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Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods
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Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods

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Volume: 175
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Ethnography
August 1995 | 210 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
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The very nature of elites makes them difficult for social researchers to study. This volume provides valuable insights into how researchers can successfully gain access to elite settings. Using their actual experiences, the contributors provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to manoeuvre and become accepted in worlds otherwise closed to them.

Three broad research areas are covered: business elites; professional elites; and community and political elites. Useful information is given on how researchers in these areas can gather data, construct interview strategies, write about their subjects and come to experience the research process.

Rosanna Hertz and Jonathan B Imber
Introduction
 
PART ONE: BUSINESS ELITES
Robert J Thomas
Interviewing Important People in Big Companies
Michael Useem
Reaching Corporate Executives
Peter Cleary Yeager and Kathy E Kram
Fielding Hot Topics in Cool Settings
The Study of Corporate Ethics

 
John P Workman Jr
Using Electronic Media to Support Fieldwork in a Corporate Setting
Paul M Hirsch
Tales from the Field
Learning from Researchers' Accounts

 
 
PART TWO: PROFESSIONAL ELITES
Joshua Gamson
Stopping the Spin and Becoming a Prop
Fieldwork on Hollywood Elites

 
Jennifer L Pierce
Reflections on Fieldwork in a Complex Organization
Lawyers, Ethnographic Authority, and Lethal Weapons

 
Alan Aldridge
Negotiating Status
Social Scientists and Anglican Clergy

 
Howard S Becker
How I Learned What a Crock Was
 
PART THREE: COMMUNITY AND POLITICAL ELITES
Susan A Ostrander
`Surely You're Not in This Just to Be Helpful'
Access, Rapport, and Interviews in Three Studies of Elites

 
Albert Hunter
Local Knowledge and Local Power
Notes on the Ethnography of Local Community Elites

 
Hanna Herzog
Research as a Communication Act
A Study on Israeli Women in Local Politics

 
Hugh Gusterson
Exploding Anthropology's Canon in the World of the Bomb
Ethnographic Writing on Militarism

 

Rosanna Hertz

Rosanna Hertz is the 1919 Reunion Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Single By Chance, Mothers By Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family (Oxford Press, 2008). She is also the author or co-author of five edited collections which focus on the use of qualitative methods including Open to Disruption: Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology (Vanderbilt University, 2015) with Anita Ilta Garey and Margaret K. Nelson. More About Author

Jonathan Imber

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ISBN: 9780803970366
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