Capturing a moving target: Interviewing fintech experts via LinkedIn

Robinson, Gary

doi:10.1111/area.12726

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…However, we found that this was eased by the unique context of the pandemic, because all involved were unfamiliar with remote working and were learning to use new technologies together. This made the position of ‘expert’ more fluid than it would be ordinarily and softened the positioning of expert participants as holders of knowledge ‘not otherwise available’ (Robinson, 2021: 673) or researchers as being ‘emotionally detached’ and ‘in control’ (Nilan, 2002: 372). For us, conducting focus groups, interviews and ethnographic activities via video platforms, when all involved were in their own homes, disrupted the power inherent in the researcher/researched relationship in ways that we can learn from for future social research.…”

Section: The Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Portholes of Ethnography: The Methodological Learning from ‘Being There’ at a Distance

2022

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Ethnography is, in essence, an approach to social research reliant on ‘being there’ and ethnographic approaches to the social world have been widely taken up in sociological research. In this research note, we share our UK-based experiences of ethnographic fieldwork with professional practitioners during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when ‘staying at home’ was the antithesis of ‘being there’. In doing so, we highlight opportunities the pandemic presented to re-evaluate familiar qualitative methods, to develop new, remote ethnographic research strategies and to examine the limitations of conducting ethnography from a distance. We consider how far we stretch ‘ethnography’ in a socially distanced context, using what we call ‘portholes of ethnography’, and we outline how our learning informs the ways in which we can adapt research approaches – driven by relationality – in times of crises.

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Section: The Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Portholes of Ethnography: The Methodological Learning from ‘Being There’ at a Distance

2022

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“…Such suspicions are discussed frequently within methodological literatures on elite interviewing, which often emphasise the difficulties involved in convincing interviewees accustomed to speaking publicly on behalf of their organisations to do more than reiterate the 'official' accounts of their (and their organisations') activities and agendas contained in publicly-available documents such as marketing brochures and policy statements (Rice, 2010). Geographers preparing to interview government officials, financiers or corporate managers like Nick are regularly warned that these people will likely be experienced or even professionally trained in directing conversations in order to present themselves and their employers in a positive light (Desmond, 2004).…”

Section: Artful Elitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I stressed how important it was for the project that I understood the role played by large retailers (like their firm) in preventing or preparing for disruptions to food provisioning systems and emphasised that their first‐hand experience of these activities made them uniquely able to impart this understanding. I thus positioned Nick and his colleagues implicitly as ‘expert’ interviewees—individuals who were significant to my research because they possessed specialist knowledge about important processes and practices within an influential organisation (Robinson, 2021). However, approaching my interviewees as experts also implicitly established certain expectations about the purpose of our discussions.…”

Section: Informed Expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…My relatively junior professional status may thus have helped me to make my expert interviewee feel comfortable in offering candid reflections during this interview, as elite interviewing literatures often suggest (Clare, 2017;Desmond, 2004;Welch et al, 2002). However, my project's affiliation with the FSA may also have made it difficult for Nick to dismiss my questions as irrelevant or inappropriately formulated and left him feeling unusually compelled to attempt to answer them (Rice, 2010). The contradictory power relationships which often suffused such interviews-as my relatively low professional status contrasted against the second-hand authority conferred by my regulatory connections-may thus have contributed to eliciting Nick's revealing oscillation between expertise and ignorance.…”

Section: Fallible Representativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The unknowing expert: Talking to a man about supply chains

Brice

2022

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We talked last time about how [your company]'s own testing programme is kind of a validation tool within compliance arrangements where most of the testing is the responsibility of suppliers. So, I was just wondering, what is the role of the testing that [your employer] does, within that wider assurance architecture? Nick: So … the very simple answer is that it's part of [our company]'s due diligence. So if we were challenged, we'd have to say that we'd done something to show that we are mindful, or aware, of issues and challenges … That's the legislation … The difficulty we have, again … the issue we have is really that our reach is basically to our stores. And that's the limitation of our reach. So we, again, are very reliant on our supplier base looking at their raw materials critically, from their supply base … we do what we can, where we can. But in reality, when we see a cottage pie, we don't necessarily know without asking the supplier where the beef came from, or where the potato came from, or the packaging even. So that's our limitations in what we can do. Okay? | INFORMED EXPERTSThis phone interview in late 2015 was not my first encounter with Nick, a senior food safety manager for a large UK supermarket chain. Several months earlier I had met one of his colleagues at a food industry event in London while conducting fieldwork for a research project examining how public, private and third sector organisations within the UK food system anticipate and manage possible future crises. I had taken this opportunity to introduce the project, which

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“…In doing so, we illustrate how informational and financial geographies, while closely linked and sometimes matching, are distinct elements of global networks of money, and suggest that disentangling them is crucial. Therefore, this article employs a qualitative analysis of multidisciplinary secondary data, including literature from economic and financial geography, business studies, political economy, critical data studies and science and technology studies, as well as industry reports and insights from 30 expert interviews across the banking and payments industry (Robinson, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global networks of money and information at the crossroads: Correspondent banking and SWIFT

2022

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This article explores how transaction information is a fundamental element enabling and fostering global flows of money. Financial systems, constructed around account-based money, require infrastructure, which is separated into two parts: messaging and settlement, performed via trusted agents. This separation has allowed the geographical expansion of banking, and to this day constitutes a key architecture of increasingly global networks of money. Focusing on the correspondent banking system and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, this article demonstrates the workings of this infrastructure in cross-border payments and in enacting economic sanctions. This sociotechnical infrastructure is a crucial yet overlooked area of global banking, which makes global economic and financial activity possible in the first place. Importantly, by analysing the organizational architecture of the global payments system and including the actors and agencies within it, we elucidate the (changing) relationships between data/information, geographies and power, contributing to the formation of a literature that conceptualizes financial infrastructure. K E Y W O R D S correspondent banking and SWIFT, cross-border payments, financial geographies, financial infrastructure, geopolitics, information networks This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Capturing a moving target: Interviewing fintech experts via LinkedIn

Cited by 12 publications

References 55 publications

Portholes of Ethnography: The Methodological Learning from ‘Being There’ at a Distance

Portholes of Ethnography: The Methodological Learning from ‘Being There’ at a Distance

The unknowing expert: Talking to a man about supply chains

Global networks of money and information at the crossroads: Correspondent banking and SWIFT

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