Interviewing respondents with a similar social status: Power,positionality,poetics

Abstract

Most of the literature on power and positionality in qualitative, semi-structured interviews discusses research on either precarious, disenfranchised populations or influential elites. This paper focuses on interviewing social groups who have a similar societal status as academic researchers. By combining methodological literature on insider status and whiteness, the article interrogates how sameness unfolds in the research process. Based on two research projects with literary professionals and nightclub promoters respectively, the focus lies not on the fluid and context-dependent presence of symbolic power in the interview setting (for example, through discomfort), but rather reflects on casual research settings where power is experienced as absent (for example, through comfort). The paper proposes methodological strategies to attend to challenges brought about by sameness in advance, before the fieldwork starts: by utilising informality in gaining access (but doing so reflexively), by sampling outside of the somatic norm and by formulating specific forms of ‘how-questions’.

Introduction

In social science literature on qualitative interviewing, the power dynamics of the interviewer–interviewee relationship are, most of the time, either discussed in relation to interviewing precarious, disenfranchised populations (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Crang and Cook, 2007; Mao and Feldman, 2019) or with regard to researching and obtaining access to influential elites (Alvesalo-Kuusi and Whyte, 2018; Cousin et al., 2018; Harvey, 2011; McDowell, 1998; Wedel, 2017). More recently, researchers have highlighted that when conducting elite interviews, access remains difficult (McRobbie, 2016), but the interviewee is not necessarily in a more powerful position than the interviewer (Morse, 2018; Ellersgaard et al., 2022). Rather, power dynamics are fluid and context-dependent: for example, when discomfort arises as professional relationships or sensitive policy processes are discussed (Lancaster, 2017; Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). Moreover, there has been attention to the diversity among elites and middle-class populations, making clear that a one-size-fits-all approach does not benefit social science research (Cousin et al., 2018). Still, the literature on qualitative interviewing and power dynamics in professional contexts predominantly focuses on researching ‘up’ or ‘down’, which has limited applicability for researchers encountering and fostering relatively horizontal relationships in their fields of study. This can be understood as ‘sameness’ ¹ – a sense of social proximity, or ‘quality of being the same’ (Salas et al., 2018), that characterises interview settings when interviewer and interviewee share a similar societal and professional status. This paper analyses the methodological challenges that arise in horizontal relationships and proposes concrete strategies to address these.

The implications of social proximity between researcher and research participant have been discussed by social scientists through concepts such as ‘insider status’ in social and professional networks. For example, researchers working in the field of cultural consumption, cultural production and youth culture show that while being a self-identified member of the subculture under study has advantages in terms of access and knowledge as a result of familiarity, it can make one oblivious to group norms and group ideology (Bennett, 2002; Browne, 2003; Goossens et al., 2022; Hodkinson, 2005; Nowak and Haynes, 2018). These arguments can be extended to professional settings where institutional norms, knowledge cultures and disciplinary conventions shape insider status (Montano, 2013). This line of research has pointed towards the methodological challenges such as the sense of duty researchers feel towards participants and the fluid power relations that arise (Nowak and Haynes, 2018). However, studies on insider status predominantly focus on the immediate social or professional context of the researcher (Montano, 2013), with less attention to similarities in sociological characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality. This can be seen as a shortcoming because interviewees derive their ‘maps of perception’ not just from their immediate surroundings but also from societal and institutional norms at the national and global level, which shape an obliviousness that is not adequately captured by ‘insider status’ (Lamont and Swidler, 2014; Warren, 2000).

To understand the role of societal and institutional norms in creating a sense of sameness, whiteness studies provide a useful conceptualisation of how proximity arises in interview contexts through (presumed) shared ideological dispositions. Whiteness can defined as a ‘location of structural advantage’ and an unmarked and unnamed identity characterised by an imagined neutrality that functions through othering social groups (Çankaya and Mepschen, 2019; Frankenberg, 1993). In research interviews, this can enable a sense of closeness between interviewer and interviewee over sharing the same cultural biographies and dispositions (for example, not being used to being excluded) (Ahlstedt, 2015; Bhopal, 2001 Gallagher, 2000). The shared comfort that arises as a consequence in the research context can disguise the workings of symbolic power (Ahmed, 2012; Çankaya and Mepschen, 2019), in particular racism (Warren, 2000), making it harder to address societies’ power structures in conversation. For example, researchers have reflected on how bringing up race and ethnicity when interviewing white respondents can spark discomfort or even angriness (Best, 2003; Çankaya and Mepschen, 2019; Gallagher, 2000). However, whiteness – and by extension sameness – is not a static, monolithic entity: people attribute a wide variety of cultural meanings to their white identities and these meanings may shift over the course of time, or even during an interview (Gallagher, 2000; Valentine, 2002). In sum, commonalities may be undercut by other differences (such as gender, but also other subjectivities) and different notions of sameness may be operating at the same time during the research process (Valentine, 2002).

