In 1968 Martin Nicolaus¹ gave a searing address to the American Sociological Association in which he condemned sociologists for looking down on the poor, acting effectively as an arm of the state’s surveillance of the marginal, while looking up, hands outstretched, to government funders in order to conduct work to advance their own careers. The image is striking and still resonates – where do we stand today on the role of the social sciences in understanding the position of the better-off and their relationship to social problems more broadly? My discussion here takes in questions both the deeper politics and ethos of researchers who do or not study the wealthy alongside questions of the kinds of ethical practices or processes raised by doing research on the wealthy. In this brief note I want to discuss the question of how far researchers should be prompted to think about the ethical questions of researching ‘upwards’ and what potential institutional or disciplinary impediments and issues may get in the way of doing such work. My thoughts are shaped by my experience of proposing, being funded to, and conducting research on the super-rich in London over the past decade.

1. On the ethical framing of considering elites

The idea of an elite broadly refers to social groups which sit at the apex of a social hierarchy, whether this be defined in terms of wealth, power, education and so on. We now talk of media elites, metropolitan elites, an intelligentsia and, most recently, the emergence of a distinctive group (rather than a class as such) of the international super-wealthy who also wield enormous economic power, either through the corporations they own or in their own right. Ten years ago we knew very little about this group. This lack of social scientific understanding of the who, how, where and why of this group raises what might be thought of as an ethical question, regarding the blindness of the social sciences to key social groups.

To neglect wealth elites is to ignore questions of power, responsibility and the means by which social life may be improved. This is because, as we have been made increasingly aware, the very wealthy generate material consequences that are social in their foundation. While many governments frame questions of poverty or exclusion as questions of personal deficiency, or unfortunate side-effects of economic change, others are keen to understand how processes of austerity, state exit from provision of housing, health and education alongside financialisation of many aspects of social life are strongly related to the actions or positions of the wealthy. This may seem a crude point but there are many other, more subtle, ways in which wealth has generated ethical questions for society more broadly – tax evasion and avoidance, money laundering, political lobbying, funding of university research centres and buildings, the funding of think tanks, purchasing of large swathes of urban built environments and so on. Perhaps more subtly we also need to understand how the desire to attract investment from the super-rich generates a kind of second-guessing game (sometimes described as cognitive capture) in which politicians, finance and banking institutions, real estate agencies,  and even researchers try to second guess their needs and interests.

Writing in 1982 John Scott argued that sociologists had overwhelmingly focused on the working-classes. As an urbanist interested in social problems I recognize that much of my own work has focused on the poor and the excluded, but that it has also sought to connect the problems of the poor with those of the middle-classes and, increasingly, of the rich. If you want to know why someone is poor, traumatized, excluded and so on, the likely root of their troubles, beyond the superficialities of their immediate context, lies in the operation of deeper social, political and economic forces that generate poverty and inequality. The wealthy and middle-classes are both passive recipients and active operators in such systems, either taking their rewards, bolstering the existing advantages of their offspring and network associates or, in the case of the very wealthy and powerful, acting to manipulate and effect changes to enlarge these benefits still further. Such advantages may run the course from active tax evasion (even changing tax rules), through to challenges to planning rules and corporate law. As writers like Piketty and Harvey have told us, capital, and those with it, does not stand still – it seeks constant augmentation, as do those who hold it.

Presenting a proposal to do work on the rich to a social science funder presents issues. The rich may superficially appear not to be a problem, they live in peaceable areas, act with courtesy and restraint in their public life. They are replete with a habitus of obligation and civility. Yet, as Laura Nader (1972) argued, social scientists:

‘have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the processes whereby power and responsibility are exercised… Moreover, there is a certain urgency to the kind of [social science] that is concerned with power for the quality of life and our lives themselves may depend upon the extent to which citizens understand those who shape attitudes and actually control institutional structures’ (Nader, 1972: 284).

For C. Wright Mills (1956) the elite were a neglected group, but one whose power, influence and networks required surveying by the social sciences. For Mills, Nader and others, researchers effectively self-censored or delimited the scope of their studies in order not to challenge the assumed pre-eminence and respectable domain of policymaking corporate and other social elites. The good news is that this picture is changing, rapidly. We increasingly understand that where social problems can be found is not the same thing as why we find social problems. In a similar way, to understand the roots of such problems we may need to understand more about how wealth is produced and condensed and avoid unnecessary attention to the wealthy themselves. Ultimately, to return to critical social scientific research has become…critical. Indeed, we neglect the poor, the marginalized, those victimized by violence in unequal nations and cities by not bringing wealth and power into the remit of our work.

