In time and through migration polices, domestic elites, corporate elites, and immigrant elites can be penetrated or replaced by different ethnic groups in a variety of economic sectors (Theodorson and Theodorson 1969). Early scholarly work in Canada on the corporate elite by John Porter and Wallace Clement, in the 1960s and 1970s, investigated members of the Canadian and Continental corporate elite through original surveys (Clement 1975: 221, 1977: 339, 352,

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1983: 31). One of Porter’s findings was that ethnic minorities and immigrants were by and large absent in a British dominated elite. Instead of using surveys, Peter Newman (1999), in his more journalistic approach, obtained direct access to the Canadian corporate elite through unstructured face-to-face interviews and indirect access through the analysis of secondary data. In terms of ethnicity, Newman does describe the rise of a Jewish segment of the Canadian establishment. Subsequently in the 1980s and 1990s, William Carroll (2009) surveyed changes in the Canadian corporate elite through social network analysis of corporate boards. Recently, he updated the changes in Canada’s corporate elite that are associated with globalization, neo-liberalism, the North American Free Trade Agreement and continuing demographic diversity (Carroll 2009). In general, immigrant elites can be understood as “leaders, decision makers or influential, and not too different from spokesmen, dignitaries, or central figures” in immigrant communities (Marvick 1989: 243). Elites are those in immigrant communities who “get the most of what there is to get … whether money, esteem, power, or some other condition of life people seek and struggle for” (Marvick 1989: 244). In Canada, within the Indian or Chinese communities, members of the elite can be business owners, political representatives, academics, members of exclusive networks and entrepreneurs. Elites can be professionals or businesspersons that have attained entrepreneur status in Asia, Europe, and South America. Recently, entrepreneurs from East Asia, in particular from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and South Korea, have arrived in Canada. In this chapter, the particular focus is on the entrepreneurs among the immigrant elite. Over the past two to three decades the study of immigrant entrepreneurs by social scientists has gradually emerged throughout various regions of the world. While research on migrant entrepreneurs is not abundant, this substantive subarea of the sociology of migration is advancing with scholarship in Asia, Europe, Australia, U.S.A. and Canada. The studies on immigrant entrepreneurs in Canada have either focused on business immigrants generally, or on the Chinese specifically, with a regional focus such as in the West in Calgary and Vancouver or in Ontario (Froschauer and Wong 2006; Hiebert 2003; Li 1992, 2010; Marger 2006; Wong 2004; Wong and Ng 2002). Personal interviews have been used in much of immigrant business research along with case studies. In part, because interviewees tend to speak “immigrant English,” the analysis of their answers could be more concerned with the contentthematic aspect of what immigrants said rather than with the concrete speech context of the interview and discussion situations. The selection of interviewees could be based more on the willingness of participants to take part than on the careful construction of a representative sample, although an attempt could be made to represent regions of origin and the major economic sectors in which immigrant entrepreneurs own businesses.

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Elite Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Ordinary and Big Players Among the elite immigrant entrepreneurs are Big Players in the global economy who facilitate transnational movement of capital and who are essentially part of a transnational capitalist class (Vertovec 1999: 452). Within recent developments in global capitalism they constitute a relatively new class fraction of the capitalist class—located between transnational and national fractions (Robinson 2004: 37). This relatively new transnational capitalist class with immigrant background can be defined more broadly than the traditional Marxist notion of the capitalist class by including international professionals. For example Sklair (2001: 17, 2002: 99) includes in his definition of the transnational capitalist class those who are globalizing professionals and merchants (see Elliott in this volume for another view). As such, many immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurs in Europe, North America and Australia could be considered as part of this transnational capitalist class. In the Canadian case many Chinese immigrants are transnational capitalists who have come to Canada as investors and entrepreneurs under the Canadian Business Immigration Program since its inception in the 1980s. By the mid 1990s, immigrants became 36.2 per cent of the Canadian capitalist class and corporate elite (Carroll 2009: 39). Considering the class and power differential in interview situations is important, because the interview is a negotiated process, particularly in the case of Big Players, such as those who are powerful and influential transnational capitalists. Moreover, as researchers move up in their study of the socio-economic hierarchy of elites, the likelihood of access decreases. For instance, because of difficulties of gaining access, scholars have not used intrusive research strategies, such as personal interviews, in studying the Canadian elite. This has also been the case in researching elite immigrant entrepreneurs who are Big Players and part of the transnational capitalist class. Should researchers gain access in interviewing such elite members they may well self-censor their questions and interview reports, especially if such interviewees have used the threat of libel suits, as Conrad Black (former Big Player in the newspaper business) has, to stave off critical reports by journalists of his corporate conduct. While access to transnational entrepreneurial elites is difficult it is not impossible as recent work by David Ley (2010) demonstrates. Ley includes recent wealthy Chinese immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong in unstructured interviews and a telephone survey and he refers to them as “millionaire migrants.” However, elites themselves are also not a homogenous group and arguably those who are in the super elite, and who are billionaires, may be more inaccessible (but see Elliott in this volume). Therefore, alternative research strategies need to be examined. These include content analysis, biography, institutional ethnography, and case study. We suggest that these alternative strategies may complement data from interviews, for triangulation and crystallization, or may be used in lieu of when access is not possible. As such the case of Victor Li will be examined first to provide a short interpretative analysis of him as a case study. He is a multi

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billionaire transnational capitalist with Canadian citizenship who has been a victim of a personal kidnapping. Victor Li: The Case of a Super-Elite Big Player and Immigrant Entrepreneur Victor Li is a super-elite immigrant entrepreneur and part of the transnational capitalist class. He is the eldest of two sons of the Li Ka-Shing who lives in Hong Kong and who was ranked by Forbes as the 11th richest person in the world in early 2011 with an estimated net worth of $26 billion U.S. (Forbes 2011). Both Victor Li and his brother Richard Li are Canadian citizens, having immigrated to Canada in the 1980s and becoming involved in many business enterprises. Victor Li’s involvement in his family’s business includes being the chairperson of Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd. His family holds the controlling interests in Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd and many transnational corporations are included as part of the group’s holdings. These include Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, TOM Group Ltd., Hong Kong Electric Holdings Ltd, CK Life Sciences Int’l (Holdings) Inc. to name a few. Husky Energy Inc. of Calgary is held by Cheung Kong. This business conglomerate had a market capitalization of HK$ 891 billion (Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd 2011) in early 2011 and includes property development, property investment, real estate agency, estate management, hotels, telecommunications, e-commerce, finance and investment, retail and manufacturing, ports and related services, energy, infrastructure projects and materials, media, and biotechnology. The Cheung Kong Holdings’ website states that they have operations in 52 countries throughout the world and employ approximately 250,000 people. Victor and Richard Li’s selection of and arrival in Canada was based on a family decision of wealth dispersal to find a country where their investments were going to be safe because of a foundation in British law of protection of property ownership (Milner 1992: 244). As a consequence Victor Li had a residence in Vancouver for more than a decade supervising businesses that included holdings in the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and Concord Pacific Developments on the Expo lands in Vancouver. The success of transnational capitalists often depends on the prudent observation of geopolitics. Victor Li has been keenly aware of this and opportunistically and fluidly utilizes his Canadian citizenship flexibly. Since becoming a Canadian citizen in the 1980s he has managed to jumpstart a run of business ventures and this has enabled him to maneuver the flow of capital and expertise across national borders smoothly. These transnational practices are crucial for exploiting the vicissitudes of the global economy and the diversification of capital. Victor Li is as a very private, demure person who shuns publicity (Stainsby 1989). He is a loyal disciple to his father and his personal life is kept secret. For example, he has not publicly confirmed or denied whether his wife is from Vancouver or not. The only thing that is publicly known is that she is a Canadian

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and so are their children. Despite the secrecy of his personal life, his public business moves demonstrate how guanxi has facilitated his transnational capitalist ventures. His transnational forays and takeovers of key Canadian businesses relies on an intricate network of social and interpersonal ties. For instance, Fraser Elliot, the founder of the well-known law firm Stikeman Elliot, helped Li secure the Expo lands deal. In addition, his firm represented Victor Li in the acquisition of Husky Oil. So powerful were these business and friendship ties that Stikeman Elliot itself eventually opened an office in Hong Kong on the 18th floor of the China Building, two floors above Li Ka-Shing’s headquarters (Chan 1996). As a master of longterm relationships, Victor Li has been also intimate with the CIBC of which his father is reported to be the largest individual shareholder. The partnerships with the CIBC gave Li instant credibility in Canadian banks and the Canadian business community. Another nexus for Li’s relationships in Canada is Robert Fung, a successful Toronto financier. Fung’s wide corporate ties have connected Victor Li to some of the most powerful people in the nation such as Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin1 (Lee-Young 2004). These connections have paved the way for Li’s continued presence and control in many deals in Canada. Victor Li’s corporate moves are clearly illustrative of transnationalism “from above” whereby, as a powerful transnational capitalist owning and controlling major transnational corporations, he is engaged in the hegemonic forces and practices of capital while seeking economic dominance in many parts of the world. In the Li’s case, Canadian citizenship status can be a family asset should foreign investment regulations hinder corporate takeovers. His brother, Richard Li’s Canadian citizenship status became the grist for the mill in the bid for control of Husky Energy in 1987. His father Li Ka-shing bought a 43 per cent interest in the firm and Victor got 9 per cent. This gave the family a majority stake. Citizenship status also played a role in Victor Li’s attempt to take over financially troubled Air Canada while being restructured under bankruptcy protection. However, local resistance by workers to have their benefits curtailed can set limits of transnationalism “from above” approach. In early 2000, Victor Li through his Trinity Time Investments Company proposed to inject $650 million which would have bought him a 31 per cent controlling interest in Air Canada (Chipello 2003; Westhead 2003). However, restrictions of 25 per cent foreign investment in the firm could have hindered the takeover. But despite his residency in Hong Kong, Victor Li’s Canadian citizen allowed the Canadian government to rule that the proposed purchase did not amount to a foreign takeover. Victor Li’s offer was selected by Air Canada’s board over the offer of a rival bidder, a New York firm called Cerberus Capital Management. Air Canada workers, however, did not support Victor Li’s strategy to shift the purchase risk to their pension fund and to reduce their health benefits. Victor Li’s Trinity Time Investments company’s attempted to alter the pension plan so that 1  Jean Chretin and Paul Martin were both Prime Ministers of Canada.

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the investment risk to the workers would be increased while his company’s risk in purchasing Air Canada would be reduced. This pension plan proposal was used by Victor Li as a condition of his investment into Air Canada (CBC News 2004). As well, he had also proposed that Air Canada employees pay thirty per cent of their health care costs. Based on lack of support of his position by Air Canada workers, he ultimately withdrew his offer to purchase the airline. Such initiatives are illustrative of transnational capitalist hegemony and the financial logic of capital accumulation. Victor Li, and other super-elites of the transnational capitalist class, are engaged in transnationalism “from above” in that their activities reiterate existing power hierarchies that favor elites (Mahler 1998: 72). These Big Players facilitate the flow of many billions of dollars to and from Canada and while at the same time they operate under, but also try to influence, Canadian laws and regulatory regimes. This example of Victor Li, which demonstrates his powerful economic position, suggests that certain strategies are required of researchers to enhance their access to elites and super-elites. Further it also implies that, given the large power differential between the interviewer and interviewee, there are important factors that affect the interview itself and the interpretation of the interview data. Unfortunately, in 1996 Victor Li was the victim of a kidnapping in Hong Kong and was taken at gunpoint by Cheung Chi Keung. Within two days his father paid a ransom of 1.38 billion Hong Kong dollars ($177 million U.S. dollars) for his release. In 1999 his kidnapper Cheung Chi Keung was captured in Guangzhou, swiftly brought to trial on the kidnapping and other crimes, and was executed. Since this incident Victor Li travels with bodyguards. Needless to say a researcher attempting to interview Victor Li would find face a barrier of corporate gate-keepers who ensure his privacy and security. Thus a personal interview with him, while not impossible, would be unlikely. So what are the alternative strategies that could be employed? Institutional ethnography is not a likely alternative as access would not be possible as the corporations that Victor Li is involved with are private and there would also be problems of access to interviewing those in upper level management where the sites of authority and decision making occur. The next section examines these factors and is then followed by a discussion of some alternative research strategies that may be utilized either in lieu of interview data, if access is not possible, or as complementary methodologies and data to interview data for triangulation and crystallization. These include content analysis, biography, institutional ethnography, and case study.

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Personal Interviews Strategies to Enhance Access to Elite Immigrant Entrepreneurs Access to elites is difficult for everyone and this certainly includes academic researchers. Moreover, in the current post-9/11 era where concerns about public safety, terrorism, and crime have exacerbated, access would appear to be even more difficult. The documentary film Inside Job directed by Charles Ferguson (2010) incorporated interviews of the political and financial elite in the United States to assess their role in fostering to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This demonstrates that there are a few exceptions. Some recent academic work in Australia and the United States, such as Elliot in this volume and others, illustrate that access to the corporate and transnational elites is not impossible. Gilding’s work (2010) conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, on the subject matter of kinship and capitalism, involved conducting interviews with whom he referred to as the “super rich” in Australia and who were selected from an Australian business magazine that listed the top 200 wealthiest Australians. Guilding argues that in his case in Australia respondents were largely indifferent to social science thus making access possible. In the United States, in a case of more ordinary elites, Beaverstock (2005) interviewed 30 transnational elites of British origin in New York’s financial district and who arrived as inter-company transferees. His interviews gathered data on their occupations, career paths, dislocation, households, and business, working, and social networks. Once potential elite immigrant entrepreneurs have been identified, usually through some formal list or directory, one of the main obstacles is ascertaining access. Undoubtedly guaranteeing anonymity for interviewees is a requirement that enhances potential access and also having a formal introduction from a distinguished or well known person to the potential participants helps. For researchers a key issue may be finding immigrant entrepreneurs and locating a space for interviewing given that many live hyper-mobile lifestyles. For many immigrant entrepreneurs a key issue may be finding the time in their busy schedules to participate. For the Big Players who may perceive potential issues of personal risk and safety, there are the obstacles and buffers set up by corporate and organizational gatekeepers (Hertz and Imber 1995b: 1) which prevent researchers from establishing contact, either physically or electronically, with potential participants. However, the case of electronic communication may be perceived by these potential participants as involving less personal risk whereby they may agree to a telephone interview or an internet-based interview—for example using Skype. In the case of Big Players who view themselves as public figures electronic communications, such as their use of twitter, may not only facilitate access but the text may be a source of data. Useem (1995) encourages researchers to utilize serendipitous means that may help them gain access to business elites and in the case here of elite immigrant entrepreneurs there are several strategies. One strategy researchers would be to try

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to establish personal contact with potential participants by attending various private or semi-private events or locations that potential participants may be attending. In such half-way spaces immigrant entrepreneurs, immigration department officials, immigration lawyers, among others, may provide question and answer periods. Taking notes of answers during such question and answer periods or being able to interview key participants is what Sherry Ortner calls “interface ethnography” (Ortner 2010: 213). Such studying up opportunities could develop while attending association events, meetings, or conferences, in particular economic sectors such as high tech associations, professional associations, ethnic business associations, special interest and settlement associations (e.g., the United Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society, or SUCCESS in Vancouver). One example here is where the researcher would contact the president of an association (e.g., Hong Kong Canada Business Associaton—Vancouver) and request to be put on the agenda for a future meeting to explain her/his research project. Another example is where the researcher attends a social event where potential participants may be attending such as those for philanthropic causes, charity events, or galas. For example in Calgary there is an annual “Immigrants of Distinction” gala awards night, put on by Immigrant Services Calgary, and attended by hundreds of people including many elite immigrant entrepreneurs. While the ticket cost for this event is expensive ($100 in 2011) it nevertheless would allow the researcher to get into the same room as the potential participant. Factors Affecting the Interview and the Interpretation of Information Factors affecting the actual interview with elite immigrant entrepreneurs include the customary ones of polite and courteous demeanor and appropriate appearance. Business attire would be appropriate for interviewers given the corporate and elite status of the participants. The importance of the interviewer’s appearance is well documented in the literature (Berg 1998: 76). In essence the demeanor and appearance the researcher is necessary to at least superficially bridge the status gap between the interviewer and interviewee particularly when it involves the superelite or Big Players. As Aldridge (1993) has pointed out when there are similarities in status between participants and researchers then there is greater potential for shared meanings to occur and thus demeanor and appearance may elicit more forthright information provided by the participant. This however does not negate the fact that there would be substantial class differences between the elite and the researcher. The interviewer effect is in some cases minor (Fontana and Frey 2000: 650) while in other cases it could be a major factor. In any interview situation gaining trust from the interviewee is critically important and determines the quality of the information she/he provides. One unknown in relation to interviewing elite immigrant entrepreneurs is how the sex and “race”/ethnicity of the interviewer plays out. In a more general study Madriz (2000: 845) found, in research utilizing focus groups, that when the interviewer was the same “race”/ethnicity as the

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participants then rapport was enhanced. In contrast, Tomic and Trumper (this volume) found that shared ethnicity between interviewer and interviewee in many cases led to a lack of rapport and the questioning of the interviewer’s credibility and objectivity. Thus status, be it congruent or different between the interviewer and interviewee, may very well be important for the interview process. Given the particularly high social class of elite immigrant entrepreneurs class differences emerge as an important factor that cannot be manipulated like the sex and “race”/ ethnicity of the interviewer who could be hired and trained for the job. So awareness of how the factors of gender, “race”/ethnicity, and class affect the interview and inquiry process is critically important. Agrosino and Mays de Pérez (2000) go so far as to suggest that researchers, rather than holding these factors constant, should actually integrate them in both observation and analysis. This considers the actual interview as one of a “negotiated accomplishment” and as a negotiated text. Hence difference and inequality, particularly in terms of class, are part of the interview process (Fontana and Frey 2000). Undoubtedly this has implications on whether trust emerges on the part of the elite participant. If we accept the ethnomethodological notion that the interview is a negotiated accomplishment, with negotiated text, then the next challenge for the researcher would be to interpret the interview data in a way that nuances any personal and/ or institutional public fronts. Hoffman (1980: 45) recognized this situation a long time ago when he suggested that securing the interview is not tantamount to gaining access. Work by Thomas (1993) in interviewing important people in big companies suggested that one of the challenges was to disentangle what the elite executive may have said from her/his official corporate position and also to get beyond any formal corporate scripts and prepared public-relations text. Thus interviewers need to establish good rapport so that the interview leads to participants moving beyond prepared or standard scripts and thus enabling a more interpretative process of the “real” viewpoints and actions of participants (Ostrander 1993). Establishing good rapport often requires throw-away questions at the beginning of the interview process and the interviewer playing her/his role professionally in order to live up to the participants’ expectations (Berg 1998: 75). Complementary/Alternative Research Strategies Researchers need to consider complementary or alternative research strategies to personal interviews. Some of these strategies may need to be employed in situations where access to elite entrepreneurs cannot be attained. In other situations they may be used in combination with personal interviews. This would create data and methodological triangulation as well as crystallization. This latter notion of crystallization moves from the land surveyor and triangle analogy to that of an image of a crystal and its many sides to incorporate mulit-methods, data, and disciplines (Janesick 2000: 392). For example a recent multi-method study of elites (not immigrant entrepreneurs) by Neal and McLaughlin (2009) combined

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textual analysis of news media coverage and documentary archives, along with semi-structured interviews in their study elite policy-makers in Britain and the development of the Parekh Report on multiculturalism in Britain. Content Analysis Content analysis of text and visual representations can provide useful data in understanding elite immigrant entrepreneurs. Sources here include annual corporate reports, business journals, magazines, and newspapers, particularly business sections of general newspapers. Equally useful are corporate websites and topic specific and special interest websites. Electronic media sources and data can be very supportive of fieldwork on corporations and corporate settings and contain a rich electronic paper trail (Workman, Jr. 1995). For example, in 2011 the website of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry (SCCCI) indicated the first World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention (WCEC) was founded by the SCCCI in 1991. This website stated that such Convention’s “objective is to congregate Chinese Businessmen and entrepreneurs from around the world, on a meaningful and unique platform for business exchange and networking. This mega event has since become an important biennial international convention and has since been consistently and successfully held in several major cities all over the world. Two decades after its establishment, the SCCCI will be hosting the WCEC once again on October 5–7, 2011 at Singapore Resorts World Sentosa & Suntec Singapore.” Such conventions can allow researchers access to speeches and presentations of members of this transnational entrepreneurial elite. Sometimes for Big Player immigrant elites there are secondary interview data by journalists in newspapers and popular magazines and biographies (discussed in next section). For example the book Chinese Canadian: Voices from a Community (Huang et al. 1992) contains interviews with 23 Chinese Canadians some of whom are immigrants and successful entrepreneurs. Often published interviews and brief bios are associated with a major public event such as the naming of a university building or faculty after a benefactor (e.g., Martin Schulich, Tom and Caleb Chan). Content analysis of text can be very informative and researchers can further engage further in discourse analysis or critical discourse analysis. Not only is text important but any form of linguistically mediated data, including transcripts and interviews are important. Silverman (2000) also makes the point that interview materials should be treated as accounts rather than as a reflection of actual reality. As such the interpretative procedures in textual-critical discourse analysis are important (Gubrium and Holstein 2000) and in particular here is understanding elite immigrant entrepreneurs’ class position in systems of power. Biography and Life History Biographical accounts either in a few paragraphs or as books are valuable data for understanding those elite immigrant entrepreneurs who have become well known

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publicly. In some cases the information can come indirectly from biographical accounts of others associated with or related to the elite person being studied. For example useful data can be found on Victor Li in the biography of his father LiKa-Shing (Chan 1996). While autobiographies have the advantage of the actual narratives of the elite and her/his voice it may, as in the case of personal interviews, contain formal corporate and ideologically scripted positions and viewpoints. The growth and popularity of social media, such as Facebook (since 2004) and Twitter (since 2006), provides potentially new sources of biographical and life history data on immigrant entrepreneurs where researchers need to use the same cautions as mentioned above. Institutional Ethnography Over the past two decades institutional ethnography has emerged as an important empirical method of inquiry. However, it has not been utilized, to any extent, in studying elites because its focus is not on particular groups of people, individuals or subjects or participants. Rather, its focus is on mapping distinct social forms of coordination or social relations and thus attempts to explain social processes, in terms of what happens (McCoy 2008: 703). The sites of inquiry are where administrative decision making is made and the goal is to understand the social processes involved. Thus institution, as used in institutional ethnography, refers to “… the way clusters of ruling relations interconnect around a specific function ….” This means that one way of understanding these social relations is through collecting data by interviewing professionals or executives who occupy positions of authority although they themselves are not the objects of inquiry. The use of interviews in such a fashion to investigate and understand ruling relations is well documented in the literature by DeVault and McCoy (2006). As such, there is certainly a convergence of interest of studying elites and institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography wants to study relations of ruling, that is coordination and control, and this is precisely where many elites are located and where decisions are made. With respect to elite immigrant entrepreneurs some of them are located on boards of directors in various organizations and corporations. These range from board directorships on NGOs to multi-national companies and include, for example, immigrant service organizations like SUCCESS in Vancouver, or Immigrant Services Calgary, to corporations such as CIBC and Husky Energy. There is potential here to use institutional ethnography along with more group focused methods in studying elites in order to broaden the understanding of elites in terms of how and where they exercise power. Such a combined approach would enhance crystallization and would provide for not only data and methodological triangulation but also theory and investigator triangulation (Berg 1998: 5; Janesick 2000: 391).

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Case Studies of Members of the Corporate Elite The examination of specific individual elites or types of elites is common in popular journalism. For example journalist Brian Milner (1992) wrote a book entitled The Hidden Establishment: The Inside Story of Canada’s International Business Elite where he unveiled the cases of several influential transnational capitalists in Canada in the 1980s and early 1990s with the theme being that they were relatively unknown in terms of the Canadian establishment but yet very influential and part of an international elite. One of Milner’s cases was James Ting who was the founder of a small Canadian electronics manufacturing company called Semi-Tech in the 1980s. Ting was hailed as a transnational entrepreneur with global operations in places such as Tokyo, New York and Toronto after taking over well known companies such as Singer Sewing Machines and Sansui Electric. Milner portrayed him as exemplary of an ambitious immigrant who established himself in Canada with connections to foreign capital from Hong Kong and other places. Academic researchers conceptualize cases in many different ways (Ragin and Becker 1992: 9), however these will not be discussed here with respect to elite immigrant entrepreneurs. What the case study approach allows for however are sociological narrative accounts and analysis from events (Abbott 1992). So by exploring a specific case of a Big Player immigrant entrepreneur the narratives are the appropriate units and are the empirical evidence. At one level, when cases are individuals, then there may be overlap with biography and life history. At another level, when cases are organizations, then there may be overlap with institutional ethnography. However, most case studies would initially be of individuals or perhaps families. Stake (2000) argues that the utilization of the case study is not so much a methodological choice but more a choice of what is to be studied with the ultimate goal being a “population” of cases. He also draws a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental case studies wherein the approach may be one or the other or both (2000: 437). In regard to studying elite immigrant entrepreneurs an example might be studying the elite in the high-tech sector where the research could identify all the immigrant entrepreneurs who are CEOs of the top-100 hightech companies in British Columbia as published by the Business in Vancouver magazine in 2005. These elites would then constitute instrumental cases in order to provide insight on the general role that elite immigrant entrepreneurs play in high-tech. Marc Abeles found that immigrant entrepreneurs in Silcon Valley, who constitute a major proportion of the newly rich and forward-looking software and computer technology innovators, may well have played a more dominant role as CEOs in their enterprises than Asian members of the immigrant elite in British Columbia’s high tech sector (Abeles 2002: 59).