In my research on cultural intermediaries in the cultural industries, specifically literary professionals and nightclub promoters, I experienced this sense of sameness, or: an emphatic mutual understanding and feeling of ‘normality’ (Salas et al., 2018). Alongside shared social backgrounds and ideological dispositions (of which whiteness is an example), this was shaped by shared features characterising the professional positions of interviewer and interviewee. Sameness was produced by sharing a relatively privileged social background (the ‘somatic norm’ of being a white, male and middle-class professional in a country in the global North (Mills, 1997; Puwar, 2004)), but also by a certain precarity, as both academia and the arts are often defined by a sense of crisis: declining rates of public funding for the arts as well as academia mean both are in ‘a state of flux’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2013; O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019). In the interview setting, this extends to the level of discourse: both culture workers and academics typically possess high cultural capital, shaping a self-reflexive, typically politically progressive conversation about arts and culture (Jarness, 2015). Furthermore, both sectors are characterised by a relatively high degree and valuation of autonomy and a culture of informality that invites loose hierarchies and norms (Brook et al., 2020; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). This informality also invites homosocial norms or ‘homophily’ (Gill, 2014) which, in the research context, can contribute a presumed and experienced social proximity (for example, when men interview men). Sameness does not only take shape through shared societal status and social position, but also in and through a research process characterised by a culture of informality that shapes both professional worlds (Rose, 1997).

This highlights how sameness – as an emphatic, comfortable and mutual understanding (Salas et al., 2018) – does not fully exist a priori, but unfolds in the encounter between researcher and research participant (Valentine, 2002). In this paper, I reflect on the research process through which shared societal status shapes a horizontal relationship between researcher and research participant. In doing so, this paper addresses a gap in the methodological literature: existing methodological literature on elites, insider status and whiteness mainly focuses on dealing with this dilemma during the interview process or in the process of writing up. For example, in subcultural studies on insider status, the advice is typically that researchers need to disconnect themselves from their research population as they are writing up their research, as distance is needed to prevent the researcher from becoming an uncritical spokesperson oblivious of power dynamics (Hodkinson, 2005).

However, based on my fieldwork in the cultural industries, I suggest it is beneficiary to start thinking about the relationship between power and sameness before conducting interviews and writing up research, at a much earlier stage: when designing the research and creating the interview guide (cf Varriale, 2025). This is crucial because, as a means to control influence over others (Mao and Feldman, 2019), power manifests differently in different stages of the research process. First, in gaining access, potential respondents have the ability to control resources and ‘pull up the gate’, making access for researchers without insider status challenging (Khan, 2012; McRobbie, 2016). Second, in the interview setting, researchers may render power oblivious, because sameness contributes to a sense of shared comfort. While a relaxed and comfortable qualitative interview is often considered a virtue (Crang and Cook, 2007), recently researchers conducting elite interviews have argued that ‘moments of discomfort’ also generate valuable knowledge (Cousin et al., 2018; Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). So, in contrast to research on interviewing elites, I do not foreground the fluid and context-dependent presence of power and hierarchies in the interview setting (for example, through discomfort) (Ellersgaard et al., 2022; Lancaster, 2017), but rather how casual interview settings obfuscate power (for example, through comfort), which can have harmful social effects (Bogner and Menz, 2009). The latter especially requires scrutiny, because the research interview has a discursive power in and of itself (as the basis for published research), and research ethics should not be limited to the interview as a social situation, but also consider public interest beyond the research encounter (Alvesalo-Kuusi and Whyte, 2018).

Therefore, this paper offers concrete strategies for navigating the challenges of ‘sameness’ in interview settings. First, I focus on how adapting to a culture of informality (in terms of social networks and communication channels) provides an effective way of gaining access. However, it is also a strategy that should be used reflexively, because the research process may produce an all too comfortable interview setting which contributes to a sense of sameness (Valentine, 2002). Second, I address the sense of comfort that emerges from ‘sameness’. I propose researchers should tailor their sampling strategy to expose (potential) systemic and exclusionary mechanisms (Varriale, 2025), triangulate using other research methods, and allow for and anticipate ‘moments of discomfort’ (Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). Third, I highlight that sameness also manifests itself on the level of discourse (or: poetics). Given the well-documented inequalities in the cultural industries, and the role that cultural taste and strategic repertoires continue to play in reproducing these inequalities (Brook et al., 2020), I suggest formulating interview questions with a specific eye for relationality, context and history to contextualise answers in the lived realities of capitalist cultural production which can help researchers in arriving at a nuanced, layered conception of determining who has access to which resources and who does not and why. Taken together, this paper not only contributes to the literature on sameness in qualitative, semi-structured interviewing by combining and bridging scholarship on elites, insider status and whiteness, but also provides actionable suggestions for researchers to reflexively negotiate sameness.

