Fieldworker identification as a continuous process

What I have proposed elsewhere (Gosovic 2018) is to think of fieldworker identities in a processual fashion, to think of processes of ‘identification’ rather than a fixed ‘identity’. Following anthropologist Richard Jenkins (2008), I have drawn on the notion of ‘social identities’ and different ‘orders of

identification’ to demonstrate how identities are created at the intersection between researcher selves and ascriptions from the field. I have used these insights to reflect upon how the multiple fieldworker identities among which we oscillate, such as insider/outsider, guide and limit our ethnographic studies.

Jenkins’ framework revolves around three ‘orders’ of identification. Whereas other scholars distinguish between individual identities and social identities (Brown 2015), for Jenkins, all orders of identification are social. ‘The Institutional Order’ refers to the processes by which a group identifies as a group within itself and the process by which a group is categorized as a group by others. This aspect of identity creation has been central in my own research, as Ferring is a legal entity where the formal

categorization could provide to insiders or prohibit access to certain information and experiences to anyone considered an outsider.

For example, at the very beginning of the fieldwork, one of my primary ethnographic concerns was my organizational affiliation with the Global Ethics Office. Being a formal employee of the company and placed in the Ethics Office, I feared that people would see me as an ethics ‘auditor’, a function which might have inhibited the staff’s and managers’ willingness to participate in my research or to reveal certain dilemmas for fear that I might report them. Therefore, I initially made an effort to emphasize my affiliation with the university. However, I quickly found that people seemed reluctant to share information with me when I was seen as an outsider. Instead, I found it beneficial to clearly emphasize my employment with the company. Whenever I started asking questions, people seemed highly occupied with the terms of my contract. ‘So, you are an employee here?’ or ‘Who do you report to in the company?’ were common questions at the beginning of a conversation, asked in a wary tone. When I described the terms of my employment, however, the tone always lightened, and people lowered their guards. In addition, I realized that in a business where patents and intellectual property have a significant presence, this reluctance to answer questions from outsiders is not surprising – particularly

87 because a confidentiality clause is a standard requirement in every employee’s job contract, and an employee who breaches this agreement may experience major legal repercussions.

To understand why it was more fruitful to assert an identity as an insider-employee than as an outsider-researcher, it is helpful to turn to Jenkins’ concept of the ‘institutional order’. As Jenkins (2008) writes, the institutional order refers to the process by which identities are ascribed to organizational members based on the available classifications within the organization. Within the particular organizational context of Ferring and the reigning logics of non-disclosure, the two most immediate categories available were ‘employee’ and ‘non-employee’, essentially insider and outsider. I quickly realized that these categories determined the legal scope of the interaction between my research participants and me, as well as the kind of empirical material that I could obtain. It was thus more practical for me to assert an identity as a fellow employee. However, as I will turn to next, there were still occasions when I could benefit from combining my insider status with my role as researcher.

For example, early in the fieldwork, I wanted to participate in one of the teams in charge of the clinical trials where new products were being tested on humans. I had assumed that gaining access to this particular forum would be difficult, but instead, I encountered open doors and helpful people, and I was immediately granted access to participate in two clinical trial project groups. When reflecting upon what I initially interpreted as sheer luck and after a re-reading of my field notes, I realized that the reason I was given access to these clinical trials was my ascribed identity as a doctoral researcher.

Ferring, like all pharmaceutical companies, is a research-driven, highly specialized organization, with a large number of PhD degree holders far exceeding the average in Danish companies. Thus, when I approached clinical trials officers and explained my position, they clearly understood my need for data access, despite our differences in scientific specializations. Despite having only just entered the

company, my self-ascription as a PhD researcher was successfully acknowledged, and my requests for data access were recognized as valid. Perhaps because of the familiarity with the concept of PhD research within the company, I was in some way categorized as an insider, certainly a junior one, but still with a legitimate claim as to the kind of requests I was making for research access.

Jenkins next order, which he calls the ‘interaction order’, is influenced by Goffman’s (1990) work on impression management and front-stage/back-stage identities. The interaction order refers to the ways in which our active attempts to take on an identity depend on the acceptance of this identity by others.

This aspect of identity creation was particularly important in my efforts to gain access within Ferring, and the findings of this study have been shaped by the way I was perceived by others.

88 According to Jenkins (2008), individuals negotiate their identity within a dialectic of identification that consists of internal and external moments. In the internal moment, individuals present an image of themselves that they desire to be accepted by others. In the external moment, others can either accept or reject it (Jenkins 2008:93). In my own case, the image I presented was largely accepted by Ferring’s employees, which disrupted the outsider-to-insider continuum on which I would – according to spatial and temporal notions of the fieldwork experience – be assumed to gradually move. Despite the novelty of the context in which an academic researcher wants to investigate ethics, Ferring’s PhD-dense environment facilitated my claim to an insider identity, such that I was accepted by others and treated like a colleague.

Similarly, just as successful identity claims might grant us access to information, a fieldworker identity is never stabile. In certain situations, for example, informants may decide to unburden themselves personally, or keep knowledge from us because our identity claims as researchers are inflated (we have become ‘friends’), or rejected (we are seen as spies). I can illustrate this dilemma with the following example from my fieldwork in Denmark.

A few months within the fieldwork, I am working at my desk in the Global Ethics Office.

By now, I have become a natural part of a weekly meeting routine, and when the manager hosting the meeting asks if there is news from the Global Ethics Office, she looks not just at my colleagues, but also at me, as if any of us could provide updates on behalf of the department in which, she seems to think, we all work as equals.

I feel quite at home, and instead of nervously preparing myself for the meeting, as I did in the beginning, I brought a cup of coffee from the canteen to make the weekly event cozier.