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Ethics, Power, and Knowledge What are the motives of the participant and the researcher in terms of the research project? What are the power relations between the two and what effect does that have? What are the ethical considerations that researchers need to be mindful of? There is scant literature on why elites would want to participate in a research project conducted by an academic researcher. Gilding’s work in Australia (2010) suggests that one of the motives elites have for participating is potential media exposure.2 He found that elites view participation as an opportunity to influence public relations and their legitimacy. He also found that another motive is psychological for elites in terms of personal therapy and self reflection. Regardless of what the motives may be it would be extremely rare that elites would be motivated to participate because of a desire to contribute to a process that may have implications for social change such as participatory action research. Simplistically, the motives of the researcher can be reduced to the traditional dichotomy of pure and applied research. While the position of neutrality of the researcher is laudable in the eyes of some funders and the scientific model the reality is one of the production of knowledge, not for knowledge’s sake, but rather for some application. For example, the recent Metropolis Canada3 initiative in Canada on immigration and integration matters, required academic researchers whom they funded to indicate what the policy implications were of their research findings. Another notion of neutrality is one where the researcher positions her/himself as an intermediary between the “haves and the have nots” (Hunter 1993) but this again, in reality, is unlikely to occur. Rather, researchers have certain interests for their research that are not neutral. Moreover, the intended direction of this social change, for most researchers, would not likely be in the direction of empowering elites. Hertz and Imber have succinctly described why most researchers are interested in studying elites. One reason is “… to expose the reach of power in the hope of clarifying it for those who are subject to it” (1995a: vii) and another is that knowledge and understanding may be translated into social policy as it pertains to the government and workplace (1995a: vii-viii). Positionality is critically important in an interview process. While the difference between elites’ upper class position and academic researchers’ middle class position is not huge, it is significant. In any event the researcher is not in a liminal position, as suggested above, but more a point of alterity (Ladson-Billings 2000: 262) vis-à-vis the elite entrepreneur. Does this mean that the researcher “looks upward meekly” (Galliher 1980) to the participant who holds and exudes power? The “supplicant” position is not necessary for the researcher. Rather, engagement in feminist methodological approaches can be a strategy of dealing with the power 2  See Corman et al. and Ryan and Lewer in this volume for contrasting viewpoints on motives. 3  Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada along with several Government of Canada Departments.

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differentials between the researcher and participant in elite research. For example Conti and O’Neil (2007) suggest that attention be drawn to the positionality of the researcher and that the notion of the researcher as an objective observer should be downplayed as her/his voice is not really absent. So researchers do not have to look up meekly if the position taken is one of where the interview is a negotiated process. There can be, nevertheless, tensions in the research process particularly when the researcher perceives or recognizes that power is being exercised. Since there is a reciprocal relationship between power and knowledge (Madibbo 2010) the challenge for the researcher here is to obtain certain forms of knowledge (such as meaningful data and information) from elites from a position of weakness. This is especially challenging when elites recognize that the information they are providing may potentially undermine or be used to resist their status and power. During the interview process various skillfully crafted probing questions may be strategically posed to participants to elicit this information and may be supplemented by a semistandardized or unstandardized interview process. In this latter case the interviewer develops, adapts, and generates questions that are appropriate to the given situation and the main purpose of the investigation (Berg 1998: 61). The researcher’s desire is to create knowledge, based on information provided by elites, and other data sources, may have policy implications and lead to social change. The desire for social change is not an ethical issue for qualitative researchers in Canada. As the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans4 state in a section on goals and objectives of qualitative research: (f) Research Goals and Objectives: The aims of qualitative research are very diverse, both within and across disciplines. The intended goals of qualitative projects may include “giving voice” to a particular population, engaging in research that is critical of settings and systems, or the power of those being studied, affecting change in a particular social environment, or exploring previously understudied phenomena to develop new theoretical approaches to research (Canadian Institutes of Health Research et al. 2010: 135, emphasis added).

The situation that potentially creates an ethical dilemma for researchers in interviewing elite immigrant entrepreneurs, or other elites, is in the area of informing or disclosing to potential participants the goals and objectives of their research project which is at the pre-consent phase. If the researcher states that one of the goals is to create knowledge to inform social policy to effect change, then there may be a greater chance that consent by the participant may not happen. In this case, as in others where access fails, alternative and unobtrusive research methodologies will need to be deployed. The grey area here is the extent of what 4  The Tri-Council refers to The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

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is ethically required in terms of explaining to participants the objectives of the research. For Canadian research the Tri-Council Policy Statement indicates the following under the section on expression of consent for ethics boards: “The consent process should be based on mutual understanding of the project goals and objectives between the participants and the researcher” (Canadian Institutes of Health Research et al. 2010: 140). Herein lies the grey area as researchers have discretion in terms of how they describe to participants their project goals and objectives in the preamble to obtain voluntary consent. It is interesting to note that in the study of participants who hold positions of power the Tri-Council Policy makes it less bureaucratic and easier to obtain consent as they state: REBs may need to consider the power relationship that might exist between researchers and participants, and whether a waiver of the requirement for signed written consent may affect the welfare of the participants. In cases where the participant holds a position of power, or routinely engages in communicative interactions similar to those involved in the research by virtue of their position or profession (e.g., a communications officer or spokesperson for an organization), consent can be inferred by the participant’s agreeing to interact with the researcher for the purpose of the research. For example, some political science research focuses on power structures and individuals in positions of power (e.g., a senior partner in a law firm, a cabinet minister or a senior corporate officer). In this type of research, where a prospective participant agrees to be interviewed on the basis of sufficient information provided by the researcher, it may be sufficient for the participant to signify consent to participate in the research (Canadian Institutes of Health Research et al. 2010: 140, emphasis added).

This Tri-Council policy provides a relaxation of voluntary consent procedures and qualifications for researchers studying the powerful and thus enables researchers more leeway and freedom in the divulging of the results of the study. As such, once researchers gain access the major challenges are not ethical ones but rather more of data analysis, interpretation, and reporting. As well, there exists the challenge of meeting the expectations of the funders of the research and securing follow up funding for future research. Conclusion What can we learn from examining and assessing qualitative methodologies that researcher can use, or potentially use, in studying the corporate elite, elite immigrant entrepreneurs, and the super-elite among immigrants? We found that many countries, including Canada, support immigration policies that are more stratified, in other words less egalitarian and more elitist, and allow through the agency of immigrant entrepreneurs the penetration of domestic corporate elites. Such policies can foster the migration of the wealthiest one percent of the global

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population, including business owners and investors. In exceptional cases, such immigration policies can also serve the migration of a super-elite (super-rich, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats, Freedland (2011)), for whom Canada as a nation constitutes merely an economic opportunity structure providing stepping stones to membership into the global super-elite—a transglobal community of peers (a nation onto themselves), with home and host country allegiance, or ethnicity, becoming secondary (Freedland 2011). Members of the super-elite may be part of the most influential and prestigious stratum in immigrant societies, such as Canada. We introduced the case of Victor Li, a member of the global super-elite, who immigrated to Canada, holds Canadian citizenship, and resides in Hong Kong. Because he is extremely wealthy, has been kidnapped, considers family business as important, he shuns publicity and employs gate-keepers. He practices a “transnationalism from above” by pursuing direct and portfolio investment opportunities in Canadian corporations, including real estate firms, oil companies, and Air Canada. Studying such super-elite members means overcoming access barriers that constitute a challenge for researcher. We have suggested a variety of qualitative methodological strategies, including interviews in private or semi-private settings to overcome barriers and challenges to studying members of Canada’s elite immigrant entrepreneurs. In such contexts, interview rapport can be affected by trust, business attire, ethnicity, race and gender. Interview results can be complemented multi-methodologically by surveys of elites, textual analyses, and triangulation. Another strategy to overcome challenges in studying up in such circumstances can be content analysis of annual corporate reports (should the entrepreneurs’ business be incorporated as a publicly traded firm rather than a family firm), corporate websites, and secondary interview data (e.g., from radio programs, newspapers, or other media). Also, a research project studying the immigrant elite can incorporate biographies, life histories, institutional ethnography, and case studies. Case studies of specific types of elites or super-elites in particular economic sectors (for example, immigrants of particular ancestries among the hightech elites, corporate elites, media elites, financial elites, and planning elites) can be the focus of inquiry. Researchers of elites also need to be aware of the ethics, power, and knowledge involved in studying up. For example, the ethics of researcher’s motivation, objective, and level of disclosure need to be considered; the power differential between interviewer and interviewee may need to be negotiated; and whether the knowledge that is created is to serve social change should be decided. Although we offer a number of pragmatic suggestions to overcome barriers and challenges to studying members of Canada’s immigrant elite, the relation among specific immigrant elites and their relations with the national elites need further examination. Still unresolved is whether members of the super-elite are predominantly transnational or part of the most influential and prestigious stratum in immigrant societies. It is unclear whether transnational super-elites are able to subordinate the domestic immigrant elites to function as their economic, social, and political sub-elite, by delegating their socio-cultural interests, business management, philanthropic reputations, and political lobbying to them.

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Chapter 10

Productive Disorientation, or the Ups and Downs of Embodied Research Virginie Magnat

In this chapter, I argue that neither ‘studying down’ nor ‘studying up’ can accurately describe the approach of the researcher who relinquishes the position of intellectual authority afforded by academic expertise in order to conduct fieldwork on experts of embodied practice, whether they be boxers, trapeze artists, choreographers or experimental theatre practitioners. I examine the role of embodiment within experimental ethnography, the ‘performance turn’ in the social sciences, and the cognitive potential of performance for ethnographic research. I then consider several examples of embodied ethnographic fieldwork, including my own investigation of transmission processes among women from different cultures and generations whose creative work is rooted in the cross-cultural performance research of influential Polish theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski. Embodiment, Ethnography, and Performance In Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sarah Pink envisions the latter as a participatory practice in which fieldwork experience becomes a form of apprenticeship for the researcher, whose learning process is “embodied, emplaced, sensorial and empathetic, rather than occurring simply through a mix of participation and observation” (2009: 65). Pink warns that when ethnographers open themselves up to the new world in which they find themselves immersed, they may experience an acute sense of disorientation, and she argues that, no matter how prepared they may be, “researchers’ own sensory experience will most likely still surprise them, sometimes giving them access to a new form of knowing” (2009: 45). In the social sciences, being taken by surprise is still often dismissed as lack of control, even though Pink contends that it is an unavoidable aspect of fieldwork experience. I therefore propose to further explore this embodied form of knowing which, according to Pink, can be simultaneously jolting and revelatory. I am particularly interested in Pink’s figure of the ethnographer-apprentice who learns “to know as others know through embodied practice,” which necessitates participating “in their worlds, on the terms of their embodied understandings” (2009: 70–72). Indeed, such a conception of ethnography as participatory practice posits that studying others engages the self in a learning process emphasizing

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place, sensory perception and empathy, a perspective which I contend may enable us to reconfigure fieldwork as a way of being in the moment, a form of alertness or heightened awareness, an openness to possibilities—to use the terminology of performance training—thereby requiring the mobilization of all our resources, including our senses and emotions. Embodiment is therefore pivotal to such a perspective, as demonstrated by Paul Stoller, whom Pink acknowledges as a key predecessor. Stoller’s approach is informed by his fieldwork on West African spirit possession practices, which leads him to assert that sensuous scholarship entails “lending one’s body to the world.” Addressing scholars directly, he challenges them to “eject the conceit of control in which mind and body, self and other are considered separate.” He endorses a methodology which values a “mixing of head and heart” and hinges upon an involvement in the research process that he describes as an “opening of one’s being to the world—a welcoming,” or an “embodied hospitality,” which he argues is “the secret of the great scholars, painters, poets and filmmakers whose images and words resensualize us” (1997: xvii–xviii). Stoller’s unconventional ethnographic writing makes room for the author’s embodied awareness of his surroundings, the people he meets, and the food he eats. He experiments with writing about fieldwork in the third person, reflexively turning himself into one of the characters of the stories he tells. This alternative mode of representation, which departs from disciplinary expectations, destabilizes the reader and raises the question of her/his empathy towards the ethnographer. By privileging embodiment while relinquishing part of his authorial control, Stoller provides the reader with an opportunity to study the ethnographer (up and down) and gain an insight into the experiential dimension of fieldwork. While anthropologists such as Stoller and Michael Taussig, the author of Mimesis and Alterity and Defacement, attempt to make palpable the performative dimension of ethnography foregrounded by James Clifford in Writing Culture, Dwight Conquergood, an ethnographer credited as one of the pioneers of performance studies, further expands the scope of the performative. Indeed, the field of performance studies encompasses a wide range of cultural performances, from traditional ritual processes to performance in everyday life, that is to say, practices which had previously been excluded by the narrower scope of theatre studies. By bridging the social sciences, arts and humanities, this interdisciplinary field of research offers a breadth of inquiry and an openness to cross-fertilization which have been conducive to developing new epistemological and methodological perspectives. Hence, Conquergood’s own ethnographic work, which focuses on marginalized populations such as the Hmong of Southeast Asia, street gangs of Chicago, and refugees in Thailand and Gaza, raises salient epistemological and methodological questions about what George E. Marcus and Paul Rabinow identify as the traditional scripts of anthropology (2008), which tend to privilege “studying down.” Perhaps most importantly, Conquergood indicts what he defines as “an academically fashionable textual fundamentalism and fetish of the (verbal) archive,” which

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he relates to “historical processes of political economic privilege and systematic exclusion.” (2002: 147). Arguing not against text but against textocentrism, he calls into question the “world-as-text model in ethnography and cultural studies” and proposes “a riskier hermeneutics of experience, relocation, copresence, humility, and vulnerability” (2002: 149, 151). He therefore challenges researchers to reimagine “participant-observation as coperformative witnessing” in order to fully embrace “alternative ways of knowing that exceed cognitive control” (2002: 149). African American ethnographer Katherine Dunhan may be considered as one of the precursors of performance ethnography since, when conducting fieldwork in Haiti in the 1930s, she drew from her dance training to access the embodied knowledge transmitted by Voodoo ritual practices. Yet it was Victor Turner’s collaboration with theatre director and theorist Richard Schechner, which, along with Conquergood’s interdisciplinary research, eventually led to the establishment of the field of performance studies in the 1980s. The subsequent “performance turn” in the academy has been analyzed by Norman K. Denzin, whose conception of performance ethnography was largely influenced by Conquergood’s work. Denzin envisions performance as a site of struggle, negotiation, and hope, “a site where the performance of possibilities occurs” (2003: 328). He therefore contends that performance can be “a way of revealing agency, […] a way of bringing culture and the person into play, […] a path to understanding, a tool for engaging collaboratively the meanings of experience” (2003: 9–10, 19). The Promise of Disorientation Since the “performance turn” in the academy often remains highly conceptual in spite of its claims to legitimize embodied ways of knowledge, I propose to counterbalance this tendency by drawing from performance training and practice in order to provide an insight into the cognitive potential of performance. Experimental theatre director Eugenio Barba, whose perspective is informed by his practice-based research on Asian performance traditions, points out that alteration of balance is one of the techniques through which the performer experiences disorientation, the point being to destabilize the body-mind and alter the performer’s perception of the world. Such disorientation techniques lead to a de-conditioning designed to eliminate daily behavior, and eventually produce a re-conditioning from which emerges the type of “extra-daily” behavior pertaining to highly stylized and codified forms of physically-based performance traditions such as Japanese Noh, Chinese Opera, and Indian Kathakali. I ground what I propose to name productive disorientation in Barba’s notion of “thinking-in-motion,” that is to say, an embodied way of knowing accessed through training by performance practitioners. Barba describes “thinking-inmotion” as an alternative to the type of thinking which is discursive and resorts to language, or “thinking-in-concepts.” Barba contrasts “thinking-in-motion”

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with “thinking-in-concepts” by specifying that the former is linked to what he describes as “creative thought […] which proceeds by leaps, by means of sudden disorientation which obliges it to reorganize itself in new ways” (1995: 88). Based on my embodied knowledge of such performance processes, I would suggest that the training and techniques employed to alter one’s habitual behavioral and cognitive patterns hinge upon a productive disorientation which is particularly conducive to the mixing of head and heart evoked by Stoller, and which fosters what Pink describes as a sensorial, empathetic way of knowing. In A Passage to Anthropology, Danish cultural anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup establishes a relationship between such performance processes and the ethnographer’s fieldwork experience. A key contributor to Barba’s International School of Theatre Anthropology, Hastrup derives from her encounter with theater that the concept of embodied experience becomes pivotal whenever researchers attempt to account for what Barba defines as the “body-in-life” (1995: 82). Situating flesh and blood human agents within a corporeal field “with which every individual is inextricably linked by way of the physical, sensing and moving body” (1995: 95), she infers from this embodied condition that “the point from which we experience the world is in constant motion […] there is no seeing the world from above” (1995: 95). Hastrup hence concludes from her collaboration with Barba that creative agency is inherent to our embodied condition and results from our psychophysical engagement in the unpredictable fluctuations of forever emergent cultural processes. Indeed, since fieldwork experience is always embodied, it requires from ethnographers that they find creative ways of responding and adjusting to what is occurring around and within them—a form of improvisation which engages their entire being: body, mind, and heart. From Disorientation to Empathy Although French sociologist Loic Wacquant engaged in the study of people living in the African American ghetto of Chicago, he eschewed the traditional scripts of “studying down” by choosing to immerse himself for three years in the world of a local boxing club. Since he did not possess the expertise of the club members, the only way of gaining their trust and respect was to prove that he was willing to invest time and energy into studying the art of boxing—which, given his identity as a European academic, also eschewed what would usually be defined as “studying up.” He eventually realized that the embodied knowledge he had acquired had critically informed not only his fieldwork but also, and more importantly, his conception of sociology. Indeed, this experience led Wacquant to infer that understanding through the body should be extended to all areas of sociology. Arguing that embodied experience is what makes us social beings and that language is then inscribed onto this experience, he now endorses an embodied sociology which accounts for the desires and visceral competences which are anchored in the human organism and

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remain opaque to discursive thinking. He therefore challenges researchers to give themselves the means to conceive of the body not only as socially constructed, hence produced by society and culture, but also as actively engaged in constructing the social and generating knowledge and action in the world (2003: 20). The epistemological distance which separates ethnographers from the people they study (whether up or down) is rejected by Jeanne Favret-Saada in the 2008 Journal des anthropologues special issue on empathy, where she states that such distance claimed by anthropologists in the name of objectivity is meant to create a protective barrier ensuring that the ethnographer remains unaffected by others. What might be perceived as a form of enforced segregation is supported by a philosophical dualism which, according to Favret-Saada, privileges reason over affect and written representation over fieldwork experience. She specifies that the fieldwork she conducted on witchcraft practices in the Bocage, a rural area of Western France, convinced her that the only viable epistemological positionality is one in which one must disregard whatever one knows or thinks one knows. FavretSaada’s guiding principle during her fieldwork on witchcraft was the necessity to listen to what the people she was studying were speaking about between themselves so that she might come to understand which questions were pertinent to them. She thus learnt to welcome the form of displacement which entailed giving up familiar moorings and being re-positioned by the people she was studying. Interestingly, Favret-Saada associates such re-positioning with a form of displacement or transportation of the self similar to physical displacement in space and to the experience of being transported that pertains to love relationships. This reconfiguration of fieldwork as a form of letting go, which requires that the ethnographer relinquish control not only of the research questions but also of the ways in which fieldwork is to be conducted, is thus experienced as a form of psycho-physical displacement akin to productive disorientation. Accordingly, attempts by researchers to maintain a protective distance between them and the research participants becomes counterproductive, since the point of conducting fieldwork is to be displaced, transported, and affected. Empathy hence becomes part of the ethnographic equation, especially when lived experience and embodiment are key to the research process, as demonstrated by two other contributors to this special issue of Journal des anthropologues. In “Shared Experience, Empathy and the Construction of Knowledge: An Ethnographic Approach to the Trapeze,” Magalie Sizorn argues that empathy consists in establishing a displacement and constitutes an important resource for understanding the lived experience of others. Sizorn remarks that her previous sports training and her willingness to engage in the practice of trapeze by becoming a student of the trapeze artists she was studying gave her access to a form of embodied knowledge which would have been unavailable to her had she remained positioned as a spectator, grounded by gravity and observing the trapeze artists from below. While qualifying her limited experience of trapeze as “humble” (modeste), Sizorn contends that she nevertheless gained a sensory, embodied perspective

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on this practice, so that her body gradually became the repository of her field notes, which she was then able to reflexively discuss from an altered positionality. She remarks that this empathetic knowledge of practice helped her to better “participate” in the interview process with trapeze artists, since the latter trusted that their life stories would be more accurately represented by someone who had some embodied experience of what their work entailed. She concludes that the body, as site of sensory experimentation, is also a site of knowledge-making which can disrupt preconceived ideas circulated by those who merely watch from a safe distance. Indeed, by highlighting key aspects such as the demanding training which is required, the risks involved, as well as the pleasure, fear, and pain that pertain to the lived experience of such a practice, an empathetic research approach can be a way of avoiding condescension and of promoting intersubjective understandings anchored in the material reality of practitioners’ lives. In her article, Sizorn refers to Husserl’s work on empathy, which posits that the body is central to an understanding of what others may experience. Building on Sizorn’s analysis, I would suggest that this form of phenomenological displacement or, to borrow Favret-Saada’s terminology, this form of transportation, hinges upon a sensory, embodied re-positioning which affects the researcher’s perception and increases her willingness to be vulnerable, thereby contributing to a fuller understanding of what is at stake for those she is studying. Given the nature of my own embodied research, which I will discuss next, I find it useful to relate Sizorn’s discussion to an article on choreography contributed by Audrey Bottineau to this special issue on empathy. In “Empathy as a Means of Understanding the Choreographer’s Craft: Going Behind the Scenes of Contemporary Dance,” Bottineau analyzes her experience of being torn between proximity and distance, and reflects on the necessity of capitalizing on her personal experience of dance in order to gain access to knowledge usually reserved to professional dancers and choreographers. As with Sizorn, she acknowledges that her engagement in the work of the artists she studied was enhanced by her ability to conduct empathetic research through the building of relationships of trust with the research participants. She discusses the notions of shared and reversed empathy, which she experienced when she became gradually more involved in the work of the artists, as they required from her that she participate in their activities, from collective warm-ups to eating meals together or taking on tasks such as driving, cooking or, more significantly, documenting the rehearsal process on film, which served both her ethnographic research process and the artistic research process of the choreographers and dancers. Finally, she acknowledges the intensity of the emotions she experienced when attending public performances which were the result of the many months of rehearsals she had witnessed. Bottineau thus upholds Favret-Saada’s objection to the notion that ethnographers should avoid at all costs participating in indigenous discourse and succumbing to subjectivity—for in Favret-Saada’s experience as in Bottineau’s, Sizorn’s, and Wacquant’s, disorientation, displacement, embodied participation

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and empathy constitute the necessary conditions to studying people who are experts of a sensory way of knowing. My Meetings with Experimental Performance Experts Sizorn’s and Bottineau’s accounts of their fieldwork experience resonate with my experience of the embodied research I have been conducting with women artists committed to a form of creative research linked to the experiments of renowned theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. While “studying up” cannot accurately convey my positionality as a researcher, the women involved in my project most certainly qualify as experts, if not elites. I will therefore discuss how I have been addressing questions pertaining to: designing and conducting experimental fieldwork which involves studying experimental performance experts; becoming immersed in embodied research based on trust, reciprocity and relationality; writing empathetically about practice-based artistic research; and disseminating embodied knowledge respectfully. Grotowski is widely acknowledged by theatre historians as one of the most innovative and influential directors of the 20th century. In 2009, international theatre scholars and practitioners launched an unprecedented re-evaluation of the Polish director’s enduring legacy for the “Year of Grotowski,” as designated by UNESCO. Meetings with Remarkable Women – You Are Someone’s Daughter, a research project I initiated in 2009 and developed in partnership with the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, for the “Year of Grotowski,” is the first examination of women’s key contributions to Grotowski’s cross-cultural investigation of performance practice. The extensive fieldwork I have been conducting for this project is funded by two major grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,1 and my main objective is to provide a more diverse and inclusive assessment of the significance of Grotowski’s legacy for contemporary performance practice and research. In The Grotowski Sourcebook, performance studies scholar Richard Schechner points to the small number of women among Grotowski’s main representatives and their virtual absence among his official inheritors. However, as evidenced by on-going transmission processes, personal testimonies, and unpublished archival sources, as well as books, articles and interviews unavailable in English, several generations of women from different cultures and traditions actively participated in all phases of Grotowski’s practical research, and continue to play a vital role in today’s transnational community of artists whose work is informed by Grotowski’s approach. Echoing the title of Peter Brook’s film Meetings with Remarkable Men, which is itself based on the book by G.I. Gurdjieff whose spiritual teachings influenced 1  Meetings with Remarkable Women – You Are Someone’s Daughter is funded by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant and a SSHRC Research/Creation in Fine Arts Grant.

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both Grotowski and Brook, Meetings with Remarkable Women challenges the assumption that men are necessarily the holders of traditional knowledge. Similarly, the subtitle You Are Someone’s Daughter reconfigures the title of Grotowski’s 1985 talk “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un” [You Are Someone’s Son] in which he evokes the human need to feel connected to one’s cultural ancestry. By reclaiming what is essentially a folk-saying in my native culture, I trace the artistic lineage linking these women’s continuing search for what it means to become someone’s daughter. My own Grotowski-based performance training is rooted in the transmission processes I am investigating: I worked for four years in Paris with actors who were students of Ludwik Flaszen and Zygmunt Molik, two founding members of Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre. Later on, I went on to work directly with Molik, the voice specialist of the company, and with Rena Mirecka, also a founding member and the only woman to have performed in all Laboratory Theatre productions. Several other encounters with women belonging to the Grotowski diaspora eventually led me to conceive of this project. However, while my Grotowski-based training endows me with the status of insider by giving me access to the artistic practice of the women who accepted to participate in my project, I did not work directly with Grotowski and therefore belong to what I would call the Grotowski diaspora’s lost generation—a generation upon whom Grotowski’s influence is, at best, invisible, as he himself noted during his Collège de France lectures.2 Grotowski’s uncompromising approach to artistic research required from his collaborators unusually high levels of rigor and competence, sustained by their life-long commitment to a regime of extremely demanding physical and vocal training that set a benchmark in experimental performance practice. During his “Year of Grotowski” keynote address at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, Peter Brook suggested that, by setting the bar so high, Grotowski had challenged artists to constantly question their perceived personal limitations as well as the alleged limitations of their craft, so as to keep searching beyond what they already knew was possible. While the women involved in my project assert their creative independence by defining in their own ways their relationship to Grotowski’s legacy, they acknowledge the lasting influence of his research on their work and share his demand for rigor, competence and commitment. Consequently, from their perspective, my insider status is all but relative since it is necessarily ranked 2  The significance of the cross-cultural research conducted by the Polish director was recognized through his appointment, in 1997, to the Chair of Theatre Anthropology of the Collège de France in Paris. During his tenure at the Collège de France, Grotowski held a series of public lectures in French in various Parisian theatres (March 24; June 2, 16 and 23; October 6, 13 and 20, 1997; January 12 and 26, 1998). The title of these lectures was “La Lignée Organique au Théâtre et dans le Rituel” (The Organic Line in Theatre and in Ritual). I attended each of these lectures and have documented them in the Polish theater journal Didaskalia.