Analysing (the production of) sameness has relevance for cultural industries research, but extends to other occupational fields such as health care, education and social work. In all of these fields, inattentiveness to power relations in qualitative research could lead to academics exerting discursive power in various forms of research output and research valorisation, for example when they become ‘spokespeople’ for the sector (McRobbie, 2016) or feel too strong a sense of duty towards participants individual interests (Nowak and Haynes, 2018). For example, with regards to whiteness, discursive power manifests itself in research output when hegemonic categories of race or (neo)colonial language are reproduced without critical scrutiny (Warren, 2000). At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that interviewees in these professional sectors do not have full control over access to resources and a limited influence in shaping the way we make sense of the world (Brook et al., 2020; Ellersgaard et al., 2022; Khan, 2012; Saha, 2018). With regard to the cultural sector, the challenge I encountered when researching sameness could be formulated as follows: how to uphold a critical stance towards the limited space and resources available for cultural and creative work, while also remaining critical towards the corrosive effects of the cultural industries, as their gatekeeping practices reproduce or legitimise social inequalities (see Brook et al., 2020; Saha, 2018)? This challenge can be adapted for academic research into other sectors in the ‘foundational economy’ (O’Connor, 2024) such as health care, education and social work, which highlights the wider applicability of the findings of this paper.

Study background

This paper's contributions are based on two research projects on the cultural industries, both conducted in the Netherlands and predominantly in Amsterdam – typically conceptualised as the economic centre of the Dutch cultural sector (Musterd et al., 2006). While I carried out both projects through a variety of methods (including ethnography and document-based analysis), the main method for both projects was semi-structured qualitative interviews. The literary publishing project (2014–2016) was my MA thesis and sought to understand how Dutch cultural intermediaries in the literary field such as acquisition editors, agents and grant providers responded to public calls to increase ‘cultural diversity’ in literary publishing. In 2014, I conducted twelve interviews with literary professionals (nine different publishers, one agent, two grant providers). Over the course of the research project, I decided to interview not only intermediaries but also four writers of colour because exclusionary structures are often invisible to those inside these institutions (Lamont and Molnar, 2002). The nightclub project (2018–2022) was my PhD research and focused on Amsterdam's night-time economy: my aim was to understand how music genres shape the economic organisation of nightclubs and the impact this organisation has on social and spatial inequalities in both labour and audience participation. In 2019, I interviewed 36 promoters (17 employed by clubs, 19 independent) as key actors who negotiate the tension between creativity, commerce and audiences.

In both research projects, the focus was on respondents who performed a gatekeeping function through which they controlled access to the cultural industries: they had a decisive influence in who gets to publish a book, who gets to organise a club night or who gets DJ at a club night. Both research projects were concerned with cultural intermediaries: ‘those workers who come in-between creative artists and consumers (or, more generally, production and consumption)’ (Negus, 2002: 503). My interest in these roles is derived from the fact that these workers bridge the interests of three groups: owners, core cultural workers (such as artists, writers, or musicians), and consumers. However, the degree of influence varies between respondents in ways that are specific to the cultural field. Among the promoters, club promoters typically had more means to control access to resources than independent organisers (external promoters). Similarly, some acquisition editors worked for publishing houses that were seen as more prestigious than others. While intermediaries are mostly invisible to the public eye, my interviewees were occupied with successfully communicating their ‘brand-image’, benefitted from the ‘aura’ and charisma of the cultural sector and were often able to exert editorial control (see also McRobbie, 2016). This is reflected in their approach to academic interviews: most interviewees arrive with the expectation that their opinion and expertise matters (Bogner and Menz, 2009; McRobbie, 2016; Lancaster, 2017). Still, like other middle-class professionals (Brook et al., 2020), interviewees would sometimes downplay their influence in reference to the tough, unpredictable and competitive economic climate their businesses are part of.

In terms of positionality, I did not have personal or professional relationships with my participants (see Hodkinson, 2005; Nowak and Haynes, 2018), but I did share many sociological characteristics with my interviewees. I conducted the interviews for the literary publishing project in my early twenties. All interviewed gatekeepers were white and had a university-level degree. They were mainly male (10/12). However, respondents were notably older than I was at the time: the youngest interviewee was 30, the oldest 66. I conducted the interviews for the nightclub project in my late twenties. During this fieldwork, I shared more basic social characteristics with my interviewees: they were mainly male (25/36), mainly white (29/36), mainly in their twenties or thirties (29/36), and most had completed a university-level degree or were in the process of doing so (24/36). While I participated in Amsterdam's literary world as a reader and visitor of events and in Amsterdam's nightlife as a frequent clubber, my insider status was limited to the extent that in both fields I had ‘only’ one personal or professional acquaintance who could help with finding respondents. In both research projects I adapted to challenges of interviewing respondents with a similar societal status. I did so over the course of the fieldwork by including additional respondents that diverted from how I had defined my research population in the studies’ respective research designs. In the project on literary publishing I also interviewed four writers of colour, while in the nightclub project I did not only interview club promoters but also external promoters, who more often were not part of the somatic norm. Nightclub promoters displayed higher levels of trust: in both research projects the default for respondents was to appear anonymous, of which interviewees were informed beforehand, although nightclub promoters frequently said they considered this unnecessary.

