Identity Challenges in Field Research: Three Stories

Journal of Applied Communication Research Vol. 43, No. 1, February 2015, pp. 136–140 Identity Challenges in Field Research: Three Stories Jan-Oddvar Sørnes, Ingunn Dahler Hybertsen & Larry Browning We tell of our struggles in completing ethnographic field research by showing the hurdles and difficult interactions we faced on our different projects. We interpret the obstacles as threats to our identities and show how we responded to them. Our conclusion shows how we preserved the independence of our interpretations while completing the data collection and interpretation. Keywords: Threat Rigidity; Åsne Seierstad; Confessional Ethnography Three of us take turns in this confessional booth—two Norwegians and one American. We are old friends and occasional coauthors. But here, instead of speaking about one of our joint research efforts, we share with you some private struggles we each have had with different projects. This will let us avoid overlapping each other’s stories and also let us extend the range of the heady challenges we present to you regarding identity challenges in the field. Jan-Oddvar Sørnes The four-person research team I joined some years ago—two Ph.D. students and two professors—collected 68 in-depth interviews from Norway and the USA on the topic of technology use. Out of those interviews identified 4793 incidents, which we then sorted into a document containing 59 categories. We called this gargantuan document a “technical analysis.” Our plan was to mine it for an array of papers. We did, in fact, spend several days in intensive meetings, mapping out articles, a book, and two dissertation projects. Jan-Oddvar Sørnes is an Associate Professor in the Bodø Graduate School of Business at the University of Nordland. Ingunn Dahler Hybertsen is an Associate Professor at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Larry Browning is a William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an Adjunct Professor of Management in the Bodø Graduate School of Business at the University of Nordland. Correspondence to: Jan-Oddvar Sørnes, Mørkvedtråkket, Bodø Graduate School of Business, University of Nordland, 8049 Bodø, Norway. E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 0090-9882 (print)/ISSN 1479-5752 (online) © 2014 National Communication Association http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2014.983141 Identity Challenges in Field Research 137 Had we published a transcription of those meetings, the world would have thought we were an ideal decision-making group. But I found the work that followed those meetings inordinately frustrating, demanding, demeaning, and fraught with competing forces that forced me to tread gingerly with my research partners and family. Because I am Norwegian, and because half of the interviews were conducted in Norway in Norwegian, I was tasked both with collecting almost all the Norwegian interviews and with translating them into English for analysis. I did not mind that grunt work, for it gave me a chance, as a graduate student, to prove myself to the team. My advisor, also from a Norwegian university, and the American professor on the team set in place the agreement for how we would work. Because they were responsible for quality control, they would be coauthors on any of the work that came out of the project, while the American graduate student and I could be first author on as many of the research pieces that we needed for our dissertation work and subsequent publications. While this seemed straightforward enough, in practice it was a tangled mess. The senior members of the team frequently disagreed on how and what should be done, leaving me stuck in the middle. I struggled throughout the project not only with issues of hierarchy and seniority but also with how to juggle my work and family obligations. I also felt like the weakest member of the team. Being inferior to the professors was one thing, but I also felt like a complete laggard compared to the other graduate student, a young woman who was exceptionally smart, endowed with a strong work ethic, and extremely competitive to boot. My solution to the problem was one that I had used many times before as an athlete who ran track—just work harder and smarter. And this I did. After a while I started to see things change as my relationship with my US partners strengthened and we became closer. There, at least, was progress. Another big problem for me, though, was working with my family to get the dissertation completed. We had received funding to come to the USA for a semester to work on the project, but our resulting budget was tight, requiring us to rent an apartment in Austin, Texas, that was far below our standard in Norway. My time was tight, too. My commitments at school were so demanding that my wife had to spend hours alone each day with our three-year old son, who did not adapt to day care so tending him became her full-time job. Further, because of allergies to processed foods, our son ate so little during our six months in the USA that we constantly feared for his health. Even after returning to Norway, I had to balance the ongoing conflicts between the two professors, compete with the American graduate students, and put in long and wearing workdays. I could tell that my wife was not at all pleased with the situation either. A decision had to made. I wanted to finish the dissertation in order to be physically and emotionally closer to my family. I remember vividly saying to my wife, “Do you want this to continue for another two years, or will you let me stay in the 138 J. Sørnes et al. basement for six months and get this finished?” She needed no time to ponder. “Get it done,” she said flatly. And I did. Ingunn Dahler Hybertsen My tale covers the challenges I faced, as a woman, conducting a lengthy research study of 22 managers, chiefly male, who were enrolled in a leadership program consisting of six-week long seminars spanning 15 months—most in a hotel conference room on the west coast of Norway. These men—mostly engineers and economists—came from different companies in Norwegian shipping, fishing, and furnishing industries. On opening day, they massed in the room’s front two rows while I, seeking to be as inconspicuous as possible, slipped into a seat in the very back. The program organizer began by presenting the design, structure, and content of the program I was about to observe. But eventually she called on me to present myself to the group and to tell them why I was going to be with them for the duration. Very simply, I said, I was there as a researcher interested in understanding the learning processes they would be exposed to in this leadership program. It all seemed pretty straightforward to me. But the questions that followed—both demanding and highly personal, clearly rooted in sudden fear—startled me. “What is your real job when you are not studying?” one man wanted to know. Another: “What are you really going to find out about us? Are you also going to count the number of beers we drink in the evenings?” etc. Taken aback, I told them that I was teaching at the University (which was not really true until the year after) and that I was a mother of two young girls. That seemed to satisfy them—but only temporarily. For over the succeeding days, several of the managers repeatedly badgered me about what I was really there to find out. My honest answer must have seemed too lame to be credible: “I really do not know at the outset what I’m going to find out.” Seeing their scowls, I tried to legitimize my