Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in researching elite groups; however the term ‘elite’ has remained largely untheorised and unproblematised in much of the resulting literature. I attempt to question what is meant by the term ‘elite’, how the term may be given a deeper conceptual relevance, and what the consequences of this might be for the study of elites. Through a critical review of conventional elite theory, and a discussion of concepts of society and power, three elements of elite definition are identified, focusing on access to resources, networking, and discursive construction. These are then illustrated with reference to local political elites in Somerset. I discuss the potential for a distinctively geographical contribution to the study of elites, through an exploration of the places and spaces in which elites are formed and interact.

It has always been difficult to explore local power structures, and local politics (or local political economies) have often been reinterpreted in ways in which they are simply seen as the working out of wider national or global processes. The recognition that this is not enough has encouraged a growth in more locally focused research, frequently involving extensive interviewing of members of local business and political elites. Two key sets of questions arise from this sort of research. The first concerns the relationships between researcher and researched which are constructed by the research process itself. Is it possible to maintain an attitude of critical engagement? How is the research agenda constructed through negotiation between the participants? Who has power within the research process? The second involves a more serious issue for this form of research: namely, is it really possible to identify and explore power through interviews, however carefully constructed they are? What about the dimensions of power that are inaccessible to interviewers? This question has bedevilled community-power and pluralist research in the USA and the United Kingdom, and has never been adequately resolved. Do we now have the means to resolve it? The author explores both of these sets of questions with the help of evidence from a range of research projects in which he has been actively involved. The conclusion suggests productive approaches to the researching of local elites, identifying opportunities as well as constraints.

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.

The globalisation of the world's economy and the creation of new flexible regimes of accumulation are necessarily generating new forms of corporate organisation. Increasingly, new economies and trade in mutable resources such as information, global finance, and genetic material are controlled not by conventional corporate elites but rather by constellations of disparate but highly influential actors linked together across an equally mutable regulatory landscape. With the aid of my recent research into the elite which controls global trade in genetic material as a case study, I begin to deconstruct conventional notions of what constitutes a corporate elite, positing in its place an alternative construction in which they are understood not as formally constituted, institutionally based entities, but rather as increasingly informal, hybridised, and invisible ‘elite networks’. I then consider some of the methodological issues which confront researchers investigating the constitution and behaviour of these elite networks. In so doing I reflect upon the role which processes such as luck, chance, and intuition play in determining the direction and outcome of research projects. I conclude with a discussion of some of the ethical tensions which surround issues of disclosure, textual representation, and attribution of sources.

Studying elites may seem to be one way of avoiding the guilt associated with the betrayals inherent in participant observation. However, work with members of the Indian Administrative Service showed them to be vulnerable in conditions of structural readjustment. The author examines the ways in which recognition of the multiple positionings of an ethnographer and those being studied can create a space for new collaborative relationships between researcher and researched. In this study the ethnographer found that the research relationship necessitated her acceptance of an imperialist past and a privileged status which she normally preferred to deny.

In this paper I address the issue of incorporating environmental sustainability in project appraisal. I extend the results of Barbier, Markandya, and Pearce on ‘operationalizing’ a concept of sustainability into appraisal methods for practical decisionmaking. I generalize their results in two directions. First, I abandon their implicit assumption that benefits and costs of a given project in a given period depend only on the level of activity of the project in the same period. Second, I address the issue of which portfolio of projects to choose. My results show how to modify the net present value criterion for choosing a set of projects in the presence of a sustainability constraint.

A three-state competing-risk labour-market model with a submodel for the state on entry into the labour market and a control for individual-level heterogeneity is constructed. A test for sample-selection bias due to location effects in the labour-market model is formulated and applied to the retrospective work-history data from the Social Class and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI). The test suggests that location and labour-market behaviour are interdependent outcomes. As the SCELI has sampled data from a very restricted subset of all possible locations in Britain the model loses external validity, that is, the results cannot be generalised to individuals who live outside the selected areas at the sample date. The model also loses internal validity, because selection on location will have induced a correlation between the random components and many of the covariates in the model, implying that the estimated parameters are misleading indicators of the true covariate effects. These conclusions must therefore raise questions about the validity of any substantive research related to labour-market outcomes which uses the SCELI data.

Despite the prominence of London in the international financial system the majority of citizens and small and medium-sized enterprises in the United Kingdom have always been reliant on the domestic banking system for their finance. In this paper the author looks at the production and reproduction of financial space in the United Kingdom through an examination of the development of the domestic banking system. Over the past 250 years progressive changes in the banking system, from the formation of joint-stock blanks to the implementation of credit-scoring techniques, have stretched and reshaped the space across which banks have operated. This ‘financial distanciation’, it is argued, is set to accelerate in the 1990s and increase the ‘spatial reflexivity’ between the international, national, and regional financial systems. It is suggested that in the context of heightened domestic and international financial competition the increasing centralisation of lending control in the UK banking system risks marginalising some sections of society and placing local economic communities at an international disadvantage.

Traditionally, agrarian beliefs have been assigned an important place in studies of the formative processes of agricultural policymaking. However, such work has tended to privilege these beliefs with a passive, conditioning, or reactive role in decisionmaking and decision taking. In this paper, we show that these deeply engrained notions also provide the basis for articulating more complex proactive strategies, aimed at advancing agricultural interests. We demonstrate how widely held agrarian beliefs in British society, relating to ‘trusteeship’ by farming of the natural environment, have been deployed by policy élites in the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) as a means of legitimising a suite of agri-environment policies to sectoral constituencies and the general public which are strongly supportive of both bureaucratic and producer group ambitions. We examine the impact of these beliefs on the formation by MAFF of the British negotiating position towards the European Union's ‘agri-environment’ regulation, EU 2078/92.

The authors explore the effects of spatial and locational cueing upon the aggregated results of cognitive mapping data. Using four experimental data sets they demonstrate that locational cueing introduces random error into the analysis and that spatial cueing increases the relative and absolute accuracy of spatial products (external representations of spatial knowledge). These effects are consistent regardless of whether individual or place cognition is assessed. As such, location and spatial cueing compromise both construct and convergent validity, and the integrity of the conclusions from previous studies on cognitive mapping are brought into question. It is suggested that a multidata collection, multidata analysis approach should be adopted to highlight and compensate for these methodological weaknesses.