In terms of active consent, the two research projects were slightly different. During the research design phase of the literary publishing project (2014), it was not yet a requirement for students of my university to obtain ethical approval. As MA students, we did take courses on research ethics and these informed the research project. For example, in the interview request, it was clearly stated that interview respondents had the right to be anonymous. However, participants did not sign a consent form. The nightclub project had a more thorough consideration of research ethics, including ethical approval from the university. I let respondents define the interview context through choosing the location (Elwood and Martin, 2000) and I offered respondents the explicit right to pause or stop the interview at any given moment. The right to pause was made explicit through a participant information sheet and consent form that all participants signed. Next to this, interviews were anonymised, and interviewees were sent a manuscript of the interview and given the possibility to make changes to the manuscript. In the following sections I will use these two research projects, drawing lessons from how these projects evolved in order to propose strategies to attend to sameness in the research design, sampling/recruitment and interview guides of projects that have semi-structured qualitative interviews as their core method.

Power

Gaining access in the cultural industries can be challenging for non-insiders: because of high cultural status, busy schedules and lack of a publicity effect, culture workers are not always eager to participate in academic interviews (McRobbie, 2016). Not only does symbolic power manifest itself through the ability to ‘pull up the gate’, the importance of informal social networks (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011) also means finding contact details can be hard. On a practical level, adapting to this ‘culture of informality’ was a useful strategy in gaining access (for a similar argument in a different context, see Morse, 2019). Through this strategy, the research process contributes to a sense of comfort, one of the elements that co-produces ‘sameness’, which requires – as I will argue – a reflexive positionality (Rose, 1997). In this section, I will first explain how the research process in a professional field shaped by loose social norms leads to a sense of comfort, before providing a methodological critique on an all too comfortable interview setting and providing concrete strategies to address this in the next section.

When I started the literary publishing project as my MA thesis in 2014, I was not aware of the cultural sectors’ culture of informality (as documented in Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011, among many others), so I chose a formal access strategy when setting up the project on literary publishers. I put a lot of work in drafting a carefully worded email that I sent to all members of the Literary Publisher's Circle, an official professional organisation, that publish Dutch literary fiction. I was open about the aims of the project: I asked publishers to participate in a research project on cultural diversity in the literary field. In response, most declined my interview request: one only wanted to fill in a questionnaire, five did not respond and eight declined. Only one publisher, who profiled itself as diverse, immediately sent back a positive response. The other eight publishers only agreed to participate after multiple attempts.

Reputation management became apparent from the responses, despite the request clearly stating interviews were anonymous, as acquisition editors could use their relatively powerful societal position to control access. For example, many thought cultural diversity was not a topic relevant for them: they ‘lacked experience’ or thought their list of authors ‘does not fit your request’. These responses were of course insightful in and of themselves: they highlight that interviewees wish to be perceived as cultural experts, while for qualitative researchers, the expertise of respondents does not necessarily matter. In this research, I was also interested in how non-diverse publishers, without expertise on this matter, perceive and negotiate the issue in the light of public debate around the topic. This highlights that in many cases, researchers in the cultural industries will encounter a specific type of a horizontal relationship: both interviewer and interviewee consider themselves experts, albeit from different knowledge cultures (Bogner and Menz, 2009). This means that as a researcher, I was typically perceived as someone with broad knowledge and theoretical knowledge on the subject matter (which includes cultural references in the given field), but without intricate knowledge on the practicalities of cultural production.

During the literary publishing project, reputation management was thus one reason why it was hard to gain access to the Dutch literary field. Informal social networks and the communication styles associated with them (text messaging services such as WhatsApp rather than the more ‘formal’ e-mail) make gaining access easier. When I told a published author I was acquainted with about my troubles finding respondents, he immediately texted an acquisition editor who, after some back and forth, eventually agreed to do an interview. Despite her busy schedule, she was able to fit in a 45 min interview just before a literary event she would be attending. The rowdy, packed bar and the tiny table we were sitting at revealed a lot about the geographies of the publishing sector: the informal, after-hours culture of networking and scouting talent. However, the location was not quite the quiet and private setting methods textbooks typically advocate (Elwood and Martin, 2000) and that I had encountered in my research so far. Before, the formality of my e-mail request had led to invitations to the publishing house, which in Amsterdam are often located in a stately house on the canal district. Being invited to the informal bar setting meant I gained access to other key spaces in the literary publishing practice, beyond the front stage. So, the main take-away lesson I took from trying to gain access to middle-class respondents is to adapt to the communication and networking style of the (informal) work culture of the field under study. This requires a tacit knowledge that those with insider status typically already possess.