know-nothing approach by explaining to them concepts about Grounded Theory methodology. My goal, I said, was to do exploratory research based on participant observation and interviewing. My plan called for qualitative interviews with some of them after the second week’s seminar and then again after the program was completed. One of the female managers that I later asked for an interview—one of the four women attending—agreed as long as I did not ask about “how it was to be a woman in this male-dominated international shipping industry.” I kept that promise, but this comment made me curious. Later I reflected that her comment might help explain the earlier behavior of the men. I solved the beer-counting question by jesting, with a cheerful grin, “I will join you when drinking beer so you can also count my beers.” This seemed to satisfy them, and over time I discovered that the informal social gatherings around the program were as important for creating a learning community as the formal activities. Yet the concerns about my research would not go away. Despite my joining the group for after-hours social sessions, one of the engineers commented out of the blue, “You might be our Åsne Seierstad.” Åsne Seierstad, a Norwegian writer and Identity Challenges in Field Research 139 journalist, had recently been criticized in the newspapers for her use of participatory observation methods in writing The Bookseller of Kabul. She was accused of invading the privacy of the family she lived with and studied in Afghanistan. The patriarch of that house eventually traveled to Norway just to sue her for invasion of his privacy. Both Åsne and her publisher were then prosecuted in Norwegian courts for their alleged crime. During an eight-year wrangle both of them lost at trial, but were later finally acquitted, though not without damage to her professional reputation. These struggles with the managers made me uncomfortable. I felt insecure about myself and what I was trying to accomplish. Over time, though, their threatening questions subsided and were replaced with other comments that reinforced for me the value of doing ethnographic research. These experiences also goaded me to learn to clarify my research aim. I also changed how I phrased what I was doing. Instead of saying, in full-blown academese, “I have an exploratory research design using participatory observation methods,” I found myself saying, humbly, “I am here to learn from you and your experience.” Larry Browning My tale from the field, a tale I still have trouble sharing, involves pissing off the CEO of the organization I was studying and having him challenge the validity of my interpretation when the analysis was completed. I have trouble revisiting the feelings I had then because I was so filled with anxiety, including the fear of disappointing some key people who had believed in me. During the contracting phase for the work, I found that the CEO, a man of considerable ego, expected the book to be focused on him and his successes. But the agreement itself stated very clearly that the purpose of the research was to explain how and why the American semiconductor industry had managed to regain its dominant position of world market share in chip manufacturing in the five years between 1987 and 1992. And there was the rub, for that period unfortunately preceded his arrival as CEO. My response to the disgruntled CEO involved widening the interpretation of my data by involving coauthors and by applying complexity theory as the frame for the analysis. Judy Shetler, a doctoral advisee, was enamored of complexity science, and our complexity interpretation of the data showed how this disparate collection of companies had coalesced into a functioning consortium. Jan Beyer, from my university’s Management department, joined us on two articles and gave our interpretation a cultural slant that showed how the major players from the member companies contributed to the organization through the cultural practices they brought to the consortium. My problem with the CEO was resolved in part by the company’s liaison person, who urged me to get the interviews started before the contracting was completed. Two months later, I had completed some 10–15 interviews of the 60 I had agreed to as part of the tentative plan. Then, deep into the project, came the formal agreement 140 J. Sørnes et al. for doing the work I had already started. The contract they offered gave the organization I studied final approval over the book manuscript. Finding me struggling with how to respond, my mentor, Bonnie Johnson, gave me a word of advice: “The worst choice a professor can make is becoming an apologist for an organization.” Also, one of the key points in William Foote Whyte’s book Learning from the Field is that giving the organization control over your manuscript is the biggest error you can make. Newly fortified, I resisted giving up that control and presented a counter-offer: I would agree to submit my chapter manuscripts for review, but if there were differences, we would jointly involve a third-party mediator to resolve them. And if we could not agree, the organization would have the right to withhold approval for the book to be published for five years, after which I could publish without their approval. Interestingly, they demanded no such restrictions on article writing; in fact, they chuckled that “no one reads academic articles” and said that they were only interested in the book’s content. Well, as expected, the CEO did not delight in my draft of the book and offered a list of objections to my conclusions. I responded by writing in the margin of each paragraph of the draft showing the evidence for the conclusion we had reached and the year and month in which the event occurred, with a brief letter explaining my sources. Finally, I offered to enter a mediation session with the company. Oddly, I never heard back from them. My coauthors and I published three articles on the organization between 1995 and 2000. Our book came out in 2000, five years after the end of the agreement. Summary Qualitative research methods are by nature exploratory, but they are invariably more messy, field-contingent, and power-dependent. These features appear in our three stories as a threat to the identity of the researcher: To Jan, the threat was the research team itself. To Ingunn, the threat was the very subjects she set out to study. To Larry, the threat was the disapproval of the organization’s CEO. All three of us overcame the obstacles by adapting to them without allowing the pressures to influence our conclusions. Rather than displaying the classic psychological feature of threat rigidity—that is, being less malleable, less imaginative, more pig-headed, and more inflexible in our thinking when we faced a barrier—we managed to achieve threat adaptation and improvisation. The sequence is important. We entered the field with innocent hope and then faced difficulties that forced us to adapt. Even so, our strategies were quite different. Jan overcame his problem with energy and brute discipline. Ingunn responded by showing vulnerability to her subjects and reframing her language to reduce the emotions of evaluation. Larry responded by employing delaying tactics and involving respected others in the research. That we now celebrate overcoming our obstacles does not mean that we cannot remember how scary those obstacles were and how often we were kept awake at night wondering how long the fear would last. Copyright of Journal of Applied Communication Research is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.