Qualitative Research on Business Elites in Sub-saharan Africa: Methodological Reflections on Access, Interviewing Approaches and Data Collection

The sampling of business elites in non-Western contexts is complicated by the challenges of identification, access and the interview process. Business elites exercise their influence subtly and often avoid publicity and researchers have relied on snowball techniques to overcome these challenges. These techniques have considerable limitations in emerging markets that differ across institutions and rules of law, but some limitations can be overcome through the positionality of the interviewer and the networks that positionality enables. Favorable positionality can signal status to potential interviewees but may not be enough in more closed societies where an insider would have access. In this paper we show how positionality can be used and introduce the Godfather Protocol, an intermediary model that operates invisibly through status-lending in highly patrimonial states. This model is distinct from existing fixer models in the literature. We accessed and interviewed 49 business elites from South Africa (14), Democratic Republic of Congo (14), Cote d’Ivoire (13) and Eswatini (8). Each country differed in terms of institutions and rules of law, and we found that identification, access and interviewing context differed accordingly. We operationalized the Limited Access Order framework to best capture these contextual differences. This paper suggests how researcher positionality operates differently across types of emerging markets and introduces the Godfather Protocol as a strategy in some of these contexts. Together, these insights equip qualitative researchers to better predict access dynamics, sampling strategies, and participant risk profiles before entering the field.