During the nightclub project, I adapted to using informal communication channels. A former colleague worked in HR at a nightclub and was able to introduce me to five relevant interviewees, all via WhatsApp. The subsequent snowball sampling not only helped recruiting more participants but also revealed the subtle intricacies of the ways in which the nightclub sector communicates. For example, an interviewee shared a colleague's e-mail address with the disclaimer ‘if he answers his email’. Similarly, while I felt self-conscious about calling or messaging potential participants directly without being introduced, but after being given a phone number by a previous interviewee, this never seemed to lead to very awkward social situations. I learned during the nightclub project that a tacit knowledge of communication conventions, the use of snowball sampling and a similar societal status contribute to a veneer of a symbolic ‘insider status’: it gives the impression that because the researcher knows their way around, they are to be trusted and ‘worth their time’. This highlights how (the pretence of) insider status is tied to prestige, and serves as a precondition for a more relaxed and loose interview.

However, here, it is important to remain reflexive: casual research settings such as cafés invite loose hierarchies and vague norms, but may obfuscate the workings of symbolic power. When interviewing club promoters, interviews often took place at the ‘chill area’ or dressing room of the nightclub or in an adjacent café. Interviews with external promoters typically took place in a café of their choice, although two interviewees invited me to their homes. Since the fieldwork partly took place in summer, many interviewees opted to have the interview outside. The warm weather in July 2019 meant that interviewees were frequently wearing shorts, adding to the informality of the interview experience. The loose norms and hierarchies deepened the experience of sameness during the interviews, as they were reminiscent of having a casual coffee with a friend or colleague. In sum, ‘acting like an insider’ provides access, but warrants reflexivity. Although a comfortable setting is often seen as a virtue in qualitative research (e.g. Crang and Cook, 2007), the performance of sameness during the interview setting may work to overrideexpression of diverse views (Valentine, 2002) and ‘moments of discomfort’ that can be generative and revealing in elite interviews (Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). The next section will connect this critique on comfortable interviews to the role of shared whiteness in interview settings, before suggesting concrete strategies to address this methodological challenge.

Positionality

Race shapes the research interview when interviewer and interviewee do not share the same racialised position and when interviewer and interviewee share a racialised position (Bhopal, 2001). This also goes for unmarked racial identities: a shared whiteness contributes to comfort by creating comfortable sense of proximity (Ahlstedt, 2015; Ahmed, 2007). Here, power does not manifest itself as the gap between academic practice and lived experience that needs to be bridged (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) or through the hierarchical, if fluid, difference between interviewer and interviewee (Best, 2003; Ellersgaard et al., 2022). Rather, through comfort, power is experienced as absent. This brings the risk the researcher does not recognise power structures, group norms, ideological dispositions and exclusionary mechanisms in the field under study. It is a particularly pertinent issue in progressive professional fields where ‘inequality talk’ showcases a discursive commitment to reducing social inequalities that does not necessarily translate into practice (Brook et al., 2020). Attending to comfort and scrutinising this discursive commitment to social inequalities requires preparatory strategies to ensure dealing with power not just in the writing-up phase of the research (when it might be too late), but also when setting up and organising fieldwork. In this section I will suggest three: recruitment beyond the ‘somatic norm’, triangulation, and allowing for discomfort.

To illustrate this, I will reflect specifically on how a shared whiteness, as an example of how shared societal position and social background intensify sameness, shapes more horizontal power relations in interviews. During my research, my whiteness became most apparent as a ‘presumed sameness’ (Valentine, 2002) when discussing (cultural) politics in interviews: white male interviewees seemed to assume I shared their political and cultural views, no matter what these views were. To give an example from the nightclub project: one male club promoter I interviewed talked about his decision to stop longer programming hip-hop nights using unusually explicit racist language: their club was no longer doing these nights because they attracted ‘men, egos’ and ‘more Black people, Moroccans’ give their bouncers ‘headaches’. Here, the promoter stereotypically read Black and Moroccan masculinities as dangerous and potentially violent (Hall, 1996). As he started explaining these examples, his language switched from first person plural (‘when we organise hip-hop nights') to second-person (‘you know’, ‘you tell me’), creating a sense of intimacy. In the context of the interview, this interviewee did not notice my discomfort with these statements, or I effectively concealed my unease. After a few minutes, after we had discussed some other issues, he returned to the topic of door policies, and criticised the local council: his club had been visited by the council's ‘mystery guests’ who had reported back the door staff excluded visitors on the basis of racial and ethnic identity.