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substantially lower than that of “authentic” insiders who worked extensively with Grotowski. Because of their high status linked to their level of expertise, these women may appear to be “elite” members of the transnational community of artists whose work is Grotowski-based. However, the process-oriented, experimental nature of Grotowski’s artistic work has meant that the kind of practice it supports remains marginal for the most part and drastically underfunded. Since women’s contributions to this practice have been considered peripheral at best, my project attempts to redress this imbalance by foregrounding and promoting the vital transmission processes characterizing the artistic work of women in the Grotowski diaspora. While I admittedly derive a certain sense of freedom and independence from not being a legitimate inheritor, from not having to “defend” or “preserve” Grotowski’s legacy, I am also acutely aware that the feasibility of my research project critically hinges upon my ability to maintain my precarious insider status and to, somehow, become someone’s daughter. While my embodied knowledge of Grotowski-based training can, understandably, never fulfill the expectations of my expert collaborators, such knowledge not only constitutes my main point of entry into their work, but also serves to mitigate their extreme mistrust of my affiliation with the academy. Such mistrust is linked to Grotowski’s own critical stance towards the production of abstract intellectual constructs that replace (and displace) performance practice as such. In his final Collège de France lecture, Grotowski hence stated that asking questions only with the mind (in French: questions mentales) merely amounted to playing a game of ideas that was neither interesting nor true. Significantly, such a critical stance was constantly balanced by the exacting demand for rigor and consistency that characterized the Polish director’s analysis of his own work. Grotowski’s perspicacity is shared by his collaborators, who staunchly resist academic approaches to performance that colonize artistic practice to fit preestablished theoretical frameworks, thereby reducing such practice to lifeless formulas bound to fail to convey the kind of embodied knowledge that is gained through “doing.” Moreover, they are equally weary of researchers who fall into the other extreme by mystifying artistic practice to liberate it from theory’s grasp. Indeed, they consider that, in both cases, dominant academic research paradigms misrepresent, disrespect, marginalize, and delegitimize very sophisticated practice-based approaches to creative research hinging upon experiential modes of cognition. Hence, from their perspective, research endeavors supported by a large amount of institutional funding are often a sure sign that there must be a hidden agenda. In fact, there always is, since the academy sets the criteria for successful research, such as dissemination by means of peer-reviewed academic publications addressed primarily to an academic audience, thereby excluding most practitioners from the debate even when claiming to support process-oriented and practice-based projects grounded in the notion of “performance as research” or “practice as research in performance.”

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In the field of performance studies, the practice/theory divide is described by Conquergood as an “apartheid of knowledges” (2002: 153) which enforces the “hierarchical division of labor between scholars/researchers and artists/ practitioners” (2002: 152). Shannon Jackson historicizes this divide as the institutionalization, within the academy, of a class-based system privileging those who think over those who do (2004: 85, 111). The discriminatory nature of the hierarchy produced by this system severely undermines practice-based research projects such as mine which require the building of relationships based on trust, respect, and reciprocity. Cree scholar Shawn Wilson points to a similar disjunction between Western and Indigenous scholars in his book Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods: “As part of their white privilege, there is no requirement for [dominant system academics] to be able to see other ways of being and doing, or even to recognize that they exist. Oftentimes, then, ideas coming from a different worldview are outside their entire mindset and way of thinking. The ability to bridge this gap becomes important in order to ease the tension that it creates” (2008: 44). Because of the complex negotiations in which I am engaged due to my positionality as a performance practitioner and scholar, I have witnessed and experienced tensions not unlike those described by Wilson as I straddle two worlds that often seem irreconcilable. While Indigenous research principles are designed by and for Indigenous scholars and activists working within their own communities, Wilson states: “So much the better if dominant universities and researchers adopt them as well” (2008: 59). I have found these principles to be more pertinent to my embodied research than the principles regulating research conducted by those whom Wilson identifies as “dominant system academics.” Making Connections with Indigenous Perspectives Respect, reciprocity and relationality, which Wilson posits as the three Rs of Indigenous research, are particularly relevant to my project, and reading Research Is Ceremony while conducting fieldwork was extremely helpful. In this book, Wilson specifies that “respect is more than just saying please and thank you, and reciprocity is more than giving a gift.” Indigenous research principles are thus meant to ensure that the research conducted by Indigenous scholars “will be honoured and respected by their own people” (2008: 59). Such research criteria are so fundamental to Indigenous communities that they “will not allow entry by researchers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, until they have met the community’s conditions” (2008: 59). According to these principles, researchers must be willing and able to engage in a “deep listening and hearing with more than the ears” in order to develop a “reflective, non-judgmental consideration of what is being seen and heard” along with “an awareness and connection between logic of mind and the feelings of the heart”; finally, researchers bear the “responsibility to act with fidelity

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in relationship to what has been heard, observed, and learnt” (2008: 59). This engagement required from researchers is clearly embodied and empathetic, and, as such, it is particularly well suited to Grotowski-based performance practice, which also requires a “deep listening” engaging the whole being, that is to say, body, mind, and heart, as well as a suspension of judgment which can be understood as a form of ‘fidelity’ to the embodied knowledge accessed through the training. My work with the women involved in my project has therefore been more about doing than talking. Since intuition is key to creativity, a deep sense of trust is necessary, yet it takes time to achieve such trust. Investing oneself as fully as possible in this long-term process is an important way of demonstrating commitment, and as time passes trust increases along with the responsibility that comes with receiving someone’s trust. My research partners are members of a relatively small group of experts whose responsibility it is to sustain and transmit a form of experimental artistic research which they consider so valuable that they have dedicated their lives to this work. They investigate performance processes rooted in world performance traditions that reconnect human beings to their community, the natural world, and their ancestral past; they explore the interrelation of creativity, embodiment, agency, and spirituality; and they share their research through the workshops they teach and the performances they create. As with Grotowski, these women consider that one must “do” to understand and not the other way around. In order to know them, it is therefore necessary to establish a relationship with them based on embodied participation in their work. Because spirituality is an important element within Indigenous research methodologies, the latter seem to me to be particularly well suited to addressing the “spiritual” dimension of Grotowski-based artistic research, a dimension which contributes to making the Polish director’s work and that of his collaborators particularly challenging to researchers. Taking spirituality seriously is especially critical to the investigation of Grotowski’s post-theatrical experiments, in which most of my research partners participated. Indeed, after having garnered international acclaim as the artistic director of the Polish Laboratory Theatre, Grotowski made the controversial decision, in 1969, to abandon theatre productions altogether in order to focus on practical research that ranged from one-time participatory experiments conducted in unusual indoor and outdoor settings, to the long-term practical investigation of ritual performance processes. From then on, Grotowski’s research became increasingly focused on sources of embodied knowledge linked to traditional cultural practices. Grotowski was very careful not to speak directly of the “spiritual” aspect of his work, and he explicitly refrained from referring to spirituality so as not to encourage reductive generalizations based on a Eurocentric understanding of what may constitute spirituality. However, reconnecting with one’s cultural ancestry was key to his approach, especially in his practical investigation of ancient traditional songs. He states:

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Although this statement seems to focus solely on sons and can appear to privilege the masculine gender, it is clear in the notes to the transcriptions and translations of his public talks, always given in French, that Grotowski was well aware of gender-based linguistic shortcomings and that he did not intend his discourse to apply exclusively to males. In fact, traditional songs have a central place in the teachings of Grotowski’s women collaborators as well as in their artistic practice, and working with them has led me to reconnect with traditional songs in the ancient Occitan language, which my maternal grandmother spoke with her sisters, brothers, parents and grandparents, but which my mother and I do not understand. These powerful songs evoke a natural environment once familiar to my ancestors, who, although they were uneducated and underprivileged, nevertheless possessed a rich and ancient embodied knowledge of the land. When the language and culture of these rural populations were suppressed, prohibited, and eventually eradicated by the imposition of the northern language which became the official language of the French nation, traditional songs in Occitan became the sole vehicle for my people’s collective cultural memory. This connection between traditional singing and cultural memory seems to be linked to an embodied sense of positionality pertaining to the interrelation of identity, lineage and place, as articulated by Hawaiian scholar Manulani Aluli Meyer when she writes: “You came from a place. You grew in a place and you had a relationship with that place. […] Land is more than just a physical place. […] It is the key that turns the doors inward to reflect on how space shapes us” (2008: 219). Meyer goes on to cite the Hawaiian elder Halemakua, who states: “at one time, we all came from a place familiar with our evolution and storied with our experiences. At one time, we all had a rhythmic understanding of time and potent experiences of harmony in space.” Meyer specifies that Halemakua believed it was possible to reconnect with this knowing in order to “engender, again, acts of care, compassion, and the right relationship with land, sky, water, and ocean—vital for these modern times” (2008: 231). The rhythmic understanding of time and harmonic experience of place which Halemakua recalls, along with the sense of compassion he invokes, suggest that music and singing have long been important experiential ways of empathetic cognition. Indeed, the endurance of Hawaiian culture can be ascribed in part to its remarkably rich musical legacy which relies on trans-generational oral transmission. According to Grotowski and his collaborators, what keeps a traditional song alive is the particular vibratory quality linked to the precision of the song’s rhythmic

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structure, so that when a competent performer actively and attentively embodies a traditional song, it can become a vehicle that reconnects her/him to those who first sang that song. Grotowski thus believes that ancestral embodied knowledge is encoded in traditional songs, and that the power of these songs hinges upon the embodied experience of singing them. Trusting that the body can remember how to sing these songs can therefore become a way of reclaiming cultural continuity. For my research partners, working with ancient traditional songs thus gives meaning and value to their creative work. Rigor and competence when performing and teaching these songs are essential to keeping alive the process by which ancestral knowledge is transmitted to those who learn to sing them. In “Theatre as Suture: Grassroots Performance, Decolonization and Healing,” Qwo-Li Driskill might be referring to a similar process when writing about learning to sing a Cherokee lullaby: As someone who did not grow up speaking my language or any traditional songs and who is currently in the process of reclaiming those traditions – as are many Native people in North America – the process of relearning this lullaby was and is integral to my own decolonial process. The performance context provided me an opportunity to relearn and perform a traditional song, a major act in intergenerational healing and cultural continuance. As I sang this lullaby during rehearsals and performance, I imagined my ancestors witnessing from the corners of the theatre, helping me in the healing and often painful work of suture (2008: 164).

The relationship between performance, embodiment and cultural continuance evoked here by Driskill points to a creative agency which is intimately linked to lived experience and yet which is not limited to or defined by a single individual perspective. It is this kind of agency which characterizes my apprenticeship with Grotowski’s women collaborators, since it enables me to remain in contact with my cultural roots while teaching at a North American university, far from the ancient land of my Occitan ancestors—for embodied knowledge fructifies with the passage of time. Grotowski identifies this process as a form of “work on oneself,” a phrase borrowed from Stanislavski, a Russian director who revolutionized theatre in the first half of the twentieth century and whom Grotowski considered to be his artistic ancestor. This type of embodied labor may also be understood as a form of “self-cultivation,” as defined six centuries ago by Japanese Noh master-performer Zeami. This notion of self-cultivation is a powerful way of conceptualizing an alternative form of agency which is collective and transgenerational, and, in the case of my project, also linked to being a woman.

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Exploring the Relational Dimension of Embodied Research Meyer poses a question which I find particularly pertinent to my own research process. She asks: “Will your research bring forth solutions that strengthen relationships with others or will it damage future collaborations?”—to which she replies that “knowledge that does not heal, bring together, challenge, surprise, encourage, or expand our awareness is not part of the consciousness this world needs now. This is the function we as indigenous people posit.” She further states: “your relationship to your research topic is your own. It springs from a lifetime of distinctness and uniqueness only you have history with” (2008: 219–20). By stressing the importance of the function of research and the necessity to position oneself within the research process in order to develop a personal relationship to one’s research topic, Meyer evokes an empathetic form of relationality which is key to my focus on women artists and the solidarity which I hope this type of research can foster. In the course of my multi-sided fieldwork, I have encouraged artists participating in group discussions and individual interviews to speak openly about their positionality as women in the Grotowski diaspora. While my genderrelated questions have been met with a variety of responses, the latter all clearly demonstrate that the women involved in my project have very mixed feelings about being identified as “women artists” instead of simply being referred to as “artists,” as is the case for their often more established male counterparts. By focusing on women who do not readily align themselves or identify with academic feminist criticism, my project therefore confronts what Luke Eric Lassiter describes as “the gap between academically-positioned and community-positioned narratives,” grounded in concerns about the politics of representation, that is to say, “about who has the right to represent whom and for what purposes, and about whose discourse will be privileged in the ethnographic text” (2005: 4). Addressing such concerns entails calling into question the legitimacy of theoretical claims that make use of artistic practice to demonstrate the validity of an argument underpinned by a particular analytical framework. The women involved in my project have developed their own perspective on their positionality as artists, and they resolutely resist any kind of categorization which might limit, constrain or stultify what they envision as the human creative potential. In my conception of the project’s research design, it was therefore imperative to leave the term “woman” open-ended so as not to impose a pre-determined theoretical lens through which to view and interpret their work. I conceived my multi-sited fieldwork as a series of meetings, for meeting the other, according to Grotowski and his collaborators, entails disarming oneself, and creative agency arises from the action of entering a space in which one cannot choose not to respond to the other, yet which is not a space for confrontation. The main objective has thus been to create possibilities for repeated encounters with these women’s teaching and creative research. These meetings, which have also given some of these artists the opportunity to reconnect with each other, have

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taken the form of work sessions, live performances, individual interviews and group discussions which I organized and funded. The main practical research component, hosted in 2009 by the Grotowski Institute in Poland, included five work sessions attended by a group of 17 participants from 11 countries, including myself, and led by five women from different cultures and generations: Rena Mirecka (Poland), Iben Nagel Rasmussen (Denmark), Katharina Seyferth (Germany), Ang Gey Pin (Singapore) and Dora Arreola (Mexico). These work sessions were followed by a three-day theater festival featuring the current creative work of these artists, as well as two days of open meetings with other key women from the Grotowski diaspora such as Maja Komorowska and Ewa Benesz (Poland), Elizabeth Albahaca (Venezuela), and Marianne Ahrne (Sweden). These events took place at two historical sites: the performance space in Wroclaw where the Laboratory Theatre rehearsed and performed landmark productions such as The Constant Prince, Akropolis, and Apocalypsis cum Figuris, and the workspace located in the forest of Brzezinka, where Grotowski conducted his post-theatrical research. In 2010, I traveled to France, Italy and Poland to meet individually with the artists involved in the project, and took part in a collective encounter initiated by women who had participated in the 2009 meetings. I continued my multi-sited fieldwork in the summer and winter of 2011. The main output for this project is the production of a book manuscript and a companion documentary film series featuring high quality videos and photos exclusively produced for the project through a collaborative process enabling each artist to work closely with a team of professional videographers and photographers, thereby ensuring respectful representation while providing a multiplicity of perspectives. The notion of meeting recurs throughout Grotowski’s work, from the theatrical to the post-theatrical period, and my project investigates meeting as a form of relationality which regulates the experience and transmission of embodied knowledge. This emphasis on the relational and the experiential is also central to Indigenous epistemologies, and Meyer states that, from a Hawaiian perspective, experience lies at the core of cultural practice: “It is as most mentors reminded me: practice culture, experience culture, live culture. […] It is a call to practice. It is a reminder of the most important aspect of a Hawaiian knowledge structure: experience” (2001: 129). Meyer specifies that knowledge acquired through cultural practice “is not a static idea, or simply an accumulation of facts. It is an expression of ritual, renewal, insight, relationship, and life” (forthcoming 2012, Left Coast Press). Conversely to the type of knowledge that is credited to individuals and protected by intellectual property rights, this way of knowing is dependent upon the “maintenance of relationships, which takes conscious and deliberate thought and action” (2001: 134). She stresses that such knowledge is “the by-product of dialogue, or of something exchanged with others. Knowledge, for some mentors, is a gift that occurs when one is in balance with another.” This implies that the person who receives such a gift also bears the responsibility of “continued rapport

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with those who ‘keep’ knowledge” for her/him” (2001: 134–5). This applies, of course, to the researcher-apprentice as defined by Pink. The sensory dimension of ethnography which is foregrounded by Pink is absolutely critical to Indigenous conceptions of relationality and elders stress the importance of cultivating a sensory and empathetic connection to all non-human entities in the natural world, as evident in the remarks of Hawaiian mentor Gennie Kinney reported by Meyer: “You have to listen for the pohaku [rock] to call you. You have to thank the ocean for helping farm it, you have to thank the rain, all those wonderful things. It brings you back to how wonderful our world is. You gotta be observant, you gotta have all the senses (Gennie Kinney, 7 March 1997)” (2001: 129). Such all-encompassing relationality relies on a form of sensory perception and embodied awareness related to both intelligence and spirituality, and associated with the body’s center. Indeed, as with the performance experts participating in my project, the Hawaiian mentors who shared their embodied knowledge with Meyer speak of a center point in the human organism, which they call na’auao, or “enlightened stomach,” considered to be “the place of wisdom” (2001: 143). Meyer thus reports performance master-teacher kumu hula Pua Kanahele stating: “It’s a cosmic center point. It has to do with your ancestors coming together with you. It has to do with your spiritual being coming together, it has to do with our physical being (Pua Kanahele, 15 January 1997)” (2001: 144). Interestingly, the notion of an energetic center situated in this particular area of the human body recurs in a number of performance traditions, as noted by Barba in his Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. Pua Kanahele goes on to explain: Na’au [stomach] is the center of who you are [. . .] the center of your body [. . .] between your very spiritual and your very earthy, or your very airy and your very earthy. I think that when your whole body or when your whole self reacts to something it all comes to that center. […] To me, na’auao [enlightened stomach] is when everything, not when you, but when everything kind of centers for you and then a light comes on, and then you can relate to it, that’s na’auao. […] It’s being centered, it’s when everything comes together (Pua Kanahele,15 January 1997) (2001: 145).

Hence, according to this perspective, the physical, the intellectual and the spiritual dimensions converge through a central point of the human organism, as if “being centered,” a phrase shared by a large number of performance practitioners, offered a more material or organic way of referring to relationality, which may be conceived as a balancing process sustaining endless interconnections occurring at all levels of life, human and non-human, from the cellular to the cosmic. Wilson emphasizes the embodied, relational, and spiritual dimensions of the research process itself when stating that, from an Indigenous perspective, knowledge is approached through the senses and the intuition as well as through the intellect, and that it is relational and shared, so that one is answerable to all one’s

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relations—including one’s environment, one’s ancestors, and the world at large— when one is conducting research (2008: 56). He further contends that research is ceremony because it is about making connections and strengthening them: “there is a lot of work, dedication and time spent in building up the relationships with the cosmos that allow the visible ceremony to happen” (2008: 89–90). Wilson’s use of the term ceremony is, of course, culturally specific, yet his choice to equate research and ceremony points to fruitful possibilities for both Indigenous and nonIndigenous researchers. Indeed, participating in a ceremony entails carrying out a series of actions which, if performed competently and in accordance with traditional knowledge, can activate, sustain and revitalize relationships to others, to the entire community, and to the natural world. There are striking parallels between the kind of competence that guarantees efficacy within traditional ritual practices, the transmission processes connecting one generation to the next in the Grotowski diaspora, the teaching and creative work of the women involved in my project, and the embodied research which is informed by my collaboration with them. Given such parallels, I consider that relationality, respect, and reciprocity constitute the necessary conditions and the guiding principles for Meetings with Remarkable Women – You Are Someone’s Daughter, and my hope is that these meetings can perhaps become, for the women participating in this project as well as for myself, a way of collaboratively embodying research as ceremony. Conducting fieldwork for this project has therefore become, for me, an opportunity to experience disorientation, displacement, and empathy through my embodied participation in the work of performance experts. While one of my goals is to share what I learn with others so that I may contribute to the transmission process which keeps embodied knowledge alive, I do think, along with Wilson and Meyer, that being transformed by the research process constitutes the ultimate goal for the ethnographer-apprentice, especially since Meyer contends that being changed by one’s research is the only way of changing the culture of research. She therefore encourages researchers to reflect on the implications of research for their own lives, and to ask themselves: “Are the ideas learned by doing research something I practiced today? Truly, why do research if it doesn’t guide us into enlightened action? Is the vision I hold in my heart something I extend in all directions?” (forthcoming: 2012, Left Coast Press). Moreover, changing the culture of research entails acknowledging that conducting research should not be conceived as a competition for knowledge between individuals striving for academic recognition, but as a relational process dependent on mutual trust, collaboration, and healing. Meyer hence posits: “This is our time to find each other and to affirm the qualities inherent in earth, sky and water so we can once again regain a place of purpose and relationship with our natural world. […] All relationships matter. Here is our work. Here are spaces for the practice of courage and consciousness.” (forthcoming: 2012, Left Coast Press). Neither up above nor down below, such spaces are meeting points within, between, and around us— and while it may seem disorienting at first, I would like to conclude that such

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a perspective can help us to envision the research process itself as a search for balance, or, to borrow the words of performance expert Pua Kanahele, for being centered, so that everything can come together. References Barba, E. and Savarese, N. (eds). 2006. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. London and New York: Routledge. –––. 1995. The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge. Bottineau, A. 2009. “L’empathie pour comprendre le métier de chorégraphe.” Journal des anthropologues 2008, 114–15. Posted online on December 1. Retrieved June 27, 2012 http://jda.revues.org/303. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conquergood, D. 2002. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR T174 (Summer): 145–56. Denzin, N.K. 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Driskill, Q.-L. 2008. “Theatre as Suture: Grassroots Performance, Decolonization and Healing.” In Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics, eds R. Hulan and R. Eigenbrod. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 155–68. Favret-Saada, J. and Isnart, C. 2008. “En marge du dossier sur l’empathie en anthropologie.” Journal des anthropologues 114–15. Posted online on December 1, 2009. Retrieved June 27, 2012, http://jda.revues.org/323. Grotowski, J. 1997. “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un [You Are Someone’s Son]” (1989), trans. J. Slowiak and the author. In The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. R. Schechner and L. Wolford. Routledge: London and New York, 294–305. ––––. 1997. “Holiday [Swieto]” (1972), trans. B. Taborski. In The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. R. Schechner and L. Wolford. Routledge: London and New York, 215–25. Hastrup, K. 1995. A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory. New York: Routledge. Jackson, S. 2004. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lassiter, E.L. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, M.A. Forthcoming, 2012 “The Context Within: My Journey into Research.” In Indigenous Pathways in Social Research, eds D.M. Mertens, B. Chilisa and F. Cram. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

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–––. 2008. “Indigenous and Authentic: Hawaiian Epistemology and the Triangulation of Meaning.” In Handbook of Critical & Indigenous Methodologies, eds N.K. Denzin, Y.S. Lincoln and L. Tuhiwai Smith. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 217–32. –––. 2001. “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology.” The Contemporary Pacific (Spring). University of Hawai’i Press, 124–48. Pink, S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Rabinow, P., Marcus, G.E., Faubion, J.D. and Rees, T. 2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schechner, R. and Wolford, L. (eds). 1997. The Grotowski Sourcebook. London and New York: Routledge. Sizorn, M. 2008. “Expérience partagée, empathie et construction des savoirs,” Journal des anthropologues, 114–15. Posted online on December 1, 2009. Retrieved June 27, 2012. , http://jda.revues.org/302. Stoller, P. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taussig, M. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford University Press. –––. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Wacquant, L. 2003. “Entretien avec Loïc Wacquant,” Solidarités 28 (June 16): 18–20. Wilson, S. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

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Chapter 11

Interviewing Elite Men: Feminist Reflections on Studying “Up” and Selling Out Shelley Pacholok

The “crisis of representation” (Denzin and Lincoln 2000: 3), spawned by postmodern critique, raised questions such as, “Who can (or should) speak for whom?,” and “How should research participants’ lives and experiences be (re) presented in social science research and writing?”. Feminists have also been attentive to issues of power in the practice of social research and persist in illuminating the “micropolitics” (Bhavnani 1993) of such research; for example, acknowledging that the researcher has the most (and often final) authority over the form and content of written text. A fundamental tenet of feminist research, then, is to minimize power differences between researchers and participants (Harding 2005; Naples 2003). Toward this end, feminist social scientists have developed interview principles that aim to diminish these power differentials. For instance, researchers are instructed to become “equals” in a dialogic exchange with participants (Fontana 2001) and to establish empathy and rapport with those they interview (Luff 1999; Taylor 1998). Much of this feminist writing is directed at women doing interviews with and for women (Finch 1993; Oakley 1981), and often the assumption is that the interviewer has more power than the interviewee (Lee 1997). This is most likely because discussions are usually about white, middle-class academic women interviewing marginalized women (e.g., see Armstead 1995).1 Further, feminist researchers have long centered women’s experiences, often with the political goal of making visible the social locations and knowledge of such marginalized women.2 More recent theoretical developments, however, have complicated the notion of an up/down power binary between researchers and participants and “the image of the powerless respondent has altered with the recognition that researchers’ ‘power’ is often only partial and tenuous” (Olesen 2000:234). Thapar-Bjorkert and Henry (2004), for example, demonstrate that researchers are not all-powerful 1  For an exception see Ross’s (2001) work on elite women. 2  For a thorough review of feminist research paradigms and methods see Olesen (2000).

