Gatekeeping and drinking cultures: how do we talk about drinking?

Abstract

This paper examines the importance of gatekeepers in facilitating access to key informants. Using the author’s experience of working in alcohol-related research, the problems in gaining interviews with licensees, security staff and club and bar operators are discussed. However, in a departure from an understanding of gatekeepers as fixed, I argue that we need a more fluid and rhizomatic model. Rather than being fixed, it is argued that gatekeepers are far less stable than first appears and can shape, open up, inform and re-direct the research process along often surprising trajectories. Extending this point, in the second part of the paper, gatekeeping is explored in terms of discursive and disciplinary practices. I ask how discursive gatekeeping, and specifically debates about responsible and irresponsible drinking practices, have shaped and informed research in this area. Again, a more fluid understanding of gatekeeping is developed in order to work through the complex and often contradictory ways that knowledge is produced, reproduced and generated in critical work on drinking cultures.

Keywords:

• gatekeepers
• pleasure
• alcohol
• night-time economy

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a conference paper delivered at the ‘Gatekeepers and Social Research: Hindrance or Facilitation’ colloquium held at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2011. The author wishes to thank participants at the colloquium, an anonymous reviewer, Isabel Crowhurst and Madeleine Kennedy-Macfoy.

Notes

1. Snakes and ladders is a classic children’s game, the object of which is to make one’s way through a series of boxed squares. Along the route, landing on a square with a ladder will facilitate quicker access to the higher squares, while landing on a snake will cause the player to move back towards the bottom squares.