However, white male interviewees also appeared to presume sameness when they expressed outspoken progressive cultural politics: the promoter who argued to ‘overthrow the existing structures that are white male dominant’ did not flinch an eye. However, for male promoters of colour I interviewed, my middle-class, academic whiteness was much more visible (cf. Best, 2003). When a respondent of colour used the phrase ‘the dominant culture in the sense of straight white men’, a more modest version of the white male promoter's progressive cultural politics, he immediately followed this up with ‘no offence’. Only after I said I had not been offended, he continued his story. Interviewees of colour also recognised racialised difference through urban slang (see also Best, 2003). When white respondents used slang, they assumed I knew what the words meant, but when respondents of colour did, they often would correct themselves and use a more formal word. So, whiteness manifested itself not only through the comfort white male interviewees felt to express their political dispositions, but also in the assumption of shared knowledge and language. On the basis of these reflections, I suggest three practical strategies to address the pitfalls of comfort, which relate to sampling and recruitment, triangulation and interview preparation.

First, being aware of the white male middle-classness of the cultural industries means that, at the stage of sampling, it is crucial to include respondents who fall outside of the ‘somatic norm’ (Puwar, 2004) in the interview population (which might entail opening up the sample to a less narrowly defined professional role). Here, the goal is not necessarily to ensure a balanced demographic representation of society, but rather to provide a more comprehensive account of how the cultural industries function as an economic system and a system that (re)produces inequalities (Gray, 2016; Varriale, 2025). For example, a white male club promoter talked about students as their new target audience for Saturday night. At first glance, an exclusionary mechanism does not seem to be present here. However, in another interview, a Black male external promoter who organises parties at that same club said he was moving to a different venue because he tried to get his successful club night programmed on the more prestigious Saturday night but had heard the club's management considered his event's crowd ‘too Black’ (Koren, 2023). He then proceeded to decode the ideological meaning (Hall, 1980) of the phrase student night by saying ‘I’m Black myself, what do mean? [and] I am a student too’. Diversifying the sample (to include not just club promoters but also external promoters with more varied racialised identities) highlighted how this phrase is key to the racialised power dynamics that shape nightclub economics.

Second, it is important to triangulate research methods. During the literary publishing project, I noticed the geographical imaginations of white cultural intermediaries were very different from writers of colour. A white male acquisition editor told me that at a literary event ‘it's not so hard to come up and have a chat’, suggesting networking helps young writers to get on a publisher's radar. In a later interview, a Surinamese Dutch writer made the exclusionary mechanisms behind this claim clear by telling me how distant the literary field felt when she was growing up, pointing out that diversity initiatives had helped to overcome that distance. To arrive at a more comprehensive account of the role of social networks in the acquisition process, it would have been helpful to include participant observation at literary events. For example, during the research phase I visited literary events and noticed anecdotally that acquisition editors I interviewed were indeed frequently there, either accompanying authors or spotting new talents, but they were never officially part of the program. They were rather invisible to the general public. Using multiple, complementary methods would have given a more complete picture of acquisitions editors’ relative power, as gatekeeping entails not just selecting manuscripts but also managing social networks.

Third, it can be productive to allow for and anticipate a degree of discomfort (Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). White respondents are quickly uncomfortable discussing race, ethnicity and racism (Ahlsted, 2015; Best, 2003; Wekker, 2016). While methodological literature often emphasises the importance of comfort for productive research interviews (Crang and Cook, 2007), reflections on elite research have shown how discomfort can be revealing of participants’ lifeworlds (Cousin et al., 2018; Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). A useful strategy to make race ‘speakable’ for white respondents is to introduce it through reference to ongoing public debates around affirmative action, diversity and inclusion (Gallagher, 2000). When conducting fieldwork for the nightclub project, gender inequality on line-ups was a prominent topic of debate in music media and local press. After asking more general questions, I introduced the topic of gender inequality, which most interviewees had thought about in some capacity, to probe respondents’ perception of other inequalities. The subsequent discomfort that sometimes arose was insightful about the position of specific social inequalities in interviewees’ maps of perception: it led to the finding that genre shapes which social inequalities are addressed – techno promoters centralise gender inequalities, while R&B/Dancehall focus on racial and ethnic inequalities (Koren, 2022) – and which inequalities are not addressed. This highlights how gender and race sometimes work in tandem, but not always.

Taken together, I found these strategies can function as correctives for an all too comfortable research setting that disguises the workings of discursive power, ultimately leading to research output with a better conception of the functioning of power in the professional field under study. This highlights the importance of a sampling and recruitment strategy that is less concerned with groups and more with social systems (see also Varriale, 2025), a methodological strategy that identifies multiple, complementary mechanisms of exclusion (see also Lamont and Swidler, 2014), and a careful analysis of the significance of discomfort in elite interviews (see also Cousin et al., 2018). These strategies are oriented towards a more profound, sector-specific analysis of the potentially corrosive effects of economic, cultural and social practices of middle-class professionals, by locating the research and the research setting in a wider nexus of power (Alvesalo-Kuusi and Whyte, 2018). However, these strategies do not yet address a crucial but undervalued aspect of qualitative interviews: phrasing questions. In the next section, I will suggest how specific questions can address power in an interview context shaped by sameness.