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and that participants can and do exercise power in the production of the research product. This theorizing is especially germane to research on elites. There is a general consensus that elites wield a great deal of power (Hoffmann-Lange 1987). As Odendhal and Shaw (2001) note, “elites generally have more money, knowledge, and status and assume a higher position than others in the population” (p. 299).3 Talk of studying “elites,” then, by definition, implies power differences between researcher and researched—that is, the researcher is thought to have less power than those she wishes to study. While elites are generally thought to be powerful, what is less clear is the extent of their power and how power operates when studying elites. Keller (cited in Odendahl and Shaw 2001) suggests a hierarchy in which some elites have a “general and sustained social impact” (p. 301) while others’ power is limited to a specific social setting. Expanding on this idea, and applying a poststructuralist lens, Smith (2006) argues that definitions of elites must reflect the shifting and fluid nature of power: The idea that elites can be neatly defined and treated as consistently powerful is a view which relies on a rather simplistic idea that there is a dichotomy between powerful elites and powerless others … such an outlook ignores the preposition that power exists in a variety of modalities … that these modalities of power can be negotiated and … consequently that elites may change over time (even during the course of one research project) (p. 645).

These insights echo the broader theoretical work of Foucault (1980) which suggests that power is not static, but rather fluid and shifting. Further, they parallel theorizing by feminists of color which calls attention to the ways in which structures of inequality intersect to produce multiply constituted subjectivities and social locations in which there are few “pure victims or oppressors” (Hill Collins 2000: 287). These recent theoretical developments suggest that an up/down formulation of power is problematic. In this chapter I consider this issue as I explore the dilemmas that I faced as a feminist researcher studying a privileged group of men. Specifically, I discuss the challenges associated with applying core feminist interviewing principles in my work with this group, in light of the destabilizing of binaries occasioned by contemporary feminist and postmodern thought.

3  There is, however, some debate over which kinds of power are more important (e.g., formal or informal) (Gould 1989; Hoffmann-Lange 1987).

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So What About Men? Informed by the troubling of the up/down dichotomy, it was clear that I would not wield more power than my participants simply by virtue of my researcher status. However, since the notion of studying up is challenged by recent theorizing on power, neither did it make sense to assume that my elite interviewees would be all-powerful. The fact that most were relatively privileged men added an additional layer of complexity. Feminists have long debated whether and/or on what terms to include men in feminist research because for so long men’s lives, interests and knowledge were foregrounded while women and women-centered domains remained invisible (e.g., see Smith 1987). In response, scholars such as Sandra Harding (1987) defined the field of feminist methodology as one that centers women’s experiences and produces research for women. Therefore, feminist researchers utilizing interviews have understandably been occupied with documenting the ethics of interviewing women (Finch 1993; Oakley 1981). The lives of men have only recently been integrated into feminist research; most often those men incarcerated or convicted of violence (e.g., see Anderson and Umberson 2001; Huggins and Glebbeek 2003; Presser 2005). Some argue that including men in feminist research can “reveal the operation and impacts of patriarchy to a greater degree” (Price 2010: 84), and others reflect on the extent to which research by or for men constitutes “feminist” research (e.g., see Arendell 1997; Presser 2005). Feminist researchers have also documented the dilemmas associated with interviewing men (e.g., see Arendell 1997; Grenz 2005; Pini 2005), but have not spoken to the challenges of interviewing elite men. In their study of global bureaucrats Conti and O’Neil (2007) claim that feminist methodologies lead to reconceptualizing power and ‘studying up’ but they make no mention of the tensions that arise when one attempts to employ feminist research principles in interviews with elite men (even though it appears that all of their participants were men). In other words, they do not theorize gender in their account of research with elite men. This is the task to which I turn in this chapter. I ask, how might one practice feminist research principles based on democracy and transparency in interviews with men who have a history of resistance to gender equality? How can a feminist researcher go about interviewing a community of privileged men without resorting to essentialist notions of gender and/or categorical notions of power? In the end, could I “do” feminist research with this group of men or would it mean “selling out” as a feminist? Setting the Stage Despite pressures for change, firefighting organizations in Canada were, and are, largely populated by white men. However, there is some variation in the kinds of

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jobs that firefighters do and the demographic composition of the organizations that employ them. All of the firefighters in this study are responsible for fighting fires, but their occupations differ on a number of important dimensions. My sample includes structural firefighters (responsible for extinguishing fires in burning buildings) and wildland firefighters (who primarily deal with forest fires). The latter group includes both ground crews and pilots. The overall gender composition of each group ranged from 100 per cent men for structural firefighters to approximately 80 per cent men for wildland firefighters. In this chapter I draw on interview data with 16 male structural firefighters and 18 male wildland firefighters. While there were more women employed as wildland firefighters, both organizations were characterized by a gendered division of labor in which women were more often found in “support” roles. In terms of race and sexuality, the sample is overwhelmingly white and heterosexual (symbolically, if not in practice).4 Firefighters, Capital, and Elite Status Studying elites presents a number of challenges including ethical concerns and researcher access (see Schneider in this volume for an in-depth discussion of these topics). There are also longstanding debates over conceptual and operational definitions of “elite.” In addition to economic standing, some argue that shared behaviors, values, and lifestyles are important criteria (Odendahl and Shaw 2001). Some researchers further classify elites into categories, such as political elites, business elites, community elites (Odendahl and Shaw 2001) and economic elites (Mills 1956; Moyser and Wagstaffe 1987). To complicate matters, there is often considerable overlap between elite categories and the form and content of groups shift over time (Odendahl and Shaw 2001). In light of these conceptual uncertainties, it seems fruitless to impose a static label onto relatively amorphous groups. Rather, a more productive endeavor may be to consider the resources that the group in question has at their disposal at the time they are being studied. Firefighters may not fit neatly into any of the aforementioned categories; however, they do possess a significant amount of valuable resources that afford them power and privilege in their community. For instance, structural firefighters have symbolic capital (e.g., prestige, honor) (Bourdieu 1984) by virtue of their status as heroes in the wake of 9/11 (Langewiesche 2002; Lorber 2002). This is not a trivial resource. In the wake of a devastating wildfire, structural firefighters in my case study drew on their symbolic capital to secure both social capital (i.e., networks of influence) and economic capital (Bourdieu 1986). With the help of their union representative, the fire chief, and the local media, firefighters successfully 4  Most of the firefighters who were interviewed presented themselves as heterosexual (i.e., many mentioned wives or girlfriends in the interviews). However, as sexuality is often invisible (especially in homophobic environments), I cannot say for certain that all of the firefighters practised heterosexuality.

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rallied the public and city hall and secured a pay raise less than one year after the fire. In other words, they literally and figuratively “cashed in” on their symbolic capital by converting their collective social capital into economic capital (i.e., a salary increase). The fire chief, who became a local and national celebrity, also reaped significant rewards. He was featured on the cover of a prominent national magazine, received an honorary degree and numerous gifts and awards, was invited to do public speaking engagements all over the country, and encouraged to run for political office. The adoration showered on the chief and the fact that his charges effectively negotiated a higher salary from the very municipality in which hundreds of houses burned to the ground, clearly demonstrate structural firefighters’ power and status in the community. While wildland firefighters do not have the heroic standing as structural firefighters (Desmond 2007), they do share another form of symbolic capital. Both groups lay claim to masculinities that channel “hegemonic masculinity”— the most desired and culturally valued configuration of masculinity in a given historical moment (Connell 1995, 2000). Those thought to practice and embody hegemonic masculinity are bestowed with significant privileges, or “patriarchal dividends” (Connell 1995, 2000). Drawing on hegemonic masculinity as they do, firefighting masculinities constitute a significant resource—symbolic capital that affords patriarchal dividends in the form of power and influence in firefighters’ organizations and communities. For example, since firefighting masculinities are constructed in ways that exclude women and marginalized men, firefighters have been relatively successful at keeping these groups from entering their ranks. This despite pressures to diversify the demographic make-up of firefighting organizations created by the equal rights movement, calls for equal opportunities for women in the labor market, and employment equity legislation designed to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups. Firefighting masculinity not only provides firefighters with the necessary symbolic capital to block Others from access to their organizations, it allows them to secure the best jobs within their workplaces and to reap the dividends (e.g., higher pay, better job security, more respect and prestige) from this arrangement. In addition to these valuable forms of capital, firefighters are, like other elites, a “closed” group. Thus, they prefer to keep Others out and employ gatekeepers to mediate their relations with presumed interlopers (including researchers). The firefighters that I studied were also reeling from the losses caused by the recent fire, and were concerned about a pending lawsuit. For these reasons, they were particularly wary of people who had the potential to shine an unflattering light on their organizations. Moyser and Wagstaffe (1987) identify “defensive” elites as groups who are threatened by academic research, have little to gain from it, or who are otherwise averse to placing themselves under the researcher’s microscope. In this sense, firefighters may be characterized as defensive elites. However, as noted above, there is a certain rigidity inherent in categorization that makes it a less effective approach for studying groups that shift and change over time. In the

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case of firefighters, it is ultimately the valuable and various forms of capital at their command and the significant prestige and influence that they wield in their community that define their status as elites. Feminist Inspired Interviewing: Disclosure, Reciprocity and Rapport Inspired by the early work of Anne Oakley (1981) feminist researchers have championed reciprocity, self-disclosure, and rapport as ways to minimize power differences between women interviewers and participants (e.g., see Hertz 1995; Taylor 1998). The stated goal was to develop more egalitarian relationships with interviewees (e.g., the interviewer shifts from a neutral questioner to a participant, while participants are given the freedom to ask questions of the interviewer); to allow women to describe their experiences in their own terms; and to encourage research participants to introduce new questions based on their own lived experiences (Hertz 1995; Taylor 1998). The application of these guidelines is not without its pitfalls however. Efforts to diminish power differences between women have been critiqued by those who argue that these manoeuvres overlook political issues around knowledge production and consumption.5 It is also unclear whether these principles can be utilized productively in elite studies (Kezar 2003). At first blush it may also seem problematic to apply feminist interview principles of reciprocity, disclosure and rapport to a study of elite men. At the same time, I could not ignore postmodern theorizing and recent studies of elites, both of which suggest that power is not linear, but multi-directional, contextual and negotiated (Campbell 2003). To take these insights seriously meant that disclosure, reciprocity, and rapport between myself and my participants was, at the very least, a possibility. Moreover, recent discussions suggest that the application of these principles may not only be possible, but necessary in order to obtain quality data when interviewing men. Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2002) note that masculinity dynamics are embedded in the interview process in ways that make the interview: An opportunity to signify masculinity inasmuch as men are allowed to portray themselves as in control, autonomous, rational, and so on. It is a threat inasmuch as an interviewer controls the interaction, asks questions that put these elements of manly self-portrayal into doubt, and does not simply affirm a man’s masculinity displays (pp. 205–6).

The interviewer has control in that she sets the agenda, asks the questions, and probes for information. Participants relinquish some control over the process and they also risk having their public self discredited. When respondents’ masculinity is threatened they may employ a number of strategies in an attempt to save face, 5  For a detailed discussion see McCorkel and Myers (2003) and Rice (2009).

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such as trying to control the interview situation, limiting disclosure of emotions, and exaggerating rationality, autonomy, and control. The researcher’s job, then, is to employ questioning and probing strategies that reduce this threat to participants’ masculine selves (Schwalbe and Wolkomir 2002). It seemed reasonable to expect that masculinity would be especially salient in my interviews with firefighters, not only because firefighting is a highly masculinized occupation (Chetkovich 1997; Pacholok 2009) but because firefighters were on the defensive due to the unprecedented losses caused by the recent wildfire. Further, because they have a long history of excluding outsiders, it was plausible that at least some would try to control the flow, content, and even dissemination of information. Since I wanted to obtain quality data, and, where possible, draw on feminist methodological principles, I was motivated to pay close attention to the power dynamics in the interviews and to attempt to minimize threats to participant’s masculinity. In what follows I focus on three key (but contested) principles of feminist interviewing—disclosure, reciprocity and rapport. Heralded as tools for mitigating power dynamics, they had the potential to serve double duty as mechanisms for reducing threats to masculinity in the interviews. In what follows I discuss how I worked to put them into practice and some of the dilemmas I faced along the way. Disclosure and the Undercover Feminist In the interests of transparency and reflexivity many feminists call for selfdisclosure of their identities in order to place themselves on the same “critical plane” as participants (Bloom in Rice 2009). This is a worthy strategy when used by researchers to interrogate their own social locations and the ways in which they are implicated in their research, as Rice (2009) does so eloquently in her study of women’s embodiment. When self-disclosure means sharing personal information with participants it is more likely to have the intended effect when the researcher shares a particular worldview or experience with their participants. However, I could not assume this was the case in my research with firefighters, as I was entering what was very likely a “politically resistant community” (Klatch 1988). Further, Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2002) caution that masculinity threats may be heightened if participants are aware that the interviewer is interested in gender. As a result, I felt that revealing myself as a feminist researcher interested in gender relations and political change would be risky at best (if it had negative repercussions for rapport with participants), and academically disastrous at worst (if organizational gatekeepers chose to freeze me out). The option to be a covert feminist also raised the thorny issue of informed consent. Researchers are mandated to provide a “statement of the research purpose” so that potential participants can make informed decisions about whether or not to participate in research studies (Panel on Research Ethics 2010). Seemingly straightforward, informed consent presents a number of challenges for qualitative

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research, one being that the research focus often emerges after entering the field, and/or changes as one moves along, thus researchers are rarely able to provide participants with all relevant information beforehand (Hedgecoe 2008; Thorne 2004). A related concern is whether critical researchers are obligated to disclose all the details of their research to powerful groups (who, for obvious reasons, may decline to participate if they are made aware that they will be critically evaluated). Thorne (2004) suggests that elite groups are less in need of the protections granted by the principles of informed consent. While this may make sense in theory, it is not always so in practice given the feminist research principle of self-disclosure. In the end, I chose, like others before me (e.g., see Arendell 1997) not to disclose my feminist status unless I was asked directly, which I never was. I did, however, make my interest in gender known in the synopsis of the research results that I gave to interested participants at the conclusion of the study. Being an undercover feminist created a number of additional dilemmas. Many firefighters agreed to assist me with my research, were generous with their time, and had little to gain from doing so. As a result, I felt indebted to them. And while I did not necessarily agree with firefighters’ politics, it did not preclude me from appreciating their views on various topics. In fact, I liked many of the people that I met—some firefighters were funny, some were sincere, and most were thoughtful. All of this made me uncomfortable about concealing my feminist identity. Finally, my covert status restricted the degree to which I could reciprocate by disclosing my thoughts and feelings, both during interviews and in interactions outside of the interviews. This caused some guilt because I hoped that participants would share with me the very depth of information, feeling and emotion that I was withholding from them. When I did engage in self-disclosure it was not always in an attempt to alter power dynamics. Rather, I often revealed personal information when I thought it would help me gain access to a site, a participant, or important information. Some aspects of my personal history (i.e. that I had experienced a natural disaster and that I had grown up in the area), positioned me as an ally and I shared this information when “selling” my project to gatekeepers, when soliciting participants, and when commiserating with firefighters on issues of mutual concern. On some levels my strategies were entirely self-serving and, one might argue, counter to feminist research mandates to minimize power differences, an issue to which I return at the end of this chapter. Reciprocity, Power and Control Some feminists concerned with the power dynamics implicated in research relationships advocate establishing reciprocal relationships with informants (Rice 2009). Reciprocity may include, but is not limited to, sharing knowledge and experiences with participants (Cotterill 1992), becoming friends (Oakley 1981), and granting participants some control over the interview process (Campbell 2003). Given the potential threat to masculinity engendered by the interview

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method, I focused on the latter and gave firefighters opportunities to shape the format, content, time and location of their interviews. I wanted firefighters to thoughtfully respond to my questions, so I reciprocated by listening to them speak about issues that they felt were important, even when they seemed tangential to the project. When I sensed that participants wanted to air an issue, I listened attentively until they were finished and commiserated when appropriate by saying, ‘I can see why you’d be upset about that’. I also gave interviewees some control over the way that the interview unfolded. For example, I did not prevent participants from deviating from the topic at hand; instead, I circled back to my question after they had a chance to speak. In several cases, firefighters’ lengthy diatribes created time constraints and I was unable to ask questions that I wanted to. Finally, I gave each participant a chance to add additional comments near the end of the interview. Unfortunately, in some cases my efforts backfired when firefighters used these opportunities for reciprocity to assert their agency in ways that affronted my feminist sensibilities and, in one case, compromised the quality of the interview.6 On this occasion an administrator in the structural fire department directed the entire interview, dictated which topics we covered, took a phone call while I waited, checked the clock several times, and after the allotted time was up, asked, “Do you have enough?,” which effectively announced that he was ready to end the interview. More commonly, though, I was interrupted while asking questions or making comments during interviews.7 Another structural firefighter, who I interviewed while doing a driving tour of burned neighborhoods, provided numerous unsolicited driving tips. In the end, I worried that sharing control over how the interviews unfolded and the conditions under which they took place reinforced norms of gendered interaction in which women are empathetic listeners and facilitators of men’s narratives (Pini 2005). Interpretive Rapport Another rationale for not revealing my feminist identity and research agenda was that I believed it would hinder rapport with participants. Rapport is important for obtaining quality data. However, it is important to distinguish between a manipulative rapport that objectifies participants by attempting to exercise control over them in order to “extract” data and “interpretive rapport” that aims to foster mutual understanding (Campbell 2003: 290). I strived to employ rapport in the latter fashion but on more than one occasion it caused much personal discomfort. For example, I sometimes agreed with sexist remarks even though I found them highly offensive. Usually my agreement was 6  In a similar vein, Thapar-Bjorkert and Henry (2004) found that some of their participants used reciprocity to create spaces where they could exercise power. 7  This occurred in interviews with both groups of firefighters, although younger wildland firefighters were much less likely to do so.

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implicit; I simply did not say anything in response to these comments. A number of times it was more explicit, such as when I nodded my head or laughed. On two separate occasions I did not challenge men who made homophobic remarks. In a small group interview one structural firefighter, talking about a training program in an occupation that employed mostly women, belittled a gay classmate in the following way: Firefighter: There was 3 ½ guys who went through my class … cause one guy was a, like//[sic] Group: [laughter] Me: Three and a half guys? Firefighter: Yeah Me: Oh, gay? Group: [laughter] Me: [nervous laugh] Firefighter: Yeah, yeah, one of those guys….decent enough guy or whatever. We used to bug him a little bit.

On the one hand, I was upset that I was complicit in homophobic and overtly sexist constructions of gender. I wondered if my passivity simply reified negative stereotypes about women and gay men. On the other hand, I wanted to understand firefighters’ worlds and worldviews, and had I challenged them it would have been because I wanted to try and change their views. I also had another motive—I needed their cooperation and I worried that any objections to their comments could potentially undermine their masculinity and compromise the interview process. In other words, similar to Glebbeek’s (2003) dilemma in her interviews with police, I garnered cooperation by disregarding participants’ offensive comments. I found some comfort in deciding to save my critical analysis for the written products (Arendell 1997) but, in the end, I felt like I was “selling out” as a feminist on two fronts: (i) because I did not challenge firefighters on sexism and homophobia and (ii) because I had utilized rapport-building strategies in an objectifying way. This dilemma was further complicated because I was sympathetic to some of the firerelated concerns that firefighters expressed and I felt compassion for those who cried or struggled to hold back tears in the interviews. Campbell’s (2003) notion of critical dialogue is partially instructive here. She argues that “dialogue suggests connection without requiring empathy and acceptance of all that is said, and when qualified by ‘critical’, [it] allows for challenge” (p. 293). In my interviews with firefighters I hoped to create “dialogue” even though I did not agree with everything that they said, but I did not employ Campbell’s “critical” interview style, as I did not confront firefighters when faced with sexist or homophobic remarks.

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The Participant as “Expert” Another technique that I used in an effort to establish interpretive rapport was to position participants as experts. I highlighted that I was somebody who was largely uninformed about the occupation of firefighting, as I wanted participants to know that they had expert knowledge that I did not have and needed their help to understand. This positioned the interviewee as the authority and me as the “student” (Hoffman 2007) who was interested in learning more about the occupation of firefighting. This strategy seemed especially important given my status as an academic—always conscious of potential threats to masculinity, I did not want firefighters to feel intimidated by my post-secondary education. Ultimately, asking firefighters to explain various dimensions of their jobs also meant sharing control. And encouraging firefighters to share their knowledge also worked to develop a mutual understanding of the sort that fosters interpretive rapport. On the downside, my attempts to make the interviews non-threatening created a feminist ethical dilemma. When I invoked the naïve researcher role in order to position participants as experts, it very likely reinforced stereotypes of women as largely incompetent and unknowledgeable when it comes to “men’s work.” This strategy also felt overly manipulative in the last few interviews because by then I had accumulated a solid base of knowledge on firefighting and was no longer the uninformed researcher. Moving Forward Calls to democratize the research process are often rooted in the premise that one is studying “down.” In like fashion, feminist interview principles of reciprocity, disclosure and rapport were developed with the intention of minimizing power differences between women researchers and women participants, the former thought to have more power than the latter. Contemporary feminist theorizing and postmodernism have undermined these assumptions, but feminist interviewing strategies have not kept pace with these developments when it comes to studying elite men. I wanted to employ feminist interview principles in my work on firefighters not only as a committed feminist, but because they held promise for creating quality data by mitigating threats to participants’ gender displays. However, these principles did not map neatly onto my research project. I could not ignore the fact that my participants were elite men—a group with a history of resistance to infiltration by outsiders and one that garnered respect and prestige in the community. As a feminist, I could not overlook the fact that, on many levels, these men benefitted from gender and racial inequality. The division of labor in firefighting organizations, and firefighters’ success at keeping Others out, meant that the highest paying, stable, and most desirable jobs were held by white men. Because firefighters are a closed group who reap rewards through exclusion, it was

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not unreasonable to expect that they would be resistant to a feminist political agenda of inclusion and social change. These considerations necessarily complicated the implementation of feminist-inspired interviewing principles. At the same time, I did not want to prematurely conclude that firefighters were “anti-feminist” simply because they were men. Women may also be resistant to feminist research (e.g., see Luff 1999) and intersectional theorizing has seriously undermined the notion of “essential” differences between women and men—I had to recognize the complexity in social locations and subjectivities of the men in my study. Finally, postmodern troubling of an up/down power binary and the notion that power flows in a top-down fashion meant that it was problematic to presume that men firefighters were more powerful than I was or vice versa. So my challenge was to avoid automatically privileging gender as an analytic lens (Rice 2009) while simultaneously recognizing the privileges that men firefighters, as a group, enjoyed. When I began interviewing firefighters it was clear that the power dynamics were not straightforward. I certainly had some degree of control over the research process by virtue of my status as a middle-class academic; one with the ability to (re)present participants’ narratives in ways that I deemed appropriate. It was also apparent that my participants were privileged on some dimensions—they had the ability to freeze me out, to speak disrespectfully about outsiders without fear of reprisal, to dictate the location and timing of the interviews, and to share in directing the flow and content of those interviews. This was, of course, partly due to my efforts to reduce potential threats to firefighters’ masculinities. It was not surprising, then, that I did not feel all-powerful in the interviews. Rather, I often sensed an implicit (and sometimes overt) jockeying for control. Minimizing threat might be viewed as a way to democratize the research process in the sense that the goal is to share power so as not to undermine the accomplishment of masculinity. On the other hand, it can be unjust (and inconsistent with feminist research ethics) when it results in an “objectifying” rapport—one where researchers are instructed to manipulate the interview dynamics in ways that reduce masculinity threats, because such threats are thought to interfere with the extraction of quality data (e.g., participants may resist showing emotion). On more than one occasion my efforts to navigate masculinity dynamics in such a way felt like I was “selling out” as a feminist. Not only did I excuse firefighters’ homophobic or sexist comments (i.e., I affirmed their masculinity practices even when they were problematic), I did not always use self-disclosure and other rapport-building strategies in an explicitly “feminist” way. In fact, sometimes these strategies were entirely self-serving. However, reflecting back on the interviews I recognize that to view this as anti-democratic is to miss the postmodern point that power is multi-directional, shifting, and contextual. If this is indeed the case, research practices cannot be classified as either hierarchical or anti-hierarchical. Campbell (2003) discusses the limitations of describing the power dynamics of interviewing in such categorical terms:

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Power in and over the research process is not concentrated in the hands of either the research or the researched. This does not amount to ‘power sharing’ or ‘democracy’, which implies some sort of mutual recognition about the epistemological, methodological and analytical routes that are taken, but is part of a ‘power struggle’ – a dialectic of control …. The notion of a dialectic of control perfectly captures the dynamic nature of the interviewing process and its embeddedness within a wider configuration of power relations; it prises open the straitjacket of the hierarchy/democracy dyad and exposes the complexity of the interactive exercise of power; it offers a new slant on old debates about gender, race and/or class relations of interviewing; and it avoids preconceptions about who controls the interviewing process, how control is achieved, and to what effect … (pp. 299–300).

Some of my strategies certainly privileged my needs and interests. At the same time firefighters had some control over the interviews and the ability to block access to their closed group (something they had been rather successful at in their hiring practices). The interviews, then, were more accurately characterized by a dialectic of control in which participants and I engaged in struggles over the terms of access and defining the contours of the interviews. Further, the dialectic of control is consistent with a formulation of power as a shifting social relationship, rather than an intrinsic, stable, individual possession that one either has or does not have. As Hannah Arendt (1958) explains: Power is always, as we would say, a power potential and not an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.

