Researching the elite

Qualitative approaches to the study of elite practices: LSE workshop 28th November 2013 Nell Beecham and Georgia Nichols Emerging from Mike Savage et al.’s recent work on the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS) this workshop, run at the LSE, aimed to address the future for studies on elite class practices in contemporary society. The quantitative findings from the GBCS outline that the elite social class have highest levels of every type of capital. They are set apart economically from their class counterparts, but notably they also have the highest number social contacts, in addition to high scores in both traditional forms of highbrow cultural capital and newer forms of emerging cultural capital. Equally, they dominate in fields of power, such as the workplace and education. An underdeveloped area of class analysis for many years, the scale of the GBCS (and in particular its unusually high elite respondents) allows the study of elites to be brought back into the class studies framework. Utilising the finding from the GBCS, the attention now turns to painting a more vivid picture of elite practices through qualitative means