Poetics

Sameness also manifests itself on the level of poetics – by which I specifically mean the aesthetic and cultural repertoires that cultural intermediaries such as acquisition editors or club programmers use as motivation for their programming choices. In research on culture and elite and middle-class dispositions, there is a rich literature on how high status individuals mobilise aesthetic and cultural repertoires to distinguish themselves from ‘the rest’ (Bourdieu, 1984; Khan, 2012; Lamont and Molnár, 2002). While open-ended ‘non-threatening’ questions that are characteristic of qualitative interviewing enable interviewees to come up with their own categorisations (Crang and Cook, 2007; Lamont and Swidler, 2014), like other researchers before me, I experienced that respondents often found it hard to bring across their cultural ideals in clear terms (see also Rose, 1997). Furthermore, just like most sociologists of culture, middle-class professionals are self-reflexive about their cultural ideals and preferences (Jarness, 2015). For example, they associate certain cultural genres or cultural styles with specific class positions and therefore tend to refrain from outspoken judgment. The terms my research participants use – such as ‘universality’ in literature and ‘inclusivity’ and ‘togetherness’ in electronic dance music – have progressive appeal but need academic scrutiny. These shared, but often vaguely or loosely defined, cultural ideals can obfuscate ideological norms and exclusionary mechanisms (Warren, 2000; Brook et al., 2020). This section attends to these challenges by suggesting how three specific types of ‘how’ – questions (Becker, 2008) can attend to a layered and nuanced conception of the workings of power – in a context where shared vague or self-reflexive cultural ideals might obscure cultural hierarchies.

First, through the interviews for the literary publishing project, I found out how productive it is to encourage interview participants to think about cultural ideals relationally. In the literary field, cultural intermediaries are not a uniform group of gatekeepers, but rather a messy network of diverse, competing individuals (Bourdieu, 1996; Cousin et al., 2018). In reflecting on interviewing arts workers, Rose (1997) remarks that her interviewees often refused to talk about the meaning of specific works. She writes: ‘Instead, they talked of practice, process and the facticity of objects, and for very good critical reasons. They also talked of themselves in similarly performative ways’ (Rose, 1997: 318). During the literary publishing project, I realised that cultural intermediaries found it much easier to talk about aesthetic dispositions and cultural preferences when I posed ‘relational’ questions in such a way that it encouraged them to think about what distinguishes them from their peers. For example, I would probe comparisons between different publishing houses, after I realised that when an interviewee was doing that unprobed. This generated rich answers. The comparative angle probes a response that helped me as a researcher to understand how acquisition editors position their publishing house in the literary field. For example, it was only when I probed a generalist publishing house to compare themselves with a publisher that specialises in diversity, that it became clear through which repertoires they justified why ‘diversity’ did not occupy a central place in their ‘maps of perception’ (Lamont, 1992). In the nightclub project relationality revealed a lot about the imagined geographies of interviewees: clubs outside of Amsterdam's city centre did not distinguish themselves in general musical terms but rather by stressing the differences between them and clubs in the more centrally located, ‘commercial’ nightlife districts.

Second, during the literary publishing project I also found out that the relative importance of respondents’ cultural ideals only became clear when related to their institutional and economic context and practical application – so, when I asked ‘contextualising’. In professions characterised by an ‘atmosphere of crisis’, such as the cultural industries (but also education and health care), the tension between autonomy, idealism and commerce shapes production. My research participants recounted many instances in which they had to compromise when setting up events, booking artists or recruiting writers. In most cases, intermediaries were concerned whether a cultural good would be too niche, and therefore not economically viable. These compromises were illuminating: they show how cultural values and economic reality interact (further shaped by policy, institutional norms and geography). For example, one key finding of the literary publishers project is that editors typically use quality criteria for literary fiction that have their roots in aesthetic modernism, but divert from these values when discussing sales. Interestingly, such a diversion did not happen when participants discussed diversity: then they would employ modernist aesthetic values to discredit diversity initiatives (later research has subsequently found that in commercial genres like thrillers, Black narratives are discredited for being ‘too niche’ and therefore not commercially viable enough (Saha and Van Lente, 2022)).