An understanding of power as flowing in and through social life directs focus away from questions about who has more, or less, power—researchers or participants—to questions about the extent to which researchers and participants can exercise agency in the context of the shifting power relationships in which they are embedded. Had I concluded this earlier on in my study, I would have been less concerned about minimizing threats to masculinity, since this approach reflects a binary model of power based on the assumption that interviewers have more power than interviewees (who are thus threatened when they must relinquish the power and control that they are thought to have in all other situations). The jockeying for control that characterized my interviews was indicative of a dialectic of control and calls into question the validity of the binary model. Conceptualizing interview dynamics as a dialectic of control also opens a space for the kind of critical dialogue championed by Campbell (2003). As noted earlier, while I aimed to understand firefighters’ worldviews through mutual dialogue, I did not implement the “critical” dimension of this formulation. Had

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I been prepared for the extent to which firefighters would assert their agency, I would have further interrogated the suggestion that interviewers must reduce threats to masculinity to obtain quality data. Instead of attempting to minimize these at all costs by affirming firefighters’ masculinity displays, I would have more readily engaged in dialogue with them about homophobic and sexist comments. In turn, this could have further illuminated firefighters’ worldviews. And, in the end, perhaps I would not have had the nagging feeling that I had sold out8 as a feminist, because the formulation of power on which a dialectic of control is premised means that feminist research principles cannot be applied in an either or fashion in work with elite men. The dialectic of control also means that my research with firefighters cannot be neatly classified as “studying up.” Although I have argued that firefighters are elites, I do not claim that they are all-powerful. Rather, I call for a more nuanced definition that reflects the shifting and fluid nature of power (Smith 2006) in the interview process. The dialectic of control could also productively inform future refinements to feminist research methods (and methodologies) and their application in elite studies. For example, more reflection is required on the ways in which feminist research principles such as disclosure, reciprocity, and rapport, devised in response to “studying down,” could be reformulated by drawing on the dialectic of control and employed in the field of elite studies (with or without men). References Anderson, K. and Umberson, D. 2001. “Gendering Violence: Masculinity and Power in Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence.” Gender & Society 15: 358– 80. Arendell, T. 1997. “Reflections on the Researcher-Researched Relationship: A Woman Interviewing Men.” Qualitative Sociology 20: 341–68. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armstead, C. 1995. “Writing Contradictions: Feminist Research and Feminist Writing.” Women’s Studies International Forum 18: 627–36. Bhavnani, K.K. 1993. “Tracing the Contours: Feminist Research and Feminist Objectivity.” Women’s Studies International Forum 16: 95–104. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson. New York: Greenwood, 241–58.

8  The complexities around “selling out” are also borne out in the literature on race and class, in which middle- and upper-class Blacks reject the charge that class ascension means selling out.

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Campbell, E. 2003. “Interviewing Men in Uniform: A Feminist Approach?” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6: 285–304. Chetkovich, C. 1997. Real Heat: Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––. 2000. The Men and the Boys. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conti, J. and M. O’Neil (2007). “Studying Power: Qualitative Methods and the Global Elite.” Qualitative Health Research 7(1):63-82. Cotterill, P. 1992. “Interviewing Women: Issues of Friendship, Vulnerability, and Power.” Women’s Studies International Forum 15: 593–606. Denzin, N. K. and Y. S. Lincoln 2000. Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research. In Handbook of Qualitative Research. N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications: 1-28. Desmond, M. 2007. On the Fireline. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Finch, J. 1993. “It’s Great to Have Someone to Talk To: Ethics and Politics of Interviewing Women.” In Social Research: Philosophy, Politics and Practice, ed. M. Hammersley. London: Sage, 166-180. Fontana, A. 2001. “Postmodern Trends in Interviewing.” In Handbook of Interview Research, eds J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 161–76. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Gould, R. 1989. “Power and Social Structure in Community Elites.” Social Forces 68: 531–52. Grenz, S. 2005. “Intersections of Sex and Power in Research on Prostitution: A Female Researcher Interviewing Male Heterosexual Clients.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 30: 2091–113. Harding, S. 1987. “Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?” In Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed. S. Harding. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1–14. Harding, S. 2005. “New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture & Society 30: 2009–15. Hedgecoe, A. 2008. “Research Ethics Review and the Sociological Research Relationship.” Sociology 42: 873–86. Hertz, R. 1995. “Separate but Simultaneous Interviewing of Husbands and Wives: Making Sense of their Stories.” Qualitative Inquiry 1: 429–52. Hill Collins, P. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Hoffman, E. 2007. “Open-Ended Interviews, Power, and Emotional Labor.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36: 318–46. Hoffmann-Lange, U. 1987. “Surveying National Elites in the Federal Republic of Germany.” In Research Methods for Elite Studies, eds G. Moyser and M. Wagstaffe. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 27–47.

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Huggins, M. and Glebbeek, M.-L. 2003. “Women Studying Violent Male Institutions: Cross-gendered Dynamics in Police Research on Secrecy and Danger.” Theoretical Criminology 7: 363–88. Kezar, A. 2003. “Transformational Elite Interviews: Principles and Problems.” Qualitative Inquiry 9: 395–415. Klatch, R. 1988. “The Methodological Problems of Studying a Politically Resistant Community.” Studies in Qualitative Methodology 1: 73–88. Langewiesche, W. 2002. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. New York: North Point Press. Lorber, J. 2002. “Heroes, Warriors, and Burqas: A Feminist Sociologist’s Reflections on September 11.” Sociological Forum 17: 377–96. Luff, D. 1999. “Dialogue Across the Divides: ‘Moments of Rapport’ and Power in Feminist Research with Anti-feminist Women.” Sociology 33: 687–703. McCorkel, J. and Myers, K. 2003. “What Difference Does Difference Make? Position and Privilege in the Field.” Qualitative Sociology 26: 199–231. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Moyser, G. and Wagstaffe, M. 1987. Research Methods for Elite Studies: Allen & Unwin. Naples, N. 2003. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. New York: Routledge. Oakley, A. 1981. “Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms.” In Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Roberts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 30–61. Odendahl, T. and Shaw, A. 2001. “Interviewing Elites.” In Handbook of Interview Research, eds J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 299–316. Olesen, V. 2000. “Feminisms and Qualitative Research At and Into the Millennium.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 215–55. Pacholok, S. 2009. “Gendered Strategies of Self: Navigating Hierarchy and Contesting Masculinities.” Gender, Work & Organization 16: 471–500. Panel on Research Ethics. 2010. “Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.” Government of Canada. Pini, B. 2005. “Interviewing Men: Gender and the Collection and Interpretation of Qualitative Data.” Journal of Sociology 41: 201–16. Presser, L. 2005. “Negotiating Power and Narrative in Research: Implications for Feminist Methodology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 30: 2067–90. Price, L. 2010. “‘Doing It With Men’: Feminist Research Practice and Patriarchal Inheritance Practices in Welsh Family Farming.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 17: 81–97. Rice, C. 2009. “Imagining the Other? Ethical Challenges of Researching and Writing Women’s Embodied Lives.” Feminism and Psychology 19: 245–66.

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Ross, K. 2001. “Political Elites and the Pragmatic Paradigm: Notes From a Feminist Researcher—In the Field and Out to Lunch.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4: 155–66. Schwalbe, M. and Wolkomir, M. 2002. “Interviewing Men.” In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, eds J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 203–19. Smith, D.E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Smith, K. 2006. “Problematising Power Relations in ‘Elite’ Interviews.” GeoForum 37: 643–53. Taylor, V. 1998. “Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research.” Qualitative Sociology 21: 357–79. Thapar-Bjorkert, S. and Henry, M. 2004. “Reassessing the Research Relationship: Location, Position and Power in Fieldwork Accounts.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 7: 363–81. Thorne, B. 2004. “‘You Still Takin’ Notes?’ Fieldwork and Problems of Informed Consent.” In Approaches to Qualitative Research, eds S. Nagy Hesse-Biber and P. Leavy, 159–76.

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Chapter 12

Turning over Rocks and Unsettling Memories: “Studying Up” Euro-Canadians in the Spaces between Cultures Natalie A. Chambers Yes, I wished I hadn’t started [these interviews] because I don’t think that I’m that useful, number one, and number two, I found it really unsettling. First of all, I was angry at myself. Not at you, I don’t think. It was at me. I thought, “Why did I ever think that I could do this?” – Christine, former teacher, Norway House Indian Residential School. On the whole Natalie, I feel that you have read too much into what we said. We were all just young people trying to do a job with very little support. – Jack, former boys dormitory worker, Port Alberni Indian Residential School (Chambers 2003: 243).

Christine and Jack are two elderly white church-going Euro-Canadians, and former employees of the United Church’s Indian residential schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Their comments reflect their personal and emotional experiences as participants in a research project that pertained to “study up,” as Laura Nader described in 1969, “the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty” (p. 289). In this chapter I describe my attempt to “study up” through colonial hierarchies and across cultures; an unsettling process that turned over rocks for both the researcher and the researched. Studying Up Colonialism Over the last 40 years, research that pertains to “study up” has been narrowly focused on the “elite” including business elites, professional elites, (doctors, lawyers, religious leaders, and Hollywood elites), and community and political elites (Hertz and Imber 1995). Mayer notes that, “Nader’s phrase ‘studying up’ [has been used] to describe what ethnographers do in examining chains of social hierarchies, as opposed to the colonial paradigm for the study of those with less social power” (2008: 141). Papers on local and global elites tend to discuss issues such as: the shifting of the “field” from a rite of passage in “exotic” lands to the

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local community, justify local studies as a valid form of inquiry, the challenges of recruitment and gaining accessing to elites, relational dynamics between the researcher and the participants, and the ethical dilemmas that are subsequently encountered during interviews (Conti and O’Neil 2008; Gazit and Maoz-Shai 2010; and Hertz and Imber 1995). This chapter will contribute to and extend these useful discussions; studying up colonialism, former colonial agents, and past colonial projects and processes involves additional challenges that are not yet well represented in elite or whiteness studies. Researchers in elite studies tend to study up social class and gendered hierarchies with contemporary agents of social privilege; for example, corporate elites, the clergy, lawyers (Hertz and Imber 1995), and those conducting whiteness studies may find themselves studying “across,” “up” or “down,” as was the case with Frankenberg’s research on white women (Frankenberg 1993). Both approaches involve the analysis of privilege, power and hierarchies within “white” society. However, just as whiteness studies, “reverses the traditional focus of research on race relations by concentrating attention upon the socially constructed nature of white identity and the impact of whiteness upon intergroup relations … [and] makes problematic the identity and practices of the dominant group” (Doane 2003: 3), studying up colonialism focuses attention upon the socially and culturally constructed nature of settler identities and the impact of colonialism upon colonial relations, and makes problematic the identity and practices of settler peoples. In colonial countries, such as Canada “studying up” can be employed to turn over rocks and unsettle the colonial and culturally constructed “Indian problem” (Dyck 1991). In exposing the underbelly of colonialism we may examine the fundamental issues of dislocation, fear of the unknown, and loss that motivates the myth making conventions of a colonial history and identity “that self-consciously avoids the dangers of reading the past in terms of the present, and refrains, methodologically, from entangling itself in the psychology of settlement” (Turner 1999: 21). With the exception of a handful of prominent non-Indigenous anthropologists, (Brody 1975, 2001; Culhane 1999, 1987; Furniss 1999; Thomas 1994), “studying up” has also avoided entangling itself in the colonial projects of white AngloCanadian settlers, and thereby neatly side-stepped the present day struggles of Indigenous peoples and communities. The absence of such studies is remarkable given the repeated demands of Indigenous scholars (Adams 1991; Armstrong 1990; Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997; Smith 1999) for non-Indigenous peoples to turn our gaze and examine ourselves. In a call for social justice, Okanagan traditional knowledge-keeper and scholar Armstrong demands: Imagine how you as writers from the dominant society might turn over some of the rocks in your own garden for examination. Imagine in your literature courageously questioning and examining the values that allows the dehumanizing of peoples through domination and the dispassionate nature of the racism inherent in perpetuating such practices. Imagine writing in honesty,

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free of the romantic bias about the courageous ‘pioneering spirit’ of colonialist practice and imperialist process. Imagine interpreting for us your own peoples thinking toward us, instead of interpreting for us, our thinking, our lives, and our stories. We wish to know, and you need to understand (Armstrong 1990: 143, emphasis added).

“Studying up” colonial agents, colonial processes, projects and encounters, to critically theorize white settler society and contribute to the “conscientization” of non-Indigenous Canadians, and the freeing of minds from the grip of dominant hegemony (Smith 1997). Maori educator Graham Smith defines “conscientization” as “the concern to critically analyze and de-construct existing hegemonies and practices which entrench Pakeha-dominant social, economic, gender, cultural and political privilege … which develop critical consciousness” (Smith 1997: 34). His praxis model calls for “multiple approaches, in multiple sites and applied by multiple respondents” (Smith 2002: 15), in developing consciousness, resistance and transformative strategies to counter multiple forms of oppression. “Studying up” colonialism may be a useful approach in supporting the struggles of Indigenous peoples for social justice. History has attested to the usefulness of studying up perpetrators of oppression. The efforts of intergenerational Holocaust survivors to interview the children of Nazi perpetrators are poignant examples of studying up (Berger and Berger 2001; Sichrovsky 1988; Weissmark 2004). This unsettling research with the children of Nazi perpetrators emphasizes the profound impact of genocide on the descendants of survivors and perpetrators as they struggle with how to live their lives “in the shadow” of genocide and with how to make sense of their present-day roles in relation to the burdens of history that they have inherited. Dialogues between intergeneration Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators are also exceptional examples of what Aboriginal scholar, Ermine (2004) asks us to consider as the “ethical space,” a concept that was originally developed by Roger Poole in 1972 to connote, “an abstract space that frames an area of encounter and interaction of two entities with different intentions” (Ermine 2004: 19), and most significantly, different and colliding paradigms. Ermine describes the “ethical space” as a “bridging concept” with potential to work through the tensions between disparate “worldviews [that] are each formed and guided by distinct histories, knowledge traditions, values, interests, and social, economic, and political realities that are brought to the encounter of the two solitudes” (Ermine 2004: 20). He articulates the usefulness of creating dialogue across cultures as a point of entry for understanding different knowledge systems, and connotes the “in-between space” that is, “created by the recognition of the separate realities of histories, knowledge traditions, values, interests, and social, economic and political imperatives … creates the urgent necessity for a neutral zone of dialogue” (Ermine 2004: 20). To engage in the ethical space, individuals must first turn the analytical gaze inward to enable critical self-reflection and eliminate values and principles that uphold and reproduce the oppression of Indigenous

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peoples. Ermine’s description of the ethical space closes parallels Nader’s original articulation of “studying up”: … the examination of structures and systems in attempts to remove all vestiges of colonial and imperial forms of knowledge production and to instill a respect and understanding of different and multiple readings of the world. It will be in the ethical spaces where all assumptions, biases and misrepresentations about the ‘other’ are brought to bear in the interest of identifying ethical/moral principles in cross-cultural interaction (Ermine 2004: 42).

Other scholars have commented on the spaces between cultures. Those whom HaigBrown describes as a “border workers” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds (Haig-Brown 1992) are well positioned for “studying up” in ethical spaces between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. From my experience living within and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural realities (Chambers 2009), working ethical spaces becomes a logical necessity in visualizing a positive future. “Studying up” colonialism is a road less travelled in qualitative research, and as a young and novice researcher, my journey was a struggle from the very beginning. This chapter will discuss some of the cross-cultural, ethical, personal and emotional dilemmas that I experienced, and some of the tensions and insights gained from “studying up” colonial subjects and colonial power in the transformative spaces between Indigenous and white Canadian cultures. Studying Up Indian Residential Schools Background This chapter describes research that intended to “study up” through chains of cultural hierarchies and oppression in the past and present day by interviewing former agents of colonialism, in this case, former employees of the Canadian government and churches Indian residential school system. The participants, now elderly and in their sixties and seventies, were asked to share their memories of working in the schools in the 1950s and 1960s; a period in which they had held considerable privilege and power over Indigenous people, and especially the vulnerable children who attended the schools in isolation from their families and communities. During this period, the cultural privilege and power of the employees was protected by the ethnocentric status-quo belief of most white Anglo- and Euro-Canadians that they were culturally more “civilized” and “superior” than the Indigenous peoples whose land they had stolen. By contrast, from 1999 to 2003, the period that the research was conducted, public consciousness had been agitated by former Indian residential school students who were courageously speaking out and publically sharing accounts of emotional, cultural, physical, and sexual abuse

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in the schools experienced at the hands of school staff (Baptiste 2000; Fournier and Crey 1997; Haig-Brown 1991; Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council 1996). In spite of the explicit forms of abuse that have been revealed by former students, in 1992 the Canadian government refused to conduct a public inquiry into employees of the school (RCAP 1996), and the few scholars who have analysed the school system within the context of violations of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, were ignored (Annett 2002, 2006; Chrisjohn and Young 1997). It is within this context of controversy that I developed research that would “study up” former employees and therefore elicit previously hidden, and potentially shameful memories, that had not been openly discussed for 40 or 50 years. I was inspired by the research on Nazi perpetrators and their children (Berger and Berger 2001; Heimannsberg and Schmidt 1993; Scihrovsky 1988), as I wanted to explore to what extent oppressors are impacted by their past complicity in social injustice on a grand scale, and to what extent they could acknowledge the suffering of survivors in the present day and the struggles of the subsequent generations to overcome the shadow of oppression and abuse. “I was motivated by the need to turn our attention to “awaken” a sense of injustice in those with material and cultural power; those who do not feel the pain of injustice in their bellies; those who often refuse the knowledge and dare not listen … the imperative to tell—the vital urge not to forget— … contains an injunction to the ‘awakening of others’ … White the imperative to speak is necessary in order for survivors to re-enter a humane society, stubborn deafness may be equally necessary for the inhabitants of that society as they try to keep their ethical values stable and unchallenged” (Apfelbaum 2001: 31 in Fine 2006: 86–7). Lastly, the research seemed timely—even urgent—given the rapid aging and deteriorating health of the elderly generation of former employees. Considering the vastness of the literature that exists on Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada and the policies that led to their formation (Chrisjohn and Young 1997; Miller 1996; Milloy 1999, RCAP 1996), research that focuses on individual principals, teachers, dormitory supervisors, janitors, cooks and other professional and domestic staff who worked in the schools is extremely scant (Manly and Manly 1996; Nock 1988; Raibmon 1996; Rutherdale 1994). There are many compilations of published autobiographical accounts by First Nations survivors who attended the schools and include brief descriptions of encounters with individual employees (Grant 1996; Haig-Brown 1991; Jack 2001; King 1967; Knockwood 1992). Yet, only a few scholars have commented on the need for oral histories of school employees (Miller 1996; Trevithick 1998). The autobiographical accounts of First Nations survivors and official church or government accounts do not tell us the inner thoughts of individual staff members, their beliefs and values, their personal backgrounds or their life experiences before, during and after employment within the Indian Residential School system. Moreover, little is known of how former staff people relate to present day critiques of the Indian residential school system, or how they make sense of their experiences of working in the controversial schools. Very few former employees have come

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forward to publicly share their stories and perspectives (CBC 1995; Purvis 1994; as well see Harold 1996 and Wolcott 1967 who worked in the Indian Day School System), and prior to the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,1 there were few opportunities for former staff and students to engage in dialogue with one another either through text, film or in-person. Individual staff narratives may open up more nuanced accounts of colonial agency for examination that can only be gleaned from the rare first person accounts of individual staff members or from present day interviews with former staff. Studying Up as a Participatory Project From the very outset I was acutely aware that this research had the potential to cause harm to both survivors and Indigenous peoples in general, as well as individual former employees who participated in the project. As I anticipated that many Indigenous peoples would justifiably question my motives, as I developed the project, I sought out the insights of survivors. Over time I invited six intergenerational survivors and professionals working with survivors to participate in the project as the “experts” on Indian residential schools and as an on-going source of feedback and guidance. I had many questions for the group and I was grateful for the direct and honest feedback and guidance that I received. I describe this process of consultation, admittedly a limited one, in Chambers (2009). Once I had typed up the transcripts and shared them with the Aboriginal participants (member checking), I proceeded to recruit and interview former employees. At the outset of this project, I honestly had no idea how I would recruit the Anglo-Canadian former Indian residential school employees and it took a giant leap of faith for me to even develop a research proposal. It was to my utter amazement that, during the course of my research, the United Church of Canada (UCC) held a conference, Worker’s Wonderings, for former residential school employees to share their experiences of working in these schools. I obtained contact details of the conference organizer from the newspaper coverage, and I promptly called the UCC, introduced myself, described my project, and requested assistance in recruiting former employees to participate in the study. We met shortly afterward and I was handed a large stack of pertinent information with a promise to assist in recruiting participants for my project. Shortly afterward, my contact called three potential participants who gave consent for me to send them 1  The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement resulted from former residential school students taking the federal government and the churches to court. The agreement provided compensation to former students, and led to the establishment of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada with a budget of $60-million over five years. Its mandate, “is to inform all Canadians about what happened in Indian Residential Schools (IRS). The Commission will document the truth of survivors, families, communities and anyone personally affected by the IRS experience” (www.trc.ca) (Accessed July, 2011).

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an information package in which I outlined the methods to be used, the scope of the research, as well as what their involvement would entail. They subsequently agreed to participate in four hours of interviews with me. The fourth and final participant was referred to me through one of the initial three. At the time I conducted the research, I was an English international graduate student. I was in my early 20s staying in Canada on a temporary study visa, with no family and few friends in Canada. Owing largely to my temporary status and fragile economic situation, in spite of my recognition that I undoubtedly experienced unearned white privilege in Canada, I felt very much an outsider to Anglo-Canadian society. I saw few parallels between myself and the participants who were intergenerational Euro-Canadian settlers, church-goers and senior citizens. Over the course of the research, and by the time I was conducting interviews with former employees, I was living on a reserve in the Syilx Nation with my Syilx partner and stepchildren. Living within the Syilx Nation, I learned first-hand about the intergenerational impacts of Indian residential schooling on Indigenous communities, and the sustained efforts of intergenerational survivors to revive their language and culture. It was challenging to ignore my feelings of sadness and anger when I began recruitment and interviews with the AngloCanadian former Indian residential school employees. It is not surprising then that my first interview with a former employee was an intense emotional experience. The Interviews: Some Contradictions in “Studying Up” the Past Jack, Christine, Gerri and Beverley, were church-going senior citizens in their 60s and 70s. They opened their homes to me and served me tea and cookies, and in one instance a full meal at the dinner table. Their attitudes were welcoming, yet our encounters were somewhat formal and stifled. And indeed, far from being authoritative agents of colonialism towering over small Aboriginal children, former employees were now retired and elderly grandmothers and grandfathers. The interviews were intended to bridge the past and present, yet in so doing the possibility loomed that the participants could experience mental and emotional trauma at reading their stories against the full context of colonialism and oppression that has been experienced by Indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, over the course of 16 hours, these elderly and harmless seniors told me sad stories of children being put on planes, stripped, showered and shaved, disciplined, children’s crying echoing through the big empty dormitories, bored children, judgmental staff, unwholesome meals, unhygienic living conditions, and many other stories. I found it challenging, if not impossible, to hold multiple perspectives in mind: authoritative adults who had played a part, however minor, in the stolen childhoods of thousands of Aboriginal children, and the potentially vulnerable elders that shared these stories. My own positioning in relation to the elderly Anglo-Canadian participants was further complicated by their initial perceptions of me, as an apparently harmless, presumably sympathetic young white naïve English lady, and therefore, I suspected as an “insider” who would share their

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ideas about “Indians” who had needed the whites in order to “progress” and see “Indian reserves” as derelict places. I suspected these views would not have been so openly shared with me if I had been an Aboriginal researcher; in fact, I doubted that the four former employees would have even have agreed to the interviews. In order to retain access and their confidence, and to maintain my role as an impartial professional, I listened in silence. I only disclosed to one of the participants that I lived on an Indian reserve with my partner and three stepchildren, after she talked at some length about reserves in an entirely disparaging way and I began to feel like I was deceiving her by withholding my own experiences. It was difficult to hold my anger or not break down in tears as I listened to their stories: Christine who admitted that she was not “warm” in her interactions with the children, Jack who recalled that staff simply “didn’t think of then putting an arm around [a homesick child] and giving them a little comfort” even though they were like “captives” in “a prison, although there were no bars” and “they just looked unhappy the whole time” (Chambers 2003: 104–5). Christine shared with me: [My teacher friend] reminded me that she had a girl who never spoke the whole year in her class. No one ever saw that girl talk to anybody. My friend said to me, “I always wondered what traumatic thing had happened to that girl to make her not speak” (Christine 20.05.2002 in Chambers 2003: 105).

Other stories included: a tuberculosis outbreak that happened at the same time that the dishwasher was broken and nothing could be cleaned sufficiently; the sounds of children’s crying echoing through the dormitories at night; and the physical domination of boys by male staff because they “expected to be beaten up” (Jack 26.06.2002 in Chambers 2003: 116). As they looked back to an earlier time when they had been inexperienced adults trying to assert control over large groups of children, the participants failed to see how some of their tactics reinforced the oppressive entrapment of the children. For example, Jack explained: We had three dorms that we looked after. We found a bunch of radio equipment so we put a speaker in each dorm which was also a microphone, so we could sit in the office and hear. If the kids were in bed at night then you could soon tell if there was any ruckus anywhere. They settled down pretty well. They knew that they had to (Jack 24.05.2002).

Beverley recalled a girl being beaten and publicly humiliated by the principal. “She was strapped in front of the whole dorm, girl’s section,” when she was caught trying to run away. Such stories are prolific in survivor accounts. Former employees simply provide some insight into how the widespread abuse of Aboriginal children was so rampant and tolerated in the schools for such a long period. For example, Beverley describes being “pretty unhappy” about the strapping, but “there was not

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very much that I could do about it … I was pretty upset. I knew I was upset then. So that night we just made a special effort of listening.” Natalie: Did you say anything? Beverley: No, there was nothing to be said because this was the rule and that was what was going to happen. (Chambers 2003: 113).

