Elites in the City of London: Some Methodological Considerations

In this paper I discuss some of the methodological issues that researchers face in identifying and interviewing high-status workers. Although in the course of my research on workplace cultures in merchant banks in the City of London in the early 1990s I interviewed men and women in a range of occupations from messengers and cooks to financial analysts and company directors, in this paper I want to focus in particular on my experience of interviewing high-status employees, and on selecting and representing qualitative ‘data’. I also want to address an argument about the supposed empathy and commonality between women, often asserted in discussions of feminist research methods, that apparently creates particular conditions when women are interviewing women. I was interested in implications of these arguments when the respondents are men but the interviewer is a woman.