Third, ‘historicising’ questions helped me to get at the long stories and elaborate versions of events – at the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ (Becker, 2008; Crang and Cook, 2007). While long stories may make comparability and generalisability more difficult, tailoring interviews to participants through pre-prepared or probed case studies enriches qualitative data. Specificity and detail reveal a nuanced version of how cultural ideals shape economic practices and allow for complexity and ambivalence. For example, a club promoter I interviewed hosted an event in his club that came under scrutiny of local activist clubbers: one of the DJs performing had made sexist comments in a magazine interview. The club promoter who organised the party did actually not know the collective the DJ was a part of himself, but booked them based on the advice of a friend's whose music taste he trusted. After the interview, he initially wanted to cancel the event altogether, but he soon realised the costs of cancelling would be impossible to carry. Before being probed to reflect on these events, the club promoter had presented himself as a cultural omnivore and tried to explain that his club did not have clear boundaries when it came to music. Using the vignette revealed the role of trust and scene-based knowledge in making decisions, which then mitigates the promoter's omnivorous desire and political incentives. Taken together, these three types of questioning – relational questions, contextual questions, historicising questions – can help researchers to better understand how different forms of power manifest itself in specific occupational fields.

Conclusion

In this paper, I addressed the challenges and pitfalls of interviewing research participants with a similar societal status. I have argued that as sameness unfolds in interview situations, symbolic power does not manifest itself as present, rather it is experienced as absent. This experienced absence of power does not just flow from shared societal status and shared cultural dispositions, but is co-produced by the informality and comfort that characterise the interview setting in certain professional fields. Comfort and informality can contribute to better interview data (and can help gaining access), but can also make researchers oblivious to group norms and group ideologies. Therefore, sameness requires a reflexive flexibility that does not just locate power in the interviewer–interviewee relationship, but also locates the interview itself in the wider, societal nexus of power and considers the social effects of the interview (its discursive power). In theoretical and methodological terms, this means I showed a layered approach to sameness, as co-constituted by social proximity, institutional norms, social position and the research process itself. This analysis provides the basis for concrete strategies to address the workings of power in a layered and nuanced manner in qualitative research which speaks to the fundamental, ever-relevant question underlying sameness: the relationship between the researcher and their research field.

The methodological strategies outlined in this paper provide suggestions on how to deal with the pitfalls of sameness in qualitative research. Researchers in both youth studies and whiteness studies mainly assess sameness during the research process (the interviews) and after, typically suggesting strategies to disconnect from the research population in the writing-up phase (Bennett, 2003; Hodkinson, 2005). In this paper, I suggest it would be more fruitful to attend to sameness before starting fieldwork by attending to power, positionality and poetics. Researching middle-class professionals can be challenging in terms of access, especially for students and early career researchers. When snowball sampling is not an option, my suggestion is to carefully attune and adapt to common communication norms in the sector under study. It is important to acquire these types of tacit knowledge self-reflexively: when they lead to all too comfortable research settings, they may contribute to the obfuscating of symbolic power and social hierarchies.

Therefore, to explicitly locate the interview in the wider societal nexus of power, I suggest a sampling and recruitment strategy that includes participants that fall outside of the somatic norm in the given research context. Here, the goal is not demographic representation, which is impossible in small-scale qualitative research anyway, but rather to expose systemic patterns (Varriale, 2025). In interviews with professionals, ‘moments of discomfort’ can be generative and revealing (Ntienjom Mbohou and Tomkinson, 2022). Finally, the third strategy concerns phrasing questions. Especially when the cultural and political ideals and aesthetic language of interviewer and interviewee align, it is important to dig deeper by asking specific forms of ‘how’ questions that are relational, context-specific and historicising.

While this paper's arguments are based on research in the cultural industries, they can be adapted and applied in other professional fields where forms of sameness are likely to manifest itself, such as health care, education and social work. This would require attention to field-specific intersections between insider status, shared social position and shared ideology that are often dependent on time and place. Still, the strategies proposed in this paper are by no means exhaustive and are not applicable to all research settings. The paper is written from a self-reflexive, white perspective and mainly discusses the intersection of shared whiteness and professional cultures as an example of sameness. However, sameness and elite status are not always conflated: in the late Azeezat Johnson's (2017) research on Black Muslim women, the we-form is a way of aligning herself with her participants in order to speak truth to power. Taking into account the multitude of possible shared social backgrounds will undoubtedly enrich methodological reflections on sameness (see also Bhopal, 2001).

Another limitation is that in this paper, gender and sexuality only play a marginal role, despite their importance in the production of sameness and difference in and through the research process (Valentine, 2002). Especially the role of (straight, white) masculinities in professional worlds should be analysed in a more systematic manner. Furthermore, future research could delve deeper into the political economy of sameness, fieldwork and power: gaining access to culturally prestigious research populations has material benefits for researchers. Students often do research on professional fields they see themselves have a career in, while for academics extended networks allow them not just easier access in future research but also new outlets for their work (from trade books to public presentations). In sum, comparative methodological studies on sameness across professional fields and across social identities provide fruitful avenues for further research.