ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the methodological dilemmas encountered while conducting research on service work in large transnational corporations in Pune, India. The study involved an ethnography of low-wage service workers in India’s high-tech firms who form an invisible and precarious workforce of cleaners, drivers and security guards within lavish “foreign” firms. Our focus here is on subcontractors who provide the service workers to the multinational technology firms and form an “ambiguous global elite”. This chapter is a reflection on our methodological strategies used to conduct and analyze interviews with this particular group, in order to capture the ambiguous nature of their elite status vis-à-vis globalization and their position as both integral to globalization and hidden as one of its primary actors. It also reveals the challenges often faced by qualitative researchers who find themselves inside the worlds of those whose views and politics deeply challenge those of the researchers.
