The Infrastructural Hustle: Digital Recruitment, Intersectional Positionality, and Elite Access in Criminological Research

Gaining access to elite participants in institutionally protected settings is one of qualitative criminology’s most persistent and least documented methodological challenges. This article draws on doctoral fieldwork with senior health care executives in the U.K. private hospital sector to develop and extend Collett’s concept of the hustle into a digitally mediated, institutionally defended research context. Engaging closely with Collett’s four dimensions, the article identifies new manifestations of each that her original framework, developed in the technology industry, does not address: tech platform-gatekeeping and infrastructural barriers (access); design dictated by regulatory database availability (research design); referral distortion in snowball-recruited interviews (data); and persona alteration and linguistic labour in intersectionally disadvantaged fieldwork (dynamics). Together, these constitute what this article terms the infrastructural hustle: the specific configuration of the hustle in digitally mediated, institutionally defended settings. The article also updates James’s technique of inferential email construction for a post-GDPR environment, examines the ethical governance gaps this generates, and contributes to qualitative criminology, elite interviewing methodology, and the sociology of knowledge production.