When Moral Obligation Meets Physical Opportunity. Studying Elite Lifestyles and Power in the Saint-Tropez Area

Abstract

Concluding their article defining promising lines of research for "exploring geographies of the super-rich", Iain Hay and Samantha Muller (2012, p. 85) "assert[ed] that there is a moral obligation on the part of those of us with the resources to do so, to undertake detailed analysis of the worlds shaped by the super-rich, and in which all of us live". The authors were probably not aware that French sociologists Monique Pinçon-Charlot and Michel Pinçon had given a similar exhortation a few years earlier. Claiming that "studying the privileged is a necessity", precisely owing to the various obstacles standing in the way of such a task, they added: "understanding society without comprehending the top of the social structure is impossible" (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2007, pp. 5-6 1). It was this kind of call that impelled us to take what had long been a mere laughing matter and turn it into a proper research program: a sociological (and soon also historical) study of "Saint-Tropez", more precisely the Saint-Tropez peninsula. 2 Over time, we felt increasingly compelled to undertake this research, motivated by the idea that, particularly in the context of the I. Bruno (*) Centre d'études et de recherches administratives, politiques et sociales,

A Critical Approach to Interviewing Academic Elites: Access, Trust, and Power

“…Although insider institutional status, as portrayed in Perera (2021), can assist in recruitment and trust building during fieldwork with academics, the researcher's outsiderness (institutional and disciplinary) was not always experienced as disadvantageous. This may be explained by the highly competitive nature of academic careers and that an outsider, lower-status researcher was not perceived as a potential rival, an insight also alluded to in Bruno and Salle (2020). Additionally, the researcher's preparatory groundwork brought a measure of familiarity with the social and physical fieldwork environment, which contributed to her confidence in engaging as an outsider, and to the openness with which she was often received.…”