Staff recalled asserting control, physically, mentally and emotionally, and dominance over the children. For some employees, these approaches were learned behaviors from their own childhood experiences. Christine recalled that her father, “boxed my ears if I misbehaved! … if I was naughty at the table,” similar to, “an English dorm master who was raised in the old British system … Now I can remember that schoolmaster slapping a child – not on the face – but on the side” (Christine 02.07.2002 in Chambers 2003: 113). The participants were, for the most part, incapable of grasping their incredible power relative to the isolation and vulnerability of the children. Jack, who had worked as a dormitory supervisor at Port Alberni for six weeks before walking out on the job in protest at the appalling living conditions for staff and the children stated: I think that with the kids there was a “them” and “us” feeling. We were white so we were part of “them”. We didn’t share the churches and the government’s perspective about trying to destroy their culture, but yet we were identified with it, so we were tarred with the same brush (Jack 24.05.2002).

Jack left his job at the residential school and he attempts to distance himself from the “government’s perspective” within our interview, and yet during his short stint of employment, he too conformed to the norms and expectations of the institution; for example, he describes never thinking to comfort the children, not being allowed to be friendly with the children, and using physical force to assert his authority over them. As an interviewer, it was an intense and unpleasant emotional journey to engage in these interviews and I anticipated each encounter with trepidation, and while I managed somehow to maintain my composure until I had left the participant’s homes. Throughout the course of our interviews, the four former staff described themselves as having been young and inexperienced, and in two cases uneducated, workers operating at the lower echelons of colonial power within vast church and bureaucratic government education systems. Their emphasis on positioning themselves down in the colonial hierarchy highlighted their inability to fully grasp the larger colonial context that limited the freedoms, rights and options that were available to Indigenous parents, families and children. In fact, staff seemed at pains to divorce themselves from the colonial context, in particular, official government and church policies and discourse; I was unable to discern to what extent this was genuine or a coping mechanism in response to public critiques of the schools. As I

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attempted to navigate the colonial context, I repeatedly questioned the usefulness of this approach; after all, the stories of former Indian residential school staff had the potential to reproduce the colonial values and beliefs that had led to the development of the Indian residential school policies in the first place. It struck me that perhaps these were stories that would be better off ignored. An Unsettling Analysis Studying up through colonial power is an unsettling experience for everyone involved. As the researcher, reviewing the Indian residential school literature, (especially survivor accounts) preparing the interview questions, recruiting the staff, and conducting the interviews with staff churned my emotions, stirred up centuries of white guilt, internalized racism towards my own cultural heritage, and on many occasions, completely paralyzed the research process. Once the interviews were complete, I was left with over 100 pages of transcripts of stories that struck me as tragic, and as a consequence, totally unmanageable. I questioned what I should do with these terrible sad accounts of the schools. I could only wonder at the many lives and relationships that unravelled as a consequence of spending years institutionalized in these dysfunctional, underfunded, unhygienic, military type buildings under the watch of young and inexperienced staff. When dormitory and teaching staff members quit unexpectedly or failed to show up to work, as was often the case, dormitory staff would be responsible for up to 150 girls of all ages from morning until bedtime. Most Anglo-Canadian Indian residential school teachers had little or no prior contact or relationships with Indigenous peoples or communities during their childhoods or youth. At the Indian residential schools teachers shaved heads, stripped and showered crying children, and taught Indigenous children to speak English and about Dick and Jane, escalators and department stores (Christine 20.05.2002). As Christine pointed out, the Indian residential school wasn’t a place where “the appropriate reaction would be laughing or joking or joviality” (20.05.2002). I had heard similar stories time and time again from Indian residential school survivors, and I had responded with compassion, sadness and grief. However, hearing similar stories from Anglo-Canadian staff was a totally different experience and left me at a loss as to how to respond emotionally. When I left the house [of my first interview with a former staff person] I made some notes as I felt bewildered as to what to do with the interview material. I wrote: “How can I deal with this information? I want to criticize and ask hard questions but I don’t want to hurt anyone” (Fieldnotes 05.20.2002). Ten years have passed since I conducted my first interview with a former employee of Indian residential school. Over this period, I have struggled with how to write about and share the stories that emerged from the interviews. I embarked on this research with the aspirate to “turn over rocks” in the colonial garden, but what I unearthed seemed potentially too hurtful, and no matter what my analysis,

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held a danger in resurrecting the imperial project (Thomas 1994) that I was seeking to deconstruct. Conclusion Learning seems to be forever evolving – how then can we ever write a final research report? (Letendre and Caine 2007: 14).

As a research method, studying up colonialism has the potential to unearth hidden, subjugated knowledges that speak to the failure of grand narratives and colonial projects; this approach may be “a socially transformative endeavour that is localized, politicized and partial, yet also engendered by longer historical developments and ways of narrating them” (Thomas 1994: 104). Within these local spaces lie opportunities to examine localized and historicized relationships between Indigenous and settlers, and to explore the complex nature of colonial encounters: for example, historical analyses of white settler women have discovered them not to have been merely, “the hapless onlookers of empire, but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting” (Pickles and Rutherdale 2005: 2). Studying up may excavate multilayered, messy and hybrid colonial encounters and relationships that are criss-crossed by chains of colonial hierarchies and intersect along lines of gender, race and class that bridge and complicate the discursive binary of colonized/colonizer, oppressed/oppressor (Haig-Brown and Nock 2006). I embarked on studying up with lofty hopes that this research would contribute to the “conscientization” of non-Indigenous Canadians, and the freeing of minds from the grip of dominant hegemony (Smith 2002), but the resulting research raised many concerns that are well articulated by Michelle Fine in her aptly titled article, “For whom? Qualitative research, representations and social responsibilities”; With interviews over, we continue to struggle with how best to represent the stories that may do more damage than good, depending on who consumes/ exploits them … stories in which white respondents, in particular, portray people of colour in gross and dehumanizing ways … To what extent are we responsible to add, “Warning! Misuse of data can be hazardous to our collective national health”? (Fine, Weis, Weseert and Wong 2000: 116).

Maori educator Graham Smith’s praxis model calls for “multiple approaches, in multiple sites and applied by multiple respondents” (p. 15), in developing consciousness, resistance and transformative strategies to counter multiple forms of oppression. Studying up is an approach that, undertaken with great care, may enable non-Indigenous and Indigenous researchers and activists to research past and present settler peoples, colonial systems and societies. However, studying up is a process that is not well established and consequently, researchers may

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find themselves facing all kinds of cross-cultural, ethical, personal and emotional dilemmas (Fine, Weis, Weseert, and Wong 2000). Working in “ethical spaces,” the spaces in-between “separate realities of histories, knowledge traditions, values, interests, and social, economic and political imperatives” (Ermine 2004: 20), has great potential to contribute to the transformation of dominant settler commonsense thinking that re-inscribes colonialism as a normative value in present day relationships. An examination of colonization and studying up colonial settler-descended peoples involves confronting fragile myths of Euro-Canadian superiority and manifest destiny that continue to shape our present day national image. Crean (1999) describes this as taking ownership and “understanding the how, who and why” of colonizing projects like the Indian residential school system (p. 62). To me, “studying up” colonization means acknowledging that we all have a role to play in deconstructing colonization, and finding ways to “connect the dots” between our “personal lives” and the “historic, economic and race relations” within which we exist (Fine and Weiss 2008: 89). References Adams, H. 1991. A Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization. Penticton: Theytus Books. Annett, K. 2002. Love and Death in the Valley: Awakening to Hidden Histories and Forgotten Crimes on the West Coast of Canada. Bloomington: Indiana. Annett, K., Lawless, L. and L. O’Rorke. 2006. Unrepentent: Kevin Annett and Canada’s Genocide. Videorecording. British Columbia. Armstrong, J. 1990. “The Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment through their Writing.” In Gatherings: The En’owkin Journal of First North American Peoples, ed. D. Gregoire. Penticton: Theytus Books, 1(1): 141–6. Baptiste, V. 2000. Survivors of the Red Brick School. DVD Recording. Oliver, B.C. Berger, A. and Berger, N. (eds). 2001. Second Generation Voices: Reflections of Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators. New York: Syracuse University Press. Biolsi, T. and Zimmerman, L. 1997. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Brody, H. 1975. The People’s Land. Whites and the Eastern Artic. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Brody, H. 2001. The Other Side of Eden. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 1995. A Dinner at Oblate House. Chambers, N. 2003. “Seeking Validation: Staff Accounts of Indian Residential Schooling.” Unpublished MA Thesis. Simon Fraser University: Burnaby.

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–––. 2009. “Reconciliation: A ‘Dangerous Opportunity’ to Unsettle Ourselves”. In Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey, eds G. Younging, J. Dewar and M. DeGagne. Aboriginal Healing Foundation: Ottawa: 283-305. Chrisjohn, R. and Young, S. 1997. The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books. Conti, J. and O’Neil, M. 2007. “Studying Power: Qualitative Methods and the Global Elite.” Qualitative Research 7(1): 63–82. Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. Retrieved December 4, 2008, http://qrj. sagepub.com. Crean, S. 2009. “Both Sides Now: Designing White Men and the Other Side of History.” In Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey, eds G. Younging, J. Dewar and M. DeGagne. Aboriginal Healing Foundation: Ottawa, 59–68. Culhane, D. 1999. The Pleasure of the Crown. Vancouver: Talon Books. Culhane-Speck, D. 1987. An Error in Judgment: The Politics of Medical Care in an Indian/White Community. Vancouver: Talon Books. Doane, A. and Bonilla-Silva, E. (eds). 2003. White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism. New York: Routledge. Dyck, N. 1991. What is the Indian “Problem”: Tutelage and Resistance in Canadian Indian Administration. Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland. Ermine, W., Sinclair, R. and Jeffery, B. 2004. The Ethics of Research Involving Indigenous Peoples. Report of the Indigenous Peoples Health Research Centre to the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics. Fine, M., Bierhoff, H. and Rohmann, E. 2006. “Bearing Witness: Methods for Researching Oppression and Resistance – A Textbook for Critical Research.” Social Justice Research 19(2): 83–108. Fine, M. and Weis, L. 2008. “Compositional Studies, in Two Parts: Critical Theorizing and Analysis on Social (In)justice.” In The Landscape of Qualitative Research, eds N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Sage Publications, 87–112. Fine, M., Weis, L., Weseert, S. and Wong, L. 2000. “For Whom? Qualitative Research, Representations, and Social Responsibilities.” In The Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 107–32. Fournier, S. and Crey, E. 1997. Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. Frankenberg, R. 1993. The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Furniss, E. 1999. The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community. Vancouver: UBC Press.

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Gazit, N. and Maoz-Shai, Y. 2010. “Studying-up and Studying-across: At-home Research of Governmental Violence Organizations.” Qualitative Sociology 33: 275–95. Springer Science & Business media. Grant, A. 1996. No End of Grief: Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc. Haig-Brown, C. 1991. Resistance and Renewal. Surviving the Indian Residential School. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Haig-Brown, C. 1992. “Choosing Border Work.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 19(1): 96–116. Haig-Brown, C. and Nock, D. 2006. With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Harold, H. 1996. Totem Poles and Tea. Surrey: Heritage House. Heimannsberg, B. and Schmidt, C. 1993. The Collective Silence: German Identity and the Legacy of Shame. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Hertz, R. and Imber, J. 1995. Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods. Sage Publications. Jack, A. 2001. Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Penticton: Secwepemec Cultural Education Society and Theytus Books. King, R. 1967. The School at Mopass: A Problem of Identity. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Knockwood, I. 1992. Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie. Nova Scotia: Roseway Publishing. Letendre, A. and Caine, V. 2007. “Shifting from Reading to Questioning: Some Thoughts around Ethics, Research, and Aboriginal Peoples.” Pimatisiwin: A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health 2(2): 1–31. Manly, E. and Manly, P. 1996. The Awakening of Elizabeth Shaw. [Video Recording]. Manly Media Limited. Miller, J. 1996. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Milloy, J. 1999. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba. Nader, L. 1972. “Up the Anthropologists: Perspectives Gained from Studying up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. D. Hymes. New York: Pantheon Books, 284–311. Nock, D. 1988. A Victorian Missionary and Canadian Indian Policy: Cultural Synthesis vs Cultural Replacement. Ontario: Wilfred Laurier Press. Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council. 1996. Indian Residential Schools: The NuuChah-Nulth Experience. Vancouver Island: Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council. Purvis, R. 1994. T’shama. Surrey: Heritage House Publishing Company. Raibmon, P. 1996. “New Understandings of Things Indian: George Raley’s Negotiation of the Residential School Experience.” BC Studies 110: 69–96.

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Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. 1996. The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Looking Forward, Looking Back, Volume 1. Ottawa: Government of Canada. Rutherdale, M. 1994. “Revisiting Colonization through Gender: Anglican Missionary Women in the Pacific Northwest and the Artic, 1860–1945.” BC Studies 104: 3–23. Rutherdale, M. and Pickles, K. 2005. Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Sichrovsky, P. 1988. Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families. New York: Basic Books. Smith, G.H. 1997. “The Development of Kaupapa Maori: Theory and Praxis.” Unpublished doctoral thesis. Auckland, NZ: University of Auckland. Smith, G.H. 2002. “Beyond Freire’s Political Literacy: From Concientisation to Transformative Praxis.” AREA Conference, New Orleans, April 2002. Smith, L. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London, New York: Zed Books. Thomas, N. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Trevithick, S. 1998. “Native Residential Schooling in Canada: A Review of the Literature.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies XVIII(1): 49–86. Turner, S. 1999. “Settlement as Forgetting.” In Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, eds K. Neumann, N. Thomas and H. Ericksen. Sydney: UNSW Press: 20-38. Wolcott, H. 1967. A Kwakiutl Village and School. Queen’s Printer, Ottawa. Weissmark, M. 2004. Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 13

Methodological Challenges Faced when Researching in Hostile Environments: The SAWP in a Canadian Hinterland1 Patricia Tomic and Ricardo Trumper

There is a proliferation of methods for studying elites, methods that vary depending on the multiple access to social power that elites have: money, expertise, professional credentials, state power (Hertz and Imber 1995). Yet, we contend that elites are under-researched. Our reflections on the methodological challenges that emerged while studying the agricultural sector in the Okanagan valley in BC, Canada, are an attempt to contribute to the understanding of this complex subject. Our study on housing conditions for Mexican temporary agricultural workers under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) was not intended to be a study of elites’ behavior or ideology. And yet, given the attempt to discredit and interfere in our research by the local press, and some farmers’ organizations and individuals connected to the industry, understanding this phenomenon became a significant aspect of our research. In 2008, the peak year of a housing boom in the Okanagan Similkameen valley, affordable housing was a major problem. Since 2003, the year of the Kelowna fires, when almost 250 houses burned to the ground, and up to 2008, land and real estate prices escalated to a point where the average price of a condo or a house would be three or four times its 2002 price. Affordable housing virtually disappeared. For example, while the median house price in 1999 was $168,900, it had increased to $215,000 in 2003, reaching $520,000 in 2007 (Aguiar, Tomic, and Trumper 2011). By the end of 2007 housing costs had become a major 1  We would like to extend our gratitude to all the research participants for sharing their experiences and expertise with us. We would also like to thank our research assistants, Laura Mandelbaum and Rebecca Tromsness for their excellent work, insights and dedication to the project; our appreciation to our community partners, Erika Del Carmen Fuchs, from Justicia for Migrant Workers BC, and Reasha Wolf, from The Safe Harvest Coalition, for their valuable contribution. Our indebtedness goes to Brenda Beagan for sharing with us her valuable expertise and insight. Finally, we thank Luis L.M. Aguiar, from whom the idea of reflecting on the methodological issues of this study emerged. This collaborative research was supported with a grant from Metropolis BC. The research team consisted of Luis L.M. Aguiar (PI), Patricia Tomic and Ricardo Trumper (co-applicants).

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part of many families’ expenses. An affordability survey released on January 29, 2008 revealed that Kelowna ranked among the most expensive markets in North America (CBC News 2008). According to a rental housing market report issued by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 2008, the rental market in Kelowna showed “the lowest apartment vacancy rate in the country at 0.3%, while the vacancy rate for townhouses had dropped to 0.2%.” Not surprisingly, the author of the review points out that “[i]t is desperate times for tenants in the city of Kelowna, British Columbia. In fact it is now a housing crisis” (Alexander 2009). Given this general housing situation in Kelowna and considering that the SAWP presents very specific conditions for housing its workers, the aim of our research was to understand if and how the housing crisis was affecting these workers. Our question was simple: how were farmers and other employers in the Okanagan addressing housing issues in order to accommodate an increasing number of Mexican agricultural migrants? The SAWP in British Columbia, and in the Okanagan, has been in existence only since 2004.The number of temporary farm workers in the region increased from a handful in 2004, to about 3,000 in 2009 (Brett 2005; Schmidt 2009). The program continues to increase and today, around one third of the workers labouring under the SAWP in British Columbia work in the Okanagan valley. Hence, we did not anticipate unusual problems at the onset of the study, nor did we think that a qualitative approach would turn to be, in part, a study of elites. We received approval from the University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus’ Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) to conduct our research, conceived as interviewing employers of Mexican migrants, Mexican migrant themselves, and government and other organizations involved in the SAWP. While waiting for ethics review and approval, we undertook an extensive review of the existing literature on the subject. Our first purpose was to reread general studies on migration, studies on immigration and temporary migration to Canada, on the SAWP, and on agriculture in the Okanagan. Much of this preliminary work had been done when we received an invitation from The University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus Research Office to participate in Research Week, a yearly activity to showcase to the larger community some of the ongoing work undertaken by the faculty. Our goal was to share our preliminary findings on Mexican temporary migration. We wrote a fairly short presentation that would give account of the existing scholarship related to the subject of our interest. In part, we had already done some of the preliminary work on the Okanagan; our team had previously researched different issues in the valley (Aguiar, Tomic and Trumper 2005a, 2005b, 2006; Tomic, Trumper and Aguiar 2005, 2006, 2011). More to the point, we had surveyed the ample literature on temporary migration, beginning with John Berger and Jean Mohr’s classical book, The Seventh Man on migrants in Europe in the 1970s (Berger and Mohr 1975). Although the nature of capitalism has changed to a postfordist system, and our research addressed agricultural workers in Canada while Berger and Mohr’s deal fundamentally with migrants who moved through Western Europe to labor in its re-industrialization,

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the essence of the plight of temporary workers has not changed. There is also abundant scholarship on the Bracero program, which, from 1942 through 1964 took Mexican workers temporarily to the United States to work in agriculture (Galarza 1956, 1963). As a webpage with the suggestive title of Opportunity or Exploitation: The Bracero Program points out “[o]ver the course of its lifetime, the Bracero Program became the largest and most significant U.S. labour guest worker program of the 20th century” (www.americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove). In all, over 4.5 million contracts were awarded through the 22 years of the program. Despite the controversial nature of the Bracero program, in the 1960s the Canadian state mirrored it by creating the SAWP, a program which for almost half a century has lured temporary migrants from the Caribbean and Mexico to Canada to take the jobs in farms, nurseries and “hot houses” that Canadian workers and permanent residents refuse to fill given the existing working conditions and wages employers have been willing to pay in those occupations. There is also a significant number of studies dealing with the SAWP, in Canada (e.g. Basok 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Butovsky and Smith 2007; Preibisch 2003, 2004; Sharma 2001; Trumper and Wong 2007). Among other works, the documentary El Contrato (Lee 2004), offers a visual perspective of the conditions of temporary migrant laborers in Leamington, Ontario. From all these works what emerges is the picture of a controversial project that separates worthy immigrants from racialized unworthy migrants: the former good enough to eventually become Canadian citizens; the latter unacceptable. As Sharma (2001) points out, migrant agricultural workers are non-citizens and as such do not have the same rights as Canadian citizens and permanent residents possess. By the time of Research Week at our university, we had also reviewed the literature on the agricultural sector in the Okanagan and the ways it had resolved its labour needs prior to the introduction of the SAWP. This literature shows that long before the SAWP reached the province of British Columbia, migrant workers and racialized groups had been essential in the consolidation of the Okanagan Similkameen as one of the central agricultural areas of British Columbia. Wong’s doctoral dissertation (1988) and Lanthier and Wong’s (2002) research show that First Nations, Chinese migrants, Japanese-Canadians, Indo-Canadians, Portuguese immigrants and Quebecois, among others, had played crucial roles providing labor power for the farming industry in the valley. Race has had a significant role in the making of the Okanagan valley, racializing owners and workers, and creating a conservative monoculture even in the midst of Canadian multiculturalism (Aguiar, Tomic and Trumper 2005a, 2005b). From early on in the history of colonialism in British Columbia to today we find a continuum of political and economic strategies to establish a white dominated enclave in the valley. For example, the treatment of land as empty to be pre-empted by white “settlers” (Perry 2000); the attempt to attract gentlemen farmers from British public schools of whom the prime example is Lord Aberdeen, who established agricultural businesses along the valley (Dunae 1981); the segregation of Chinatowns in the cities of the valley (Huyskamp 2011), the anti-Japanese actions in Kelowna during World War II (Roy

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1990, 1981); the successful de-Japanization policies of the 1950s in Kelowna; the segregated sittings on the ferries that used to cross the Okanagan Lake; the beating up and other abuses of French Canadians throughout the valley, specially in the 1980s and 1990s (Cooper 1981; Seymour 1994); the proliferation of white supremacist groups in the area in the present (Lethbridge 1995, 2002). In the past two decades racism has become silent throughout the world while the biopolitics of racialization has become more subtle (Goldberg 2009). Seemingly, objective definitions of skill and meritocracy today have replaced other codes for racializing workers (Bonilla Silva 2003). Since the need for low paid and submissive workers continues to be acute and other forms of labor power are not as easily available as in the past, new groups and new geographies are sought to fulfil the labour needs of Canada in general and of the Okanagan valley in particular; today Mexican temporary migrants are replacing other non-white workers in the Okanagan farms. These issues formed the background of the talk offered by one of the members of the research team during Research Week in March 2008. To a sparsely attending audience, the Kelowna Capital News, a ‘local’ newspaper2 sent a reporter, Judie Steeves, and a photographer. Ms. Steeves is a staff writer for the newspaper. She specializes in outdoors and food, but has written extensively on farm issues.3 Unknown to us at the time of our presentation, Steeves is also a journalist for the B.C. Fruit Growers Magazine, a trade magazine of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association, a political organization that more than half a century ago was advocating for importing foreign temporary workers: Whereas there is a general shortage of agricultural labour throughout Canada, and whereas in this past year of light crop the National Employment Service could not provide us with sufficient labor for orchard employment, and whereas Boards of Trade and School Boards who have assisted at the harvest season for years past now are becoming reluctant to. Therefore be it resolved by this 1957 B.C.F.G.A. Annual Convention that the Provincial Department of Agriculture be requested to explore the possibilities of bringing into the province labor from Mexico or the Philippines for seasonal agricultural employment, to be moved to various parts of the province as required, and with the understanding that they will be returned to their country of origin at the end of the crop year. (B.C.F.G.A.1957: 30, cited in Lanthier and Wong 2002).

2  In fact, Black Press, a company that owns dozens of “local” newspapers in Canada and the United States, has owned the Kelowna Capital News since 2004. 3  Steeves is an experienced journalist who specializes in writing about food and agriculture, as well as the outdoors. She has worked as a reporter for the Kelowna Capital News for almost two decades, freelances as associate editor of the quarterly B.C. Fruit Grower magazine and for the B.C. Berry Grower magazine (http://www.judiesteeves.com/ about.html).

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After attending the talk and asking a few questions to the presenter, Ricardo Trumper, Ms. Steeves set herself to write an article for the Kelowna Capital News. Her “story” made the front page with the heading “UBC Professor Speaks Up. Migrant fruit pickers being ‘exploited’.” (Steeves 2008a: 1–2). Ms. Steeves’ somewhat disjointed report highlighted our preliminary research findings: the historical racialization of the agricultural labor force; lack of citizenship and differential rights for temporary farm workers under the SAWP in Canada; immobility and indenture; and the continuous whiteness that characterizes the Okanagan. She quotes Trumper accurately, but out of context, emphasizing Trumper’s argument that Mexican workers are hired by Okanagan employers to be “exploited to the max. They share housing and they can’t move around in the country” (Steeves 2008a: 1–2). She continues reporting on the topic in the same newspaper in subsequent days by giving space in her stories to some of the most visible local advocates of the SAWP, and by interviewing two Mexican farm workers, maybe with the intention of presenting them as the voice of the migrants working under the SAWP. There is also a flurry of responses in the same newspaper from different political actors and aggrieved employers trying to demonstrate the mutual benefits of the SAWP and seeking to highlight the ignorance of the researcher. This twin strategy is evident in the titles of the different pieces that the Kelowna Capital News published. As we showed earlier, Steeves subtitles her first piece as “Migrant pickers being ‘exploited’” where exploited is in quotation marks. In our view, this underscores her skepticism. Soon after, the newspaper published a letter to the editor from Ms. Olga Ilich, B.C. Minister of Labour and Citizens’ Service at the time. Ignoring all the research on the topic,4 the Minister claims astonishment at Trumper’s argument that temporary farm workers have differential rights to Canadian workers: “I was astonished to read claims by a UBC Okanagan sociology professor that temporary farm workers in British Columbia have no rights.” In a blatantly deceiving manner Ms. Ilich, alleges that migrants enjoy the same rights as all workers in British Columbia and goes as far as saying that “citizenship and residency play no role” in the experience of migrant workers in the province: “Once the workers arrive in our province they enjoy the same protection under the law as any one else” (Ilich 2008: A28). Side by side with Ms. Ilich’s letter, the Kelowna Capital News chose to publish another letter to the editor, this by a Similkameen resident who aligns with the Minister in discrediting the argument made about the SAWP during Research Week, although she seems to have misinterpreted Steeves’ piece as Trumper’s: “[w]hat a bunch of nonsense,” and later she admonish us: “you have to get out from behind the leather desks and forget the studies.” As an article of faith and 4  For example, Elgeresma (2007: 7) points out, “concerns have been raised over restricted labour mobility (the work permit is usually valid only for a specified job, employer and time period), and a resultant dependence for one employer that makes it difficult for foreign workers to leave unsatisfactory working conditions.”