After a number of updates on the upcoming summer party and news from the

management team, one of the legal advisors shared details of a complicated legal case that they were currently working on. ‘Of course, this is confidential information’, another colleague adds, and we all nod in assent. At the same moment, one of the other legal advisors sitting beside me turns toward me and says with a smile ‘So that means…’ and zips an imaginary zipper over her lips, emphasizing that I especially have to pay attention to this message about confidentiality. Everybody looks at me for a second, perhaps

89 wondering if they have said too much in front of me. The meeting then continues with news about a new IT training module.⁴⁰

The zipped lips gesture may have been meant as a joke. But it was a ‘joke’ aimed at me, not the others.

Regardless of the intention, however, the experience taught me that as a fieldworker, although one feels that one has gained an insider identity, this identity is not fixed. It can be interrupted by outsider

‘moments’ at any point in time. In an instant, I went from being just another staff member attending a weekly meeting to a potential whistle-blower being reminded to keep things confidential. As Jenkins writes, ‘It is not enough simply to assert an identity; that assertion must also be validated, or not, by those with whom we have dealings’ (Jenkins 2008:42). My assumption of an identity as an insider was certainly not validated at that moment in time. Thus, fieldworker identities are not stable acquisitions, and we cannot assume our identities in the field to be either insider or outsider or to correspond to an ethnographer’s ideal of a gradual transition from being an outsider to becoming an accepted insider who has built rapport with the group they are studying (cf. Ergun and Erdemir 2010). Rather, I find it useful to conceptualize the fieldworker’s identities as constantly evolving and changing, including instances where the one identity interrupts the other at unexpected moments (the sudden intimacy of an informant telling a personal secret, or the sudden zip-up gesture indicating that perhaps one cannot be trusted).

Jenkins adds one last order of identification to the formal ascriptions as insider or outsider in the

‘institutional order’ and the changing ascriptions in the ‘interaction order’. This third order of identification, the ‘individual order’, relates to the felt and personally experienced identities of the fieldworker. The individual order refers to the notion of selfhood and how this is co-constructed in a synthesis between how we as individuals experience and define ourselves and how the external world defines us. Jenkins views selfhood as a person’s embodied experience of identity, as our sense of self is always entwined into our past experiences and feelings.

I am a social anthropologist, and my preference for the social sciences streams through my educational history. There are only traces of quantitative and natural sciences from lower-level biology classes in high school and 10 ECTS points in statistics from my bachelor’s degree 11 years ago. As mentioned earlier, I have been affiliated with the Danish branch of Ferring, where many of the company’s research and development activities are undertaken. However, despite living only a short distance from Ferring’s Danish office and sharing Danish language and traditions with my work colleagues, I nevertheless felt

40 Field note excerpt, Denmark, Autumn 2017.

90 that I was entering a totally different world when I entered the company building. The following excerpt is from my field notes early in the fieldwork, where I sit with a pharmacologist named Liza.

She has started an elaborate explanation, and I am not sure where it will lead, about a condition where the patient gets large polyps inside the oesophagus. Her description is very vivid, and I am trying to follow her rather technical description of the condition.

‘And that can be dangerous, because it can create pressure on the aorta’, she says, looking at me with a concerned expression. I nod to acknowledge the severity of the condition she is describing and to confirm that I understand that the oesophagus can be affected. Or what I thought I understood. Without giving it much thought, I ask just to confirm ‘So aorta is the word for the oesophagus?’ She stops her explanation and looks at me in disbelief. ‘No…’, she says, staring at me. ‘No, the aorta is the main artery in your body…’. From that comment as well as from her expression, I understand that the name of the main artery is rather basic knowledge that I feel I should have possessed. She looks like she agrees.⁴¹

As exemplified in this excerpt, the fieldworker identity can be fluid, and suddenly interrupted. From being a colleague I became an obvious outsider who did not have the most basic knowledge about the human body that most people in the world of pharmaceutical R&D would possess. Being an outsider is not just a matter of coming from outside; it also a matter of knowing the ‘local knowledge’, regardless of whether ‘the field’ happens to be in a far-off tropical village, or a pharmaceutical R&D unit just down the street. Thus, the spatial dichotomy of ‘home’ versus ‘away’ seems inadequate when applied to organizational research, as the fieldworker’s experienced identity also depends not just on national culture or language similarities with the people studied, but also on esoteric technical knowledge.

Let us return for a moment to Jenkins’ (2008) notion of the ‘individual order’. It is important to note that the process of identification takes place in the relation between the fieldworker and those whom the fieldworker encounters in their research. Imagine, for example, that I had studied pharmacology or medical science before switching to anthropology. In that case, my notion of selfhood would likely have been that of an insider from the outset. My point her is that our identification depends on both the researcher and the field as a whole and not simply on the spatial (home/away) or organizational (university/firm) affiliations of each. This also means that on other occasions than the situation

41 Field note excerpt, Denmark, Autumn 2017.

91 described above, in interactions with employees whose backgrounds were similar to mine, my self-ascribed identity was that of an insider. Thus, I would argue that regardless of where the fieldwork takes place, the identity of a fieldworker is defined in the relation between those whom the fieldworker encounters and the fieldworker herself, and that these relations are structured or disrupted by a series of momentary interactions, any of which can alter this relation towards more insider or more outsider status.

In the following, I will delve into another aspect of my role as PhD researcher under the Danish

‘industrial PhD’ scheme, where I am both a researcher attached to an educational institution and a formal employee of the firm which I am studying. While this scheme affords opportunities for support and financing of PhD research, the dual role brings with it a unique set of ethical dilemmas.

3.7. Employee-ethnography, research ethics and entanglements with the field⁴²