• Ethical issues related to doing work on wealth elites

One of the single most difficult challenges of doing work on elites is gaining access to them. Doors, gates, guards and secretaries bar the way in many cases and I think there is increasing suspicion directed at anyone claiming to want to know about lives and lifestyles, to say nothing of questions of wealth (like income, one of the questions to be avoided by researchers and respondents). In asking how do we get ‘at’ the elites we are confronted with some ethical questions, but I believe these to present methodological, rather than distinctive ethical, problematics. Inaccessibility raises challenges, but it is also the mother of invention in thinking creatively about how to engage and involve the wealthy. How we present ourselves becomes critical, and critical work is unlikely to be received well if it is poorly articulated to those concerned. Here are 3 thoughts on these issues:

Gaining approval – Journalism faces far fewer hurdles than social science researchers and has produced enormously useful, influential and critical accounts of wealth, its impact and the wealthy themselves. This work has dug into accounts, revealed dodgy tax practices and investigated the effects of the rich on issues like housing in New York and London. But do university sector ethical processes hinder our work? I am not sure that they do, in strictly ethical terms there seems little reason to be suspicious of such work, but there is a question that may be raised and this regards whether universities are connected to the interests of the wealthy themselves (a question of conflicts of interest and patrimony). There may also be a concern about whether research on the rich may be considered to represent a risk to the institution in legal or reputational terms (you might ask whether this is a cynical position to adopt). Such questions ask that we follow standard processes of care and caution about naming respondents. The answer is to be direct and identify what the concerns are, but without being sensationalist. Wealthy respondents are as likely as anyone else to have something constructive to say about political lobbying and tax avoidance, for example.

Informed consent – This is a trickier area, largely because it is hard to be sure that the effects of research do not blow back onto its subjects when they are profoundly wealthy. Here of course there is some difference between a series of interviews with some of the wealthiest and access to land registry data on sales that does not focus on particular people. Methodology matters in this sense. But it also raises questions about whether a researcher can guarantee control over the impact of their work on those helping a researcher. My response to this is that I believe wealth elites are among the most adept at understanding issues of reputation management and the potential ramifications of working with social researchers and that we should not be unduly concerned.

On our responsibilities to elites and the powerful – What responsibilities and ethical relationship do we have to those we examine who are among the wealthiest and most powerful social actors? Social science cannot be allowed to ignore, proclaim or idly praise the wealthy. It should not leave untroubled those who are in direct and circuitous ways linked to the conditions of the poorest and others who are in some sense victims of social conditions overseen by the wealthy and powerful. Yet social scientists must act diligently to provide clear findings based in robust research that allows critique, analysis and policy to follow from it, without a concern that it is tainted by shoddy investigative processes or needless invasiveness. This suggests that there are limits to observational approaches and the suggestion by some for bin/skip searching, for example, are unlikely to receive credit or attention. Acknowledging this we must however recognize that careful, incisive and investigative social research on those who protect their identities and lives may well sit in an uneasy or problematic relationship to wider society and to the construction of what constitutes social problems and the answers to those problems.

Conclusion

In this short piece I have tried to emphasise that the moral, ethical basis of work on elites requires continued monitoring and defence. Rising social anger around wealth polarization and its links to a wide range of social problems will not disappear soon. Nevertheless, distinctions should be made between wealthy and private individuals and how systems are productive of the inequalities upon which they sit at the apex. It is important to note that many of the powerful do not believe that they wield any particular influence and indeed that their lives are either benign or beneficial to those of others (think of Boris Johnson’s lauding of the wealthy as ‘tax heroes’). Here it is obvious that the high tax contribution of the wealthy is a significant source of personal and structural legitimation that enables wealth elites to assume a position of being a public good. Such arguments require persistent examination and refutation for social benefit.

Useful sources

Nader, L. (1972). Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up, Chapter in Hymes, D. (Ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Pantheon Books.

Mills, C. W. (1956) The power elite, New York: Norton.

Nicolaus, M. (1968) – Fat Cat Sociology, available at: https://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/fatcat.html

Sayer, A. (2015) Why we can’t afford the rich, Bristol: Policy Press

Scott, J. (1982) The upper classes: Property and privilege in Britain, London: Macmillan.

Notes

1. Among other critical comments he asked:  ‘What if the habits, problems, secrets, and unconscious motivations of the wealthy and powerful were daily scrutinized by a thousand systematic researchers, were hourly pried into, analyzed and cross-referenced; were tabulated and published in a hundred inexpensive mass-circulation journals and written so that even the fifteen-year-old high-school drop-out could understand them and predict the actions of his landlord to manipulate and control him?’