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placing the responsibility on the free will of Mexicans, she claims that “[b]asic human rights have to be in place for migrant workers or I am sure they will not be returning to pick our crops the following year” (Nendick 2008: A28). A week after Steeves’ original article appears, on March 21, another letter to the editor is published in the same paper, this time from a farmer from Winfield, an agricultural area north of Kelowna. This orchardist, who hires Mexican workers, implies once more that Trumper was either distorting the facts or did not have any foundations for his assertions. He claims: “Mr. Trumper didn’t do a simple check with regard to the laws in our land before making his public presentation”. He continues by writing: “I am confident that you will find the reality and the comments made by Ricardo Trumper don’t match” (Tangaro 2008: 29). In the meantime, Ms. Steeves (2008b) continues to raise the alarm using the presentation at The University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO). On March 23 she writes an article entitled “Comments by prof. raises ire of orchardists.” She still does not seem to have read the widely available material briefly mentioned above, nor made any effort to contact Trumper to confirm his views, or to learn more about the study in which he is involved. She insists on pointing out that Trumper is inaccurate in claiming that migrant workers have differential rights in Canada and that recruiting them perpetuates racism. In preparing her article, she interviews one of the key political actors in the agricultural trade, Mr. Joe Sardinha, a grower from Penticton and president of the more than a century old B.C. Fruit Growers Association. Not surprisingly, Mr. Sardinha attempts to show Trumper’s ignorance by calling his views “ridiculous and inflammatory,” “naive and misinformed.” Steeves quotes Sardinha to insist on the ignorance of the researcher: “Trumper misses the mark by not digging deeper.” Perhaps more interesting, Mr. Sardinha opens a new front in the attack by emphasizing that with the SAWP everybody wins. It is, in his view, a win-win situation benefiting employers in Canada and Mexican migrants: “the program is mutually beneficial for both the workers, most of whom are flown from Mexico, and for orchardists who need workers willing to harvest fruit.” He is quoted again insisting “that the industry has been very happy with the program, as have the migrant workers … We’re not out to abuse migrant workers. Finding labor is a huge problem and this is a mutually beneficial program.” Finally Sardinha is quoted by the reporter saying emphatically “the program helps to feed Mexican families” (Steeves 2008b: 4). Ms. Steeves’ deployment of the benefits of the SAWP program for farmers and for Mexican migrants continues on March 26, 2008, when she publishes yet another article in the front page of the Kelowna Capital News, under the very suggestive title “Happy to work on local farms.” As we mentioned before, she interviews two Mexican migrant workers labouring under the SAWP. As the title of her piece affirms, they “are happy” with their arrangement. From the interview, she is able to inform readers that in one case “[b]ecause his accommodation is paid for he is able to spend very little of what he makes while he’s in Kelowna.” And he hopes to be able to make enough money in Canada to send his son to university. Through the voice of the workers (one of them does not speak English) Steeves

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makes an effort to show the farmers as generous and benevolent, for example, she gives the impression that workers do not pay rent. Ms Steeves also tells readers that the Mexicans are poorly educated, but experienced agricultural workers, and above all, they like this work. She quotes one of the workers saying “I like picking apples” and she remarks, “he also likes to work outdoors, despite the vagaries of weather.” She also notes that Mexican workers make $9 an hour in Canadian farms while in Mexico they make $20 a day (Steeves 2008c: 1). Along with showing happy Mexican workers, despite their harsh working conditions, Steeves interviews another key player in the industry, Mr. Mike Wallis. He was the coordinator of the Western Agriculture Labour Initiative (WALI), a political and technical organization that at the time served as the industry’s face for dealing with imported migrant workers. In Steeves’ piece Mr. Wallis explains part of the bureaucratic and practical steps necessary to make the SAWP operational. As with Sardinha, Mr. Wallis is placed in the article to refute Trumper’s “ignorance.” She writes: “Wallis was responding to a recent presentation made by UBC Okanagan professor Ricardo Trumper in which he made the argument that migrant workers are being exploited in Canada.” Wallis yet again puts forth the idea that this is a win-win situation: “They work hard, but they can improve their lifestyle back home and we get a labor force” (Steeves 2008b: 1). A few months later, and with this “controversy” still in the air, Karen Wilson, a freelance journalist who had published a piece in Okanagan Life Magazine about the SAWP in the valley entitled “Farming It Out” (Wilson 2007), published another piece in the Kelowna Capital News describing the results of a study conducted by think tank Policy Alternatives, authored, in part, by Dr. Arlene McLaren (Fairey et al. 2008; Wilson 2008). This study confirms that the scholarship on the SAWP is applicable to British Columbia and that Mexican migrants are indentured workers. For her summary article Wilson suffered a somewhat similar reaction to Trumper. This attack was also aired in the Kelowna Capital News. For us, here, it is most significant that the Kelowna Capital News published an immediate reaction from the business manager of Bylands Nurseries Ltd., a medium-size nursery operator in Kelowna. Bylands employs a sizable number of Mexican migrants every year, about 70 (Wilson 2001). Indignantly, he asks the newspaper “to publish a retraction and an apology to the agricultural industry and employers who, this article demeaned.” In the same piece, he seeks an apology from Ms. Wilson “to the many excellent foreign workers taking advantage of [the SAWP]” (Cruickshank 2008: D12). At that point, we had already begun the fieldwork for our study. It is our view that Ms. Steeves’ articles and the reactions to her reporting, as letters to the editor highlight, transformed the nature of our research from an academic endeavor within the framework of existing studies on the SAWP in Canada, and of temporary migration, racialization and agriculture, into a contested political venture. Our research team, including our research assistants, at times was confronted with a hostile environment. We had to face, and at times negotiate, access to interviews with political organizations representing the interests of the industry and with individual farmers and other employers.

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Their access to provincial political power and Ms. Steeves’ success in alerting political forces is best exemplified by the Minister of Labour’s instant response to the Kelowna Capital News’ coverage of our research as we have shown above. There is a long history of political organizing by the industry in the province, for example, Kingsbury (2004) and Kingsbury and Hayter’s (2006) work on the historical organization in the wine industry, and agriculture in general, and on the manoeuvrings of these organizations. These authors offer the picture of powerful, although somewhat heterogeneous and at times fractious business associations in the province and in the valley. In this sense, the alert by Ms. Steeves of a potential questioning to the SAWP program resonated throughout political organizations, and through them, in the provincial government. The housing of Mexican workers is crucial in their indenturing, a key characteristic of the SAWP (Preibisch 2003). As McLaren and Thompson (2008) point out, although the B.C. government may claim that Mexican temporary migrants under the SAWP have the same rights of Canadians, they have been confined to one employer who they cannot change without the intervention of the Mexican Consulate, always reluctant to get involved. Mr. Cruickshank confirms this in his response to Wilson on the nature of the SAWP, “[y]es, they [Mexican temporary workers] are tied to one employer but this is a requirement of the contract demanded by the Mexican government. The employee arrives with a signed contract with one farm and the Mexican Government must approve any transfer to another farm” (Cruickshank 2008, emphasis in original). It is irrelevant which government demands this condition; the workers are not free as Canadians are to seek employment. Also, our own research shows that workers cannot refuse the housing arrangements set up by their employers. The SAWP privileges accommodations within the premises of the employer: They “are often located on the work premises for obvious practical reasons” (Government of Canada 2009: 6). Workers are under the employer’s gaze and control all the time (Aguiar, Tomic and Trumper 2011; Tomic, Trumper and Aguiar 2010, 2011). This confinement is important to employers in the Okanagan valley. Thus, it is not surprising that when Karen Wilson (2008) reported a study in the Kelowna Capital News that demonstrated that the SAWP workers were indentured, one of the prominent users of Mexican temporary migrants in Kelowna reacted quickly and strongly. Bylands Nursery house most of its workers in trailers on the premises. Its manager, in the letter to the editor that we have discussed above, used the familiar technique of accusing academic research as misinformed while claiming Mexicans’ satisfaction with the program. Why do business people and politicians take so much care about the representation of the SAWP and try to deny the immobilization of Mexican workers into indenture jobs and work sites? The immobilization of the SAWP workers, bonding them to one employer and to one site, represents more than an expedient form of exploitation; it also marks their differential rights in relation to other workers and legitimate permanent residents, and Canadians. The SAWP, thus, inherently suspends the rights of temporary agricultural workers, with each isolated farm, winery, or nursery acting

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as holding stations, with foremen, and employers substituting for agents of the state. Analyzing detention centers for immigrants, Cornelisse (2010) claims that the illegal immigrant “represents and evokes fears of losing territorial control” by the state and, as such, needs to be sedentarized. In analogous manner the SAWP workers, who do not truly belong to Canada, are “sedentarized” under exceptional rules that suspend for them, at least some, of the citizenship rights applicable to Canadians or permanent residents. SAWP workers are placed in what Agamben (1998) calls “conditions of exclusionary inclusion.” The importance of the SAWP at a bio-political level, and for the profits of individual employers, poses a number of methodological problems for researchers. Admittedly, we made a seemingly important mistake in our research when we presented the preliminary framework on the existing scholarship on the SAWP to a public audience. The reactions of the executives of the business/political associations dealing with Mexican migrants unsurprisingly outlined their support for the SAWP, and made public their hostility to the research and the researchers. Strategically, they tried to doubt the cultural capital of the researcher(s)— and by doing that, the validity of an existing scholarship on migrant workers that emphasizes, among other things, the racialization of (im)migration and problematizes a discourse that reinforces that (im)migrants are accepted into Canada as a favor to them and out of compassion. The concerted effort of the power network that became evident in the Kelowna Capital News during a number of weeks after the academic presentation by Trumper, and later when the research team engaged in field work, had the purpose of invalidating not only this particular study and even, our intentions, but also the right of scholars to analyze social life in the area. Many, but by no means all the individuals and organizations contacted for interviews were suspicious of our intentions and of our methodology. However, the reaction to our study was not uniform, nor was the view of the agricultural business community homogeneous. In fact, when the SAWP was introduced to British Columbia business groups were split on the hiring of Mexican workers, in particular in the BC Fruit Growers Association. In 2005, when the Prime Minister’s Caucus Task Force met in Kelowna, it was apparent that the B.C. Fruit Growers Association supported the SAWP. But, farmers like Richard Bullock, the owner of Kelowna Land and Orchards, a large operation in Kelowna, spoke against it, claiming that salaries commensurate with union salaries, which he paid, would attract permanent and very efficient Canadian labourers (Steeves 2005). We discovered later in our interviews that he was not the only one advocating for Canadian workers (Aguiar, Tomic and Trumper 2011). Nevertheless, many agreed with the B.C. Fruit Growers Association’s President, Joe Sardinha, and with its manager, Glen Lucas. In fact, Mr. Lucas was a strong defender of the introduction of the SAWP to British Columbia. At the end, despite the attacks we experienced, we were able to interview many employers and Mexican workers in the Okanagan, and even government officials. In total, we completed 51 interviews. Only a handful of employers, workers, and journalists refused to talk to us. Even some

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amongst those who had been vocal against our research and our motifs gave us interviews. At times we felt, or perceived ourselves to be looked down on by research participants, but also, in many other cases, we felt we were treated as equals. We also experienced an excellent rapport with many interviewees; people who, although employing SAWP workers, agreed with the findings of existing scholarship on the SAWP and received our study with appreciation, curiosity and even enthusiasm. Thus, critical to the analysis of the position of the researcher in relation to the researched—or rather the position of the researched in relation to the researcher— is to understand the workings of power. In this analysis we take a post-structural perspective where power is understood in a fluid manner, as something, that is exercised but not appropriated (Smith 2006). In fact, in our experience researching this case study we saw that power was not really inscribed in particular individuals, or even, in organizations, but it was rather flexible and relatively diffuse, resulting in that each interview was unique and marked by the agency of the individuals involved in it (researched and researcher). Thus, we interpret our experience in conducting this qualitative study through interviewing participants in a variety of positions vis-à-vis the SAWP program as one of relativism between researcher and researched or researched and researcher. From this practical experience it is possible to problematize the position of university researchers vis-à-vis a controversial social issue, researchers who are supposed to have significant cultural capital; who work sometimes, as in this case, for powerful corporations, carrying symbolic and actual weight, specially if located in a relatively small centre as is the case of our university campus vis-à-vis the community. UBCO is situated in a metropolitan area of around 150,000 people in the British Columbia interior. Yet, in this particular case, the researchers themselves may or may not have been seen as embodying the power of the institution. The very fact that in our case, the researcher(s) might have not been perceived as white (Latin names, accents, skin color) is a factor that might have influenced at least some of the researched/researcher relations, (we say this aware that we may be accused of using the race card as a way to disqualify our point). Another complication in terms of the workings of power is the fact that we studied the lives of workers who had to tread carefully because they were always under the gaze of their bosses. Another consideration is the fact that most of the research team speaks Spanish as their first language, which positioned us, perhaps, in a relation of race equality with the workers. Again one should not forget that this condition of equality may also be a perceived condition rather than a real one as “Latin American” is rather an invention far more solid for North Americans than for nationals of countries south of the Rio Bravo. More so, class and gender also played an important role in the interactions between the researchers and the Mexican workers, as class and gender differences divide people of similar “racial” backgrounds. Thus, we wonder, were we part of the elites in our research? Were we elites studying elites? Were we Latin Americans studying both, Latin American workers and Canadian businesspeople with a sense of entitlement different than ours? Were

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we, then, simultaneously studying up and down? Or, is elite a relative term and studying up also a relative and problematic concept? (Smith 2006). As we pointed out at the beginning, the concept of studying up is much debated. Studying up is usually used to refer to researchers who study different types of elites. While some writers find that elites is a fuzzy term (Beagan 1998; Smith 2006), others like Hertz and Imber (1995) take for granted the existence of elites, and just consider them to be, simply, important people, people with power, and, as such, often inaccessible. Elites have been theorized for a long time, among others by Wilfred Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels (Bottomore 1993; Michels 1962). While for Pareto and Mosca elites are linked to individual psychological factors, for Michels, in modern society, there is a tendency for a few to rule. Michels argues that although a craving for power is inherent in human beings, this tendency is needed for the development of modern organization, administration and strategy. For him, an oligarchy is inevitable and this oligarchy devotes its efforts, above all, to maintaining their position. There is, as well, a more contemporary theory of elites that sees existing societies as elitist, where great power is concentrated in the hands of a few who rule for their own interests. In this case, elites control key power resources such as wealth, government and communications, to control information. The most significant of radical elite theorists is C. Wright Mills (1956, 1959), who describes elites in contrast to ordinary people. While ordinary people experience life bounded by the commitments of everyday life, the elites make decisions of major consequences in a historical scale, and they are possessors of the quality of mind to control events (Mills 1956, 1959). In sum, Mills sees the power elite in the United States constituted by the controllers of the military, the Federal government and corporations, those with power. The elites have become more and more extended and more and more difficult to locate in a precise way, including broader and broader groups, as there are many layers of power in complex, organic societies. Methodologists trying to understand the research process often use the term elite when trying to identify research dealing with groups that they define as powerful. As we have pointed out, this nebulous definition is of little help for research like ours. Geographer Katherine Smith (2006) offers a more nuanced view of power and elites. Indeed, while scholars interested in researching elites argue that they are studying up and that the interviewee is able to disrupt the relation with the interviewer because they are powerful enough to do so, from a post-structural perspective we have found that defining and identifying individuals as elites is somewhat elusive and problematic (Smith 2006). More so, it is unclear if it is possible to dichotomize people into elite and non-elite. Elite is simply a short hand term for actors who are perceived to be more powerful or privileged than other groups, a short hand that lacks conceptual depth (Smith 2006; Woods 1998). This is not to say that power does not exist, but it has to be unpacked. The play out of power relations depends on the particular situation in which they take place. Relations of power exist between the researched and the researcher within wider power structures. Reflexivity is needed to reconsider the power dynamics within

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the research interview, flexibly understanding the different and varying scenarios in which one finds oneself. A reflexive attitude is necessary to adapt the research methodology to the particular situation (Smith 2006). Beagan (1998) considered her doctoral research a case of “studying up” because she was, in part, interviewing and observing what she defines as elites. As a graduate student at the University of British Columbia she wrote her dissertation on the formation of medical doctors at the same university. Her qualitative research included observing and interviewing medical doctors with the faculty of medicine and medical students. Medical doctors are notorious in North America for their social status, income, and a culture of superiority, unparalleled by other professions, a position actively cultivated by physicians. Beagan discusses how she carefully considered the different situations she found herself in, adapting her methodology and demeanor to deal, on the one hand, with medical doctors/faculty at UBC Vancouver, manoeuvring to keep her research progressing even when the physicians would put in doubt her cultural capital and professional abilities, and were disrespectful or dismissive of her and the research she was undertaking. Beagan contextualizes her position by pointing out that while she was a female graduate student, whose income and power were much lower than those of the medical doctors/faculty she was interviewing, she was in a different relationship with other interviewees. She discusses how she adapted her methodology, for example, asking different and more controversial questions when interviewing students, at what she perceived to be a more level field. It is fruitful to think that all research must be reflexive and that in many ways the researchers should treat all the researched subjects as elites. Dexter (2006), to some extent, seems to point in that direction when arguing that an elite interview, “is an interview with any interviewee—and stress should be placed on the word “any”—who in terms of the current purposes of the interviewer is given a special, non-standardized treatment. By special, non-standard treatment I mean 1. stressing the interviewees’s definition of the situation, 2. encouraging the interviewee to structure the account of the situation, 3. letting the interviewee introduce to a considerable extent (an extent which will of course vary from project to project and interviewer to interviewer) his notions of what he (sic) regards as relevant, instead of relying upon the investigator’s notions of relevance” (p. 18). As in Beagan’s case, we faced the research in a reflexive manner, approaching with flexibility our relations with our varied researched groups. Our flexible positions were marked perhaps by our assumption that our position as University of British Columbia tenured faculty, to some extent, would offset the power of organized employers and even politicians at different levels; and from assuming that our origin would tend to offset the distrust that particularly vulnerable Mexican workers could have for researchers of a large university in a racialized and hostile environment. We were aware that our own place at the University and our own racialized status could influence our research. We also kept in mind and adapted the research to the heterogeneity of the sample we were studying, farmers

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and business people; representatives of business groups; government officials and local politicians; and Mexican farm workers from different parts of Mexico. Often, our interviews and access to interviewees were marked by the Kelowna Capital News campaign. In this sense, our methodology had to be adjusted accordingly, probably more consciously than if the newspaper had not interfered. We attempted to invite Ms. Steeves to a two-day workshop at the University where the SAWP was being discussed.5 She did not respond to our email. The workshop took place at the heart of the Kelowna Capital News campaign. We hoped that the journalist would become better informed of our project to be able to present a more objective, or at least enriched view of our work. It did not happen; thus the public only received the newspaper’s account favouring the SAWP, the employers and the image of migrant workers who are happy and grateful of the opportunity offered by Canada to work and improve their lives through it. The readership was also informed of the view of a seemingly ignorant and biased academic who did not know what he was talking about. Thus, we found ourselves explaining time and again our research to the potential interviewees, emphasizing its potential significance, its scientific validity, and its objectivity, and the fact that we were not the first to study the program and its problems. Despite this explanation, our requests for interviews were rejected several times. Many rejections came from farmers and businesspeople that wielded, or had connections with political power at varying levels. We also had to face rejections from temporary migrant workers who had been forewarned by their employers. On the other hand, we were given interviews by employers and functionaries who, from the start of the interview said that they had accepted to be interviewed just to show us that our perceptions were mistaken, that employers were reasonable and good with their workers; that the accommodations they offered were decent and in accordance with the conditions imposed by the SAWP. Although the latter might have tried to refocus the interviews to show the points they wanted to make, it is fair to say that our prior public exposure helped us at least in securing interviews and in addressing the issues we wanted to address. However, at times, our exposure also made it difficult to communicate with the Mexican workers. Sometimes they were afraid to be seen talking to us without their bosses’ permission. The structure privileged by SAWP of housing the workers close to their employers, under their gaze, made it problematic to enter the premises without the employers’ permission. When employers were reluctant to give us access to their workers we had to resort to finding them in places they frequented, a sort of chance sampling. We would randomly find them in shopping places, while participating in recreational activities organized by support groups, or through our community partners. Securing interviews was only one, although important, aspect of the process. The interview in itself was at times marred by demonstrations of defensiveness 5  The workshop, funded by the UBC’s Equity Enhancement Fund, was entitled Equity and Diversity in the Global Marketplace: North-South Images and Representations and took place between March 22–23, 2008.

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and anger by interviewees, and by attempts to put us in our place. Perhaps the most telling situation, and one we can comment without infringing in ethics regulations because it was made public by the institution involved, is one where the Chair of WALI responded to our request for an interview with a letter copied to the Head of our Unit at the university and to Steve Thomson, then the Executive Director of the British Columbia Agricultural Council. The letter expressed the following: “Your research group focus on ‘the difficulties faced by migrant workers with respect to their housing arrangement’ suggests a pre-disposition and lack of impartiality. In fact, Dr. Trumper’s misleading and inflammatory remarks regarding SAWP migrant worker rights [sic] at a public presentation (Kelowna Capital News, 04/14/08) validates our concern about the group’s potential lack of objectivity.” The letter continues, “The creation of a sustainable, mutually beneficial employment program for temporary foreign workers and employers requires credible, fact based analysis and review, free from political agendas or ideology.” And it ends by saying: “We hope that this will be the case.” In our interpretation, this is a group’s defensive and to some extent angry response (Aguiar 2009). Nevertheless, WALI’s officials did not close the door to an interview, although they questioned our motives. In at least two other situations we faced interviewees who accepted to give us interviews but were hostile or reluctant to answer our questions during the interview. In those cases, the interviewee opened the process by putting in doubt our motives and signaling that we were biased. We had prepared for this, and countered the assumed biased nature of our research by explaining our efforts to be objective in the research method and our intention of giving them the opportunity to express their opinions, in the same line of Beagan’s methodological strategy. We also pointed out that the BREB’s acceptance of our research was contingent on the interviewee’s right to review and edit the transcript of the interview and to deny permission to use the information if they wished to do so, partially or fully, even if we had spent resources and time in conducting it. It did happen. In other more friendly interviews we were simply assumed to be there to protect the Mexican workers who were implicitly understood to be racially or ethnically equal to us from the beginning. We had to emphasize that we worked for a Canadian university, and again try to show our impartiality and lack of bias. When interviewing employers and functionaries there were a few instances when the interviewees made special efforts to assert forms of power, trying to humiliate us. They would be rude, even obnoxious; they would look at their watch, hurrying us up, interrupting the interview to accept calls, receiving us in the kitchen of an office, making us run after them when they were showing the premises where workers were accommodated; in a couple of situations we would get to the interview to learn that the interviewee had taking the liberty of having another person present to participate in the interview, without having informed us of this. No doubt in such cases we had to adapt to the interview, measuring the consequences of our actions, trying to keep close to our planned formula and making sure that our questions were answered. Several examples come to mind.

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In one interview the owner of a business who had received us probably because of common acquaintances, rushed the interview, made obnoxious comments, tried to flaunt his financial and cultural capital (to offset our own cultural capitals?), and emphasized the pioneer origins of their family (maybe to devalue our immigrant origins?). Throughout the interview we tried to keep close to the scripted questions and maintain a neutral demeanor. We obtained valuable information, however, when we sent this person the transcripts of the interview, participation was declined arguing that we had taken too long to send the transcript. Moreover, when interviewing the workers of this firm, the employer chose whom we would interview, and the place where the interview was going to be conducted. In another case, we were interviewing a functionary of an important institution in the processing and facilitating of the selection and transportation of Mexican workers. The functionary showed up with someone higher up in the hierarchy of the institution. Both showed anger and disbelief about our methods and motives. For some time we were unable to turn on the tape recorder because the potential interviewees were hesitant about the interview and would not sign the consent form. There was a point where we reacted in a far more pointed way. After a somewhat tense exchange we said that if they felt unsure of giving us an interview we could leave; only at that point did they sign the papers and the interview started. At the end, they gave us an extensive and informative interview and allowed us to use it after reading it. In another case, a government official gave us also a fairly long interview, but received us in the kitchen of the office where we were often interrupted by other employees who entered the room to prepare themselves coffee or looking for snacks. Were we put in our place or was there no other, more proper, space in the office to conduct the interview? We would never know, but we can reflect on the possible answers to this question on studying up. There was also a case where an employer refused to be interviewed by one of the members of the team, but gave other members an interview nevertheless. S/he chose the workers whom we could interview, and was in earshot for that interview, claiming that s/he did not speak Spanish, making the workers obviously nervous. We did not challenge her/him. Finally, with Mexican workers we found ourselves occasionally in comparable situations. For example, we were chastised by a Mexican worker who did not take our cultural capital for granted and during the interview signaled his own university education trying to redirect our questions and pointing out the “mistakes” of our theoretical framework. Meanwhile, many workers found themselves in a stressful situation talking to us about their experience in Canada. Despite these issues, much of the rest of the research we conducted was marked by normality. We were received courteously in offices and sometimes—both in the case of farmers and Mexican workers—in living rooms, or were invited for tea or coffee in friendly kitchens, shown work premises, shared a coffee in coffee houses or drinks in a pub.

