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3. Methodology and Research Design

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

3.7.2. Paying back to the field and protecting interlocutors

Within ethnographic circles, a discussion has taken place regarding how we as ethnographers pay back to the people we study after having been allowed to study them (cf. Bernard 2011:157). This question is

94 absent in the AAA guidelines on research ethics but is touched upon in the ASA guidelines45. Some scholars have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of monetary payments (Head 2009), and addressed how to repay by other means, such as e.g. assisting in the household to which they belong during the fieldwork (see e.g. Srivastava 1992:18). Some have advocated ‘relational ethics’, which requires the researcher to recognize the personal bonds we have to others and the ethical

responsibilities towards our interlocutors as relationships change over time (Ellis 2007). Other scholars have suggested employing ‘the intentional ethics of reciprocation’ (Murphy and Dingwall 2001:344;

Swartz 2011:49), which is an ethical standpoint that one’s research itself should be beneficial to participants.

Besides the academic purpose of this present study, one aim has been to provide knowledge for Ferring Pharmaceuticals to facilitate improvements of their ethics program. The goal is not primarily to propose concrete improvements but to provide a knowledge base and a few practical implications of the study for Ferring to determine points of action. Thus, the present research seeks to pay back to the field in this way.

Moreover, in addition to this active intention are the unintended and perhaps unacknowledged ways in which ethnographers in general, and I in this study, pay back to the field. Ethnographers rarely devote much attention to such concerns, perhaps due to the rarity of accounting for ones ‘awkward

encounters’ and embarrassing emotions and situations where we do not always behave exactly as our ideals prescribe during fieldwork (Koning and Ooi 2013). However, as the ASA ethical guidelines state,

‘Anthropologists who work in non-academic settings should be particularly aware of likely constraints on research and publication and of the potentiality for conflict between the aims of the employer, funder or sponsor and the interests of the communities/cultures/ societies studied.’ 46. In this sense, I have strived to maintain such an awareness throughout.

Within this study, besides my aforementioned monthly salary and benefits related to being a Ferring employee, Ferring provided me with office space and access to its ethics officers during their daily work. Most days, we have had lunch together and besides being my research subjects, they have also become my colleagues. I know the names of their children, I have listened to their home-remodelling projects, and confess that I have grown to appreciate their company. Other informants from other

45 I. Relations with and responsibilities towards research participants, 6.

https://www.theasa.org/downloads/ASA%20ethics%20guidelines%202011.pdf

46 II. Relations with and responsibilities towards sponsors, funders and employers, 1.b, https://www.theasa.org/downloads/ASA%20ethics%20guidelines%202011.pdf

95 departments have likewise taken me in, some of whom have spent numerous hours explaining their work to me. As mentioned earlier, the access I was granted in the company to people, documents, events and meetings has been extraordinary, keeping in mind my expectations for reluctance to participate in a study such as mine within this industry. I have found myself amazed by the openness and willingness of informants to spend time on me, which reveals my preconceptions about this industry as being secretive. On several occasions, however, I have also realized that this amazement of people’s kindness has had an influence on how I write.

Hence, on numerous occasions, I have found myself reflecting on how I represent my informants, how my descriptions make them look and if they – or others - would be offended when reading these descriptions. In most cases, my concerns were connected to how I make them look internally in the organization if colleagues from other departments should happen to read my writings. For example, one of my informants has a rather direct way of speaking. By now, I have gotten to know him and grown to appreciate him. He has spent many hours telling me about the company and his work.

Moreover, he has been a central gatekeeper in allowing me access to various people and activities in the company. Recently, when writing up a paper, I found myself selecting this informant’s more moderate statements to describe his points when choosing quotes to include in the paper. The same meaning was expressed in various statements throughout a number of interviews and conversations, some of which could seem a bit harsh if read out of context by colleagues across the organization.

Hence, I chose the more moderate statements in order to protect his department from possible repercussions.

As the AAA principles prescribe, entailed in the obligation to do no harm is the obligation for

ethnographers to not only avoid causing immediate harm but to also consider ‘carefully the potential consequences and inadvertent impacts of their work’.47 And, as Gusterson (1997) writes, we always have an obligation to guard the identity of our informants and reflect on how we portray them, and this obligation becomes even more acute when people’s careers are at stake.

In this case, it was not one particular employee whose career had to be protected. I made sure to anonymize him thoroughly. However, his department risked looking bad in the eyes of other

departments if they had read his more direct comments. Moreover, he has shared much more with me than I believe he would have had I not been a colleague in the company. In the course of my fieldwork, we built what I feel to be a trusting relationship. I have wished not to betray this trust by representing his department in an unflattering way, which might have been the case had I selected only his more

47 http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/, point 1.

96 harsh statements (cf. Beech et al. 2009), when more moderate statements expressing the same points were actually available.

Nevertheless, I still ask myself whether I should have chosen differently, as I am fairly sure that my selection of his more moderate statements was partly a result of the relationship I had built with him and the gratitude I felt for his help in granting me his time and insights.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that certain feelings of debt created by the relationships that we ethnographers establish in the field might inhibit us from writing an analysis with sharper edges.

Sometimes, harsh statements can make the analysis stand out more clearly, and it is certainly tempting to select such statements as ‘power quotes’ (cf. Pratt 2009:501) in order to underscore a specific point.

As researchers, however, I believe that we should balance the need to present clear findings to our research communities with adhering to the nuances experienced in the field, and I find that ultimately, my entanglements in the field have helped me maintain that balance as a priority.

Moreover, such reflexivity is also urged by the AAA principles. Under point 4, ‘Weigh competing ethical obligations due collaborators and affected parties’, the principle states that ‘Anthropologists have an obligation to distinguish the different kinds of interdependencies and collaborations their work involves, and to consider the real and potential ethical dimensions of these diverse and sometimes contradictory relationships, which may be different in character and may change over time (…).’

Furthermore, the statement highlights that ‘Anthropologists must often make difficult decisions among competing ethical obligations while recognizing their obligation to do no harm (…). ’48 Similarly, while being aware that my original motivation for choosing certain statements over others may have been to protect informants with whom I had become close, I have utilized these statements because they contain the same meaning as the harsher statements, such that they have no impact on the general argument; and because any scientific goal of presenting dramatic arguments to my research community must yield to the ethical prescription to do no harm.

Even without ties between researcher and informants as close as those which I had in my field research, I find it appropriate to reflect on how we represent our interlocutors to those trying to understand their life-worlds. The task is to properly represent their motives and actions in full, via an entire or even several interviews, rather than succumbing to what they happen to say in a frustrated or dramatic moment that makes them look not just unflattering, but which is also not representative of their views.

48 http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/, point 4.

97 As point 7 in the AAA principles states, ‘There is an ethical dimension to all professional relationships.

Whether working in academic or applied settings, anthropologists have a responsibility to maintain respectful relationships with others’.I have strived to show my interlocutors such respect by refraining from cherry-picking their more colourful statements, if I feel they do not give us the proper picture.

These kinds of choices should not be interpreted as any kind of manipulation or self-censorship. Rather, when I had the opportunity to illustrate a given process or tendency in the material, I have chosen illustrations that do not unreasonably subject certain departments to exposure, nor do frivolous harm to the people who inhabit these departments. However, it is certainly essential to reflect upon when one is adhering to such ethical standards and when one is perhaps surrendering to feelings of debt towards the people one studies without having sufficient professional justification.