Calibración:

This section will look at the processes involved in securing access to a research site and participants. As with other aspects of the research process I will highlight where issues of social class were present and in some cases developed into fieldwork dilemmas. This piece of research was, as it is for all researchers, constrained and informed by the practical considerations of securing access to a research site. As there was no clear logic for adopting a comparative case study, I therefore decided that I would need one organisation for a single case-study approach. In order to narrow down the vast number of potential research sites, I employed the following rationale: organisations that did not require a subject specific degree were considered potential research sites. This was chosen because of the explicit requests made by employers (in lieu of a specific subject) for applicants to draw upon non-academic or ECA experiences as part of the application process.

I chose to recruit participants from an employer, rather than from a university, for a number of reasons. First, to avoid clustering: elite universities in the UK are strongly associated with certain social groups, and to avoid this, some other rationale would have to be adopted to select which universities would be recruited to the study. Multiple universities would have required more time in order to gain and maintain access – a time-consuming process that I hoped to minimise. Second, recruiting participants through universities – rather than through a single firm – might have decreased my chances of using research methods such as non-participant observation, or getting interviews with recruiters, as this would involve individual time-consuming access negotiations with each firm. Furthermore, recruiting from an organisation would ensure that I made contact with graduates who had already successfully traversed the application process, and were therefore already in a process of transition. Once the rationale had been decided, the tricky process of trying to secure access to a research site began. This, as we will see, had an impact on the research design.

Bryman (1988) points out that people working within organisations may be suspicious of requests by researchers for access; this is, perhaps, especially true from a novice, thus making access difficult to gain. After taking advice from colleagues at the Careers Service (who had experience of gaining and maintaining relationships with private sector graduate employers), I contacted the heads of Graduate Recruitment in eight multinational organisations. I sent an invitation for participation via email and attached a Power Point presentation which featured, amongst other things, the main aims of the

research, and details of whom I hoped to recruit and for how long. After a few tentative responses, I failed to secure access at any of the organisations contacted.

Following further conversations with colleagues in the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick, I made contact with the Association of Graduate Research (AGR) and asked if they would allow me to contact their members about the research. After this was agreed, I then spent some time considering whom I wanted to contact. In order for anyone to agree to the inconvenience of the research, I thought it would be important for them to have a personal connection to the project. It was suggested to me that some of the female, senior graduate recruiters may well have done some class travel of their own, and would therefore feel motivated – by the project’s aims – to invest their own time. It was further suggested that I could identify such a person from their biographies and accompanying photograph which were publicly available on the AGR website. I therefore spent some time looking into the biographies available on the AGR website and identified two women who appeared to fit the bill: one was the head of graduate recruitment for a multinational investment bank, and the other was the head of graduate recruitment for a multinational accountancy firm. I took the decision that I would seek first to interview these women about their own experiences of class travel, before exploring the possibilities of extending the research inwards to the organisation. At the time I thought that peering at photographs of women, reading their biographies, and trying to work out if they looked like they might

have been working class, seemed at best inappropriate and worst unethical based as many of these judgments are on processes of misrecognition (Skeggs, 2000). Considering the sort of processes that I was hoping to critique, the imagining and projecting – that is to say, the interpretation of appearance – with the explicit aim of fixing and locating individuals within a specific context disturbed me, and I had not expected such ethical dilemmas. Noting them led to the decision that I would step back from these judgments, and I, instead, contacted the administrator for the AGR board who fielded a request for participation, which was eventually successful. It resulted in the two women that I had identified tacitly agreeing to support their firms’ participation in the research. The tactic worked, and on first meeting it was quickly established that it had worked based on the professor’s suggestion; both offers of participation came from women who were the first in their generation to go to university – women who gained entry into a profession which was highly remunerated and who considered themselves to have transcended their social class of origin. Both women told me this very early on in our initial conversations; both women also asked me about my own background (where I conveyed my mother’s experiences, which are similar to theirs) which seemed to me to authenticate further my reasons for doing the research, and legitimate their participation in it. I became convinced that their personal attachment to the ideas which I was interested in investigating underpinned all future negotiations; I was able to rely on them when access became more problematic as a result of the firm’s processes and procedures – things that were out of all of our control.

Upon further discussions with these two women, they suggested that I would be more likely to get a broader range of participants at the accountancy firm, and a decision was made to cease access negotiations with the investment bank. Therefore, after many months of formal negotiations with their legal department – which included signing a confidentiality agreement – the bulk of the empirical work was carried out at a multinational accountancy firm; at their insistence I refer to them as the Firm. The access agreement that I made with the Firm both constrained and informed the scope of the research in a number of ways. First, I was only allowed to interview trainees during office hours; second, I was not allowed to observe them either at college, nor actively working at the Firm’s offices or at any of the client’s premises; third, I was not allowed access to a database, but was permitted to write a ‘recruitment’ email which the Firm then said it circulated to all new graduate trainees at four sites (three in London and one in Birmingham). The Firm suggested that I recruit for my study graduates based in a regional office, as well as those based in London, as it was thought that there might be some variation between them: applicants choose the region to which they would like to apply, and regions recruit specifically for their own area. In the end, out of my fifteen participants, four trainees were based in the Birmingham office, and the rest were in based in offices across central London.