Some Reflections on the Ethics of Covert Ethnography among Hard-to-Reach Populations

In this chapter, I revisit the lives of some former research contacts. In Badfellas (Berg Publishers, 2001), I investigated the forms of commercialized hedonism that attracted some of my contacts into new and rapidly evolving criminal markets as Blair’s New Labour government worked to secure a neoliberal future. At the end of the 20th century, many of these contacts were still young men. They were strong, confident and business-minded. Some were immediately successful and quickly became cash rich. Their relative financial success allowed them to rush towards new consumer markets with abandon. They burnt through stacks of 20-pound notes, and powerfully hypnotic consumer experiences were suddenly within their reach. The fact that their relative financial success occurred against a background of rising underemployment, poverty, welfare retrenchment and social and cultural decomposition made it all the more remarkable. However, for the men discussed in this chapter, their success was not to last. They are now entering late middle age. Prison, violence, family breakdown, addiction, welfare dependency, poverty and mental and physical ill-health have defined much of their adult lives. Their glory days of cocaine-fuelled escapades in the region’s champagne bars, of shady business deals and bags full of money, are but a distant memory. As we walk together towards a forbidding future, my contacts reflect upon the gritty realities that have shaped their lives and I explore the painful omissions of liberal and contractual accounts of ‘research ethics’.