Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods

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.

Introduction - Rosanna Hertz and Jonathan B Imber PART ONE: BUSINESS ELITES Interviewing Important People in Big Companies - Robert J Thomas Reaching Corporate Executives - Michael Useem Fielding Hot Topics in Cool Settings - Peter Cleary Yeager and Kathy E Kram The Study of Corporate Ethics Using Electronic Media to Support Fieldwork in a Corporate Setting - John P Workman Jr Tales from the Field - Paul M Hirsch Learning from Researchers' Accounts PART TWO: PROFESSIONAL ELITES Stopping the Spin and Becoming a Prop - Joshua Gamson Fieldwork on Hollywood Elites Reflections on Fieldwork in a Complex Organization - Jennifer L Pierce Lawyers, Ethnographic Authority, and Lethal Weapons Negotiating Status - Alan Aldridge Social Scientists and Anglican Clergy How I Learned What a Crock Was - Howard S Becker PART THREE: COMMUNITY AND POLITICAL ELITES `Surely You're Not in This Just to Be Helpful' - Susan A Ostrander Access, Rapport, and Interviews in Three Studies of Elites Local Knowledge and Local Power - Albert Hunter Notes on the Ethnography of Local Community Elites Research as a Communication Act - Hanna Herzog A Study on Israeli Women in Local Politics Exploding Anthropology's Canon in the World of the Bomb - Hugh Gusterson Ethnographic Writing on Militarism