The scholar, the wealthy and the powerful: notes on academic culture in elite-focused fieldwork

Abstract

Drawing on our experiences of interviewing elites, this article suggests that methodological reflexivity yields insights into the construction of symbolic and social hierarchies in contextualised interactions. The paper focuses on ‘academic culture’ as the locus through which power relations were experienced in interview situations – more so than structures such as age, gender, race and class. We argue that academic cultural resources do not always function as valuable assets in interviews with elites, and explore how different elite interviewees mobilise a wide-ranging cultural repertoire to display status.

Keywords:

• Qualitative methodology
• sociology of elites
• academic culture
• elite sociability
• reflexivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Bertron is a teaching fellow in Sociology at Université de Rouen (Rouen, France) and associate researcher at Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (CESSP, Paris, France). Her area of research includes elite education and socialisation, private education and the historical sociology of elites.

Sarah Kolopp is a teaching fellow in Sociology at Sciences Po Paris. Her work focuses on history of capitalism and the sociology of elites. Recent publications include ‘De la modernisation à la raison économique’ (Genèses, n°93) and, with Émilie Biland, ‘La fabrique de la pensée d'État’ (Gouvernement et action publique, n°2).

Notes

1. A first draft of this paper has been presented at the Conference ‘Knowledge, status and power. Elite education, training and expertise’, organised at Sciences Po (OSC) in Paris on October, 23th and 24th, 2014. We would like to thank organisers and participants for their compelling comments, and Dr Aaron Kachuck for his careful readings.

2. Historically legitimised by appealing to West-European and North-American cosmopolitan aspirations, these boarding schools have recently used curricular consolidation to reinforce their global appeal, and have increasingly attracted students from the former USSR, South America and the Middle East. Located in Francophone Switzerland, charging fees of up to 100,000 USD, they generally offer English, American middle and high school curricula and/or International Baccalaureate Diploma Programmes.

3. All interview extracts are translated from French.

4. All the names of the interviewees have been modified.

5. Created in 1945, the École nationale d’administration is France’s main public school of power; most of its prestige stems from its ties to the state and the guaranteed access of its alumni to the highest positions in different ministerial departments.

6. The following reflections draw on research diary entries.

7. Translated from French.

8. He made sure that I would know he was less well off than the parents he told stories about, but he couldn’t help mentioning his own bourgeois upbringing and luxurious expenditures.

9. This echoes what Legavre (1992) has shown about the uses of ‘off the record’ discussions between officials and journalists: he analyzes them as conversations based on ‘controlled confidences’, and shows that there is a very blurry frontier between what is ‘on’ and what is ‘off the record’, which engages the subjective and moral appreciations of journalists.