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Conclusion “Elite” is a fuzzy concept. For sure, in our case study, it is unclear to what extent we were dealing with elites. From a post-structural approach elites need to be considered flexibly. Certainly, the agricultural sector in British Columbia and in the Okanagan is important in production and employment and in that sense, farmers and their representatives might be considered elites. Moreover, the political and trade organizations in agriculture, some having existed for more than a century, are strong and reach the higher levels of government. On the other hand, the University of British Columbia is a giant corporation and the researchers are employees of this institution and financed by public funds. In terms of cultural capital, the researchers in this study had a certain “advantage” over many farmers and employers. Yet, their status was also compromised by widespread racialization that might have located them closer to the Mexican workers than to Canadian employers. Not unexpectedly, the reactions from employers and trade organizations were mixed, showing that power in the 21st century is relative. Thus, our approach to studying housing for Mexican workers was marked by reflexivity and a flexible approach to each situation. In general, every group tends to try and protect their interest when they feel that there is potential to lose in the process of being researched. This applies to the more powerful, but also to the more vulnerable. Their strategies may vary, but there is the tendency to resist if there is any perceived danger. In our analysis Steeves and the Kelowna Capital News made the research sound like an a-priori attack against SAWP that needed to be contained. This made all those who we intended to research act, at the very least, with caution, and in some cases, aggressively. In general, however, we managed to accomplish our goal, a goal that confirmed that Mexican temporary migrants under SAWP are indentured. Our research also showed that, within existing discourses, employers provide housing in a variety of manners; some take advantage of their workers, but many make efforts to provide what they see as fair accommodations. References Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Aguiar, L.L.M. 2009. “Studying Up, Being Put Down.” Farming Elites Disrupt Study. Unpublished Paper, June. Aguiar, L.L.M., Tomic, P. and Trumper, R. 2005a. “Work Hard, Play Hard: Selling Kelowna as Year-round Playground.” Canadian Geographer – Geographie canadien 48(2): 123–39. –––. 2005b. “The Letter: Racism, Hate and Monoculturalism in a Canadian Hinterland.” In Possibilities and Limitations: Multicultural Policies and Programmes in Canada, ed. C. James. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 163–74.

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–––. 2006a. “New Palate, New Taste, New Class: Wine Tourism and the Transformation of Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley.” Centre for Research on Work and Society [CRWS]. CRWS News 29 (fall): A5-A6. –––. 2011. “Mexican Migrant Agricultural Workers and Accommodations on Farms in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia.” Metropolis B.C. Working Paper Series, No. 11-04. Alexander, M. 2009. “Moishe Alexander’s Review of the Kelowna British Columbia Rental Housing Market Report Issued by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 2008, February 23.” Retrieved December 22, 2009, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1504205/moishe_alexanders_ review_of_the_kelowna.html?cat=54. America on the Move. nd. “Opportunity or Exploitation.” Retrieved May 3, 2011, http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/themes/story_51_5.html. Basok, T. 1999. “Free to Be Unfree: Mexican Guest Workers in Canada.” Labour, Capital, and Society 32(2): 192–221. –––. 2000. “Migration of Mexican Seasonal Farm Workers to Canada and Development: Obstacles to Productive Investment.” International Migration Review 38(2): 79–97. –––. 2002. Tortillas and Tomatoes Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill, Queen’s University Press. –––. 2003a. Human Rights and Citizenship: The Case of Mexican Migrants in Canada. La Jolla, CA: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies: University of California, San Diego. –––. 2003b. “Mexican Seasonal Migration to Canada and Development: A Community-based Comparison.” International Migration Review 41(2): 3–26. Beagan, B.L. 1999. “Personal, Public, and Professional Identities: Conflicts and Congruences in Medical School.” PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia. Berger, J. and Mohr, J. 1975. The Seventh Man. New York: Viking. Bonilla-Silva, E. 2003. Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Bottomore, T. 1993. Elites and Society. New York: Routledge. Brett, M. 2005. “Growers Reach South for Pickers.” The Okanagan Saturday, June 18, A1. Butovsky, J. and Murray, E.G. 2007. “Beyond Social Unionism: Farm Workers in Ontario and Some Lessons from Labour History.” Labour/Le Travail 59(Spring): 69–97. Cornelisse, G. 2010. “Immigration Detention and the Territoriality of Universal Rights.” In The Deportation Regime. Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, edited by N. De Genova and N. Peutz. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 101–21. Cooper, M. 1997. “Pickers Suffer Insults.” The Daily Courier July 9, A2. Cruickshank, C. 2008. “Letter to the Editor.” Kelowna Capital News July 1, D12.

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Dexter, L.A. 2006. Elites and Specialized Interviewing. Colchester: European Consortium for Political Research Press. Dunae, P.A. 1981. Gentlemen Emigrants: From the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre. Elgersma, S. 2007. “Temporary Foreign Workers.” Parliamentary Information and Research Service PRB 07-11eE September 7. Fairey, D. et al. 2008. Cultivating Farmworker Rights: Ending the Exploitation of Immigrant and Migrant Farmworkers in BC. Vancouver: Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives-BC Office, Justicia for Migrant Workers, Progressive Intercultural Community Services and The BC Federation of Labour, 2008 Retrieved May 1, 2011, www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/…/bc_ farmworkers_full.pdf. Galarza, E. 1956. Strangers in Our Fields. Washington, D.C.: Joint United StatesMexico Trade Union Committee. –––. 1963. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. Santa Barbara, California: McNally and Loftin. Goldberg, D.T. 2009. The Threat of Race. Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Government of Canada. 2009. Government of Canada Response to the Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration: Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers. Retrieved November 19, 2009, http:// www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4017803&Lan guage=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=2. Hertz, R. and Imber, J.B. (eds). 1995. Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods. London: Sage. Huyskamp, R. 2011. “Kelowna’s Chinatown: Recognizing an Unrecognized Past.” Paper presented at the 2011 BC Studies Conference, May 5–7, 2011, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC. Ilich, O. 2008. “Workers Protected.” Kelowna Capital News March 19, A28. Kingsbury, A. 2004. “Cooperative Fermentation: Formal Cooperation, Business Interest Associations, and the Okanagan Wine Industry.” Master of Arts Thesis, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University. Kingsbury, A. and Hayter, R. 2006. “Business Associations and Local Development: The Okanagan Wine Industry’s Response to NAFTA.” Geoforum 37(4): 596– 609. Lanthier, M. and Wong, L.L. 2002. Ethnic Agricultural Labour in the Okanagan Valley: 1880s to 1960s. Living Landscapes, Royal British Columbia Museum. Retrieved March 17, 2011, www.livinglandscapes.bc.ca. Lethbridge, D. 1995. “Techniques of Fascist Recruitment.” The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies. Retrieved July 14, 2011, www.bethuneinstitute.org/ documents/ recruitment.html. –––. 2002. “White Supremacy’s New Offensive.” The Bethune Institute for AntiFascist Studies. Retrieved July 14, 2011, www.bethuneinstitute.org/documents/ newoffensive.html.

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Min Sook Lee. 2004. El Contrato. NFB. McLaren, A.T. and Thompson, M. 2008. “Harvest of Shame”. Center for Policy Alternatives, Commentary and Fact Sheets, June 19. Retrieved May 12, 2011, http:// www.policyalternatives.org/ publications/ commentary/harvest-shame. Michels, R. 1962. Political Parties: A Sociological Studies of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Collier. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. –––. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Nendick, K. 2008. “Immigrant Workers Do the Jobs Locals Wont Touch.” Kelowna Capital News, Letter to the editor, March 19, A28. Perry, A. 2000. “Hardy Backwoodsmen, Wholesome Women, and Steady Families: Immigration and the Construction of a White Society in Colonial British Columbia, 1849–1871.” Social History/Histoire Sociale 33(66): 343–60. Preibisch, K.L. 2003. Social Relations Practices Between Seasonal Agricultural Workers, Their Employers, and Residents of Rural Ontario. Guelph: University of Guelph. –––. 2004. “Migrant Agricultural Workers and Processes of Social Inclusion in Rural Canada: Encuentros and desencuentros.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 29(57–8): 203–39. Roy, P.E. 1981. “British Columbia’s Fear of Asians, 1900–1950, British Columbia Historical Readings.” In British Columbia: Historical Readings, eds P. Ward and R. McDonald. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 657–70. –––. 1990. “A Tale of Two Cities: The Reception of Japanese Evacuees in Kelowna and Kaslo, B.C.” BC Studies 87(Autumn): 23–47. Schmidt, D. 2009. “Consulate Hires Staff to Cope with Demand for Aging Workers. Mexican Labourers Have Made a Success of SAWP Program.” Country Life in BC. Retrieved April 4, 2011, www.countrylifeinbc.com/newspages/feature. php. Seymour, R. 1994. “Searching for Paradise.” The Daily Courier July 23, A1, B3. Sharma, N. 2001. “On Being not Canadian: The Social Organization of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 38: 415–39. Smith, K.E. 2006. “Problematising Power Relations in ‘Elite’ Interviews.” Geoforum 37: 643–53. Steeves, J. 2008a. “UBC Professor Speaks Up. Migrant Fruit Pickers Being ‘Exploited’.” Kelowna Capital News March 14, 1–2. –––. 2008b. “Comments by Prof. Raises Ire of Orchardists.” Kelowna Capital News March 23, 4. –––. 2008c. “Happy to Work Local.” Kelowna Capital News March 26, 4. Tangaro, S. 2008. “Professor’s Remarks were ‘Intolerable’.” Kelowna Capital News Letter to the editor. March 21, 29. Tomic, P., Trumper, R. and Aguiar, L.L.M. 2005. “Reinventando Kelowna: Jubilaciones, tecnología, vino y turismo en una ciudad del Hinterland de Canadá.” Scripta Nova Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales

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Universidad de Barcelona, IX.194, 1 de agosto. Retreived May 4, 2011, http:// www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-194-9.htm. –––. 2010. “Housing Regulations and Living Conditions of Mexican Migrant Workers in the Okanagan Valley, B.C.” Canadian Issues/Themes canadiens Spring: 78–82. –––. 2011. “The Social Cost of ‘Healthy’ Agriculture: The Differential Rights of Migrant Workers in the Okanagan.” In Mistreatment of Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: Overcoming Regulatory Barriers and Realities on the Ground, ed. E. Depatier-Pelletier and K. Rahi. Montreal: Centre Métropolis du Québec, 58-72. Trumper, R. and Wong, L.L. 2007. “Canada’s Guest Workers: Racialized, Gendered, and Flexible.” In Racism in 21st-Century Canada: Continuity, Complexity and Change, eds B.S. Bolaria and S. Hier. Guelph: Broadview, 235–53. Wilson, K. 2007. “Farming it Out.” Okanagan Life Magazine September, 40–47. –––. 2008. “Exploiting Foreign Workers Needs to Stop.” Kelowna Capital News June 21, C18. Wong, L. 1988. “Migrant Seasonal Agricultural Labour: Race and Ethnic Relations in the Okanagan Valley.” PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology, York University (Canada). Woods, M. 1998. “Rethinking Elites: Networks, Space, and Local Politics.” Environment and Planning A 30(12): 2101–19.

Afterword Luis L.M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider

The selection of chapters in this edited collection addresses some of the fundamental facets of “studying up,” including, spotlighting and developing some key conceptual and methodological concerns not systemically examined elsewhere in the research literature. Moreover, this collection is especially timely due to the dormancy of the study of elites over the last three-to-four decades (Savage and Williams 2008). This collection also speaks to the rapidly increasing economic separation between those who have and those who have not, highlighting the necessity for a renewal of the study of elites through the lens of studying up. While the approach of studying up remains a contested designation, we believe the diversity of perspectives contained herein provides strength to the approach, while also renewing intellectual interest in the subject at an especially important juncture in time. While the use of “upward” or “study up” (and similar expressions) remains contested (Magnat, this volume), others are more comfortable with this distinction, particularly as it applies to “business elites” (Elliot; Ryan and Lewer, this volume). Even still, significant differences remain as to what exactly constitutes “elite” (Aguiar; Schneider; Tomic and Trumper; this volume), and in what context this designation matters. Conceptual distinctions, in fact, exist (i.e., those with some sort of privileged access), though a perceived limitation of this volume is that there is no one exact unified definition of “elite.” But this is less a limitation than an acknowledgment of the changing social conditions within which elites operate, and the difficulties in conceptualizing a concrete definition of elites as they (elites) change, stretch over space, or operate in the shadows of social structures (Wedel 2009). In today’s globalizing world, ideas, concepts, peoples, cultures, etc., change rapidly, and this volume examines some of these changes taking place, both locally and globally (Corman, Duffy and Pupo; Elliott; this volume). On the one hand, the challenge for the researcher is to locate and examine the establishment of elites, and, on the other hand, to then trace their flexibility as they move, change, and extend their power and influence over space and time. Wedel (2009) calls the chameleon-like nature of recent elites as “flexians.” It is with this in mind that we support McCann and Ward (2012) when they write that we must “study through” spaces and places in order to understand how ideas, concepts, models, and policies are grounded and rootless in a globalizing world. In our view, elite as a theoretical concept and discussed throughout this collection, suffers from an imprecision of definition, and, more currently, from the difficulty in capturing its uses and mobilization in a globalizing economy and transborder societies. Perhaps the development of research methods on mobility (Buscher et al. 2011)

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can further address the contemporary fluidity of the concept of elite. So, our focus on elites needs as much attention to fixing definitions of elites in place as it does to recognizing and articulating their rootlessness and mobility across spaces. Edited volumes can be tricky, as they can sometimes lack a coherent thread that unifies the chapters, even while addressing elements of the same topic. This collection attempts to avoid this limitation by placing each contributor’s position at the centre of the discussion—theoretical or empirical—of “studying up.” While some may not think that the terminology is useful, there remains an engagement with the idea (and potential) of redirecting the academic gaze upward in order to test existing concepts and frames, as exhibited throughout the present volume. Two main purposes guide the premise of this book. One, to push for the return to studying up both as an analytical project, and as a social necessity due to the manner that elites increasingly organize the lives of the everyday member. While elites further ascended to more powerful social positions (Harvey 2005), social scientists have turned away from investigating elites (Savage and Williams 2008). This disjuncture needs to be rectified, and we feel that this volume begins this adjustment work. The second purpose is related to the first; it brings elites back into the analytical targets of social scientists. The emergence of neoliberalism has given rise to the proliferation of elites (Wedel 2009), yet research on this area remains sparse (Wedel 2009). This volume draws attention to this shortcoming, but also spotlights how these conditions undermine democracy, and promote the increasingly legitimate and powerful position of elites – a process that further removes accountability measures of those that govern the everyday lives of most. Future research could investigate how contemporary (neoliberal) elites might fall under the rubric of organic intellectuals (Gramsci 1971). Other research should include investigating the gender of elites (beyond some of the work including herein, i.e., Pacholok, this volume), as well as the racialization of the term. In closing, we note that the recent emergence of the Occupy movements cannot be ignored (Davis 2011). Future work might explore what this social movement means for the renewal of studying up. For instance, Roosevelt University (in Chicago) now offers a course on “Occupy,” focusing on social inequality and elites (Globe and Mail February 6, 2012). Can it be long before other courses on researching elites using the ‘study up’ metaphor are far behind? We think not. Finally, academics can come from elite backgrounds, including, some from positions of great privilege (see Baltzell 1979). Perhaps contemporary scholars might continue to follow in the footsteps of Baltzell (1979), and, more recently, the journalist Tad Friend (2009), who published on his own elite WASP upbringing. This remains, potentially, part of the future writing on the subject.

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References Baltzell, E.D. 1979. Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Buscher, M., Urry, J. and Witchger, K. 2001. Mobile Methods. New York: Routledge. Davis, M. 2011. “Spring Confronts Winter.” New Left Review 72(Nov/Dec): 5–15. Friend, Tad. 2009. Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor. Little, Brown and Company. Globe and Mail. 2012. “University Offers Course on Occupy.” February 6. Retrieved February 21, 2012, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/factsand-arguments/social-studies/university-offers-course-on-occupy-movement/ article2328422/. Gramsci, A. 1971. The Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Harvey, D. 2005. The Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. McCann, E. and Ward, K. 2012. “Assembling Urbanism: Following Policies and ‘Studying through’ the Sites and Situation of Policy Making.” Environment and Planning A 44: 42–51. Savage, M. and Williams, K. 2008. “Elites: Remembered in Capitalism and Forgotten by Social Sciences.” In Remembering Elites, eds M. Savage and K. Williams. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1–24. Wedel, J. 2009. Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. New York: Basic Books.

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Index

Aboriginal children see Indian residential schools accessibility, researcher 1, 7, 9, 20, 75, 76–77, 78, 79–80, 161, 165–66 anthropology 2, 9, 29–30, 32–33, 36, 38–39, 42 Asian capitalism 34, 35 Atlas Speciality Steels, Welland, Ontario 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 138n11 Australia 75–76, 165, 171 BHP 74, 78, 79–80, 82 commercial cleaning 73, 77, 78, 84 authoritarianism 54 Barba, Eugenio 181–82, 194 baseball celebrities 92, 95–97, 98–99 Beagan, Brenda L. 244 BHP (Newcastle, Australia) 74, 78, 79–80, 82 Big Players 161, 164, 165, 168, 170 Borer, Michael Ian 20 Boston Red Sox ballpark see Fenway Park Bottineau, Audrey 184 Bracero progam 235 Bresciani, Dick (Bresch) 94–95 Bridges, Khiara M. 12 business organizations see management research Carroll, William 5, 160 case study method 7, 72, 81, 170 celebrities 20, 90–92, 99–100, 103, 104–5, 106–7, 110–11, 115–16 baseball 92, 95–97, 98–99 Gibson, Mel 112, 113–15, 116 TMZ 107–8, 110, 111–13 celebrity culture 3, 91, 99, 105, 108 celebrity sites see Fenway Park

celebrity status 3, 105, 107, 112, 114, 115, 116 Chambers, Natalie A. 15, 21 Chechnya 55, 56, 56 Chiapas 55, 56, 57–58 civil warfare 49–50, 51–52 class 10–11 collective identity 83–84 colonialism 32, 42, 58–59, 218–19, 220, 225–26, 227–28 commercial cleaning 73, 77, 78, 84 Conquergood, Dwight 180–81, 188 Corman, June, Duffy, Ann and Pupo, Norene 6, 20–21 corporate elites 5, 20–21, 125–27, 159–60, 170 cosmopolitanism 53–54, 152 culture 14–15 data collection 7, 93, 108, 109, 111, 168–69 defensive elites 203 democratic peace approach 52 Denzin, Norman K. 93, 181 dependency theory 54 dialectic of control 211, 212 Easterby-Smith, M., Thorpe, R. and Lowe, A. 79 El Salvador 60 elite immigrant entrepreneurs 159–60, 161–62, 165–67, 168–70, 171, 173–75 elites 1–3, 4, 5–8, 9, 159–60, 202, 243, 248, 253–54 elites research 18–19, 80–84, 165–67, 168–70, 171–74, 200 Elliott, Anthony 8, 21 embarrassed elites 6, 73

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embodiment 21, 180, 182–83, 184, 189, 191 empathy 21, 180, 183–84, 189 Ermine, W. 219–20 ethical spaces 15, 219–20, 228 ethnography 21, 179–80, 181 Favret-Saada, Jeanne 183, 184–85 feminism 11–12 feminist interview techniques 201, 204–8, 209–12 feminist research 21, 171–72, 199–200, 201, 210–11 Fenway Park 92–97, 98–99 financial institutions 29, 30–32, 33, 34, 35, 37–39, 40–41 financial market 31, 33, 35, 37, 38, 42–43, 44, 45 firefighters 12, 21, 201–4, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209–12 Frank, A.G. 54 free trade agreements 123, 135 Freeland, C. 4, 8, 17n22 frequent-flyer programmes 154 Froschauer, Karl and Wong, Lloyd L. 21 Gallaher, Carolyn 20 Gamson, Joshua 92–93 Gibson, Mel 112, 113–15, 116 Gilding, M. 19, 165, 171 global elites (globals) 6, 8, 17n22, 21, 141–44, 145–46, 150–52, 153, 154 ‘Mr W’ 146–49, 150, 151, 152, 153 globalization 8, 30, 40–41, 144, 253 Google News 109 Grotowski, Jerzy 185–87, 189–91, 192, 193 guerrillas 20, 49, 50, 54–55, 57, 60 Chechnya 55, 56, 56 Chiapas 55, 56, 57 Northern Ireland 56, 56–57 Gummesson, Evert 72, 79 Hammond, J.L. 60 Hastrup, Kirsten 182 Henniges Automotive, Welland, Ontario 123, 124–25, 126, 130, 131, 132–33

Herz, John 51 Ho, Karen 19–20 hooks, bell 14–15, 34 HREC (Human Research Ethics Committees) 75–76, 78 Indian residential schools (IRS), Canada 15, 21, 217, 220–27 Indigenous research 15, 188, 189, 194–95 institutional ethnography 169, 170 interview techniques 7, 72, 80–82, 83–84, 85, 89–92, 145–46, 204–9 see also feminist interview techniques IR (International Relations) 20, 50, 51, 54–55, 66 IRS, Canada see Indian residential schools Jaworski, Adam and Thurlow, Crispin 154 John Deere Works, Welland, Ontario 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 journalists 18, 89 Kelowna Capital News 236, 237–39, 240, 241, 245, 248 Kitay, J. and Callus, R. 72 Lexis Nexis 109–10 Li, Victor 21, 162–64, 169, 174 liberalism 52–53 local elites 6, 20–21, 127–28, 129, 130–31, 133, 134–38 Magnat, Virginie 21 management research 20, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81–82, 83–84, 85–86 BHP 74, 78, 79–80, 82 commercial cleaning 73, 77, 78, 84 Marxism 50, 51, 54–55 media 7–8, 18, 20, 90, 91–92, 95, 103, 104, 105–7, 108–10, 112–13, 115–16 Mexican migrant agricultural workers, Okanagan Valley, Canada 21–22, 233, 234, 237–39, 240–42, 245, 247, 248 Meyer, Manulani Aluli 190, 192, 193, 194, 195

Index Mills, C. Wright 2, 5–6, 89, 103–4, 105, 243 Milner, Brian 170 Mintzberg, H. 81 mobile elites 141–42, 143–45 mobilities 143–45, 150–52, 153, 154–55, 253–54 ‘Mr W’ (case study) 146–49, 150, 151, 152, 153 Nader, Laura 2, 9, 10, 29, 104 Naipaul, V.S. 1 neoliberalism 9, 10, 18, 254 non-state combatants 49–50, 53, 54 Northern Ireland 58–59, 60–65, 66 guerrillas 56, 56–57 paramilitaries 20, 50, 56, 56–57, 58–59, 60, 61–62, 64–65, 66 Obelene, V. 77 Occupy movements 11, 254 O’Donnell, G. 54 official scripts 84, 167 open-ended interviews 72 oppression research 219, 220 organizational gatekeepers 71, 90, 165 Orientalism 34–35 Pacholok, Shelley 12, 21 paramilitaries 49, 50, 58, 60, 62–63, 66 Chechnya 55, 56, 56 Chiapas 55, 56 Northern Ireland 20, 50, 56, 56–57, 58–59, 60, 61–62, 64–65, 66 participatory action research (PAR) 60, 171 particularism 53–54 patriarchy 11, 12, 203 performance studies 180, 181, 188 ‘performance turn’ 181 personal narratives 83 Pink, Sarah 179, 182, 194 Piore, Michael 72, 82 plant closures Atlas Speciality Steels 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 138n11 BHP 74, 78, 79–80, 82 Henniges Automotive 123, 124–25, 126, 130, 131, 132–33

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John Deere Works 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 United States 73–74 Posen, B. 52 post-modernism 15 post-structuralism 15–16, 17, 60, 242, 248 power 2, 11, 12–14, 50, 171–72, 199–200, 210–11, 243–44 power elites 5–6, 8, 103–4, 243 preventative war 52 productive disorientation 21, 179, 181–82, 183 qualitative document analysis 20, 103, 108–9, 110, 111–13, 115, 116 qualitative media analysis 20, 108–9, 110, 111–13, 115–16 qualitative research 1–2, 3, 7, 13, 50, 63, 72, 172, 174 quantitative research 7 rapport 1, 9, 13, 90, 166–67, 174, 199, 204, 207–8, 209, 210 realism 51–52 reciprocity 188, 204, 206–7, 209 reluctant elites 6, 73 research design 12, 75–76, 78, 79, 80–82, 85 research projects 75–76, 79–80 rhetorical discourse 84 Rice, Gareth 13, 14 Rosenblum, K.E. 72 Ryan, Shaun and Lewer, John 6, 20 Savage, M. and Williams, K. 2, 7, 17 SAWP (Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program) 233, 234, 235, 237, 238–39, 240–41, 242, 245, 248 Schneider, Christopher J. 20 Schwalbe, M. and Wolkomir, M. 204, 205 Scott, John 6–7 Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program see SAWP ‘security dilemma’ 51–52 shareholder value 37–38, 39 Sizorn, Magalie 183–84 social inequality 2, 16, 142–43, 153 sociological research 2, 3, 6–7, 89

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sportswriters 93, 95 State elites 5 Steeves, Judie 236, 237, 238–39, 240, 245, 248 Stoller, Paul 180, 182 studying down 4, 13, 50, 212 studying up 2, 3–5, 9–16, 17–19, 50, 66, 86, 104, 217–20, 243–44, 253, 254 ‘thinking-in-concepts’ 181–82 ‘thinking-in-motion’ 181–82 Ting, James 170 TMZ (Thirty Mile Zone) 103, 107–8, 110, 111–13 Gibson, Mel 113–15 Tomic, Patricia and Trumper, Ricardo 6, 21–22, 167 Trade Union History Project (New Zealand) 74–75, 79, 83 trade unions 71, 76, 77, 83, 84 BHP 74, 78, 79–80 Welland, Ontario 122, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134–36 traditional songs 189–91 transnational elites 8, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168, 170, 174–75 Tri-Council Policy, Canada 172, 173 triangulation 39, 93

tripartite model 92–93 trivialization 84 Trumper, Ricardo 237, 238 United States 3, 73–74, 143, 165, 235, 243 Wacquant, Loic 182–83 Wall Street investment banks 19–20, 29, 30–32, 33–34, 35, 37–38, 39, 40–42, 43–45, 143 warfare 49–50, 51–55, 59–60, 66 Weingast, B. 52 Welland, Ontario 121–23, 127–28, 131–32, 134–39 Atlas Speciality Steels 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 138n11 Henniges Automotive 123, 124–25, 126, 130, 131, 132–33 John Deere Works 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 plant closures 123–27, 129–34 whiteness 12, 14–15, 33–34, 35, 218 Wilson, Karen 239, 240 Wilson, Shawn 188, 194–95 world systems analysis 54 Yanagisako, Sylvia 34–35, 39 Yin, R.K. 72, 80