Senior Research Seminar: Dr Felix Stein

Collaborating with elites? Re-considering research ethics in a corporate context 

This talk will critically investigate the notion of ‘collaboration’ as a guiding concept for finding epistemically and morally adequate relations with the people whose lives we write about. Drawing on attempts at obtaining ethnographic research permission in 2012, when working as a management consultant in Berlin, the paper will foreground a series of complications that highlight where the limits of collaboration in studying elite corporate contexts may lie. It thereby interrogates the role of labour and of institutional settings in shaping the conditions for ethnographic research more widely