Access negotiations with the DCA

Access negotiations with the DCA took place in two interrelated ways both informally and formally. The formal request for access was predicated mainly on an informal request through a personal contact who employed wasta to introduce me to a key person in the DCA. This took place during the first year of the PhD. I first approached my contact inside the DCA who then accompanied me personally and used wasta to introduce me to senior staff members at the DCA giving me the opportunity to explain my research and the access I needed. These introductions greatly helped me establish rapport. They helped me to establish my identity as a researcher and gain trust. I was invited to submit an official request for access after two meetings with some of the DCA’s senior staff members—the first meeting took place in the first year of this

PhD project when I initiated contact and the other in the second year before I began the fieldwork. I prepared a cover letter in Arabic clearly stating the objectives of my research project and the type of access I required and attached copies of participant information sheets, informed consent forms, and a tentative list of themes that I wanted to probe during interviews. I then submitted these along with the cover letter to the DCA’s director office.

Two weeks after the submission of the request, an official letter of approval was issued with a statement that my fieldwork should not cause significant disruptions to employees’ official duties; this request seems to be triggered by the fear that I might distract employees from the high volume of work at the DCA’s branches. I was then

assigned an official guardian who during the first couple of days seemed largely to channel my access away from the busiest departments at the DCA presumably on the grounds of this condition. Nonetheless, the wasta relations I had already developed during the informal aspect of the negotiations proved helpful. I resorted to my first contact who then gradually assumed the guardian role and began introducing me to his colleagues. These introductions greatly helped in establishing trust and close relations with those staff members.

After a week at the DCA, I became acquainted with a significant number of staff members. I began moving around the department freely and occasionally running into junior as well as senior staff members in corridors and chatting with them occasionally regarding this research. Also, I began meeting other staff members at supervisors’ offices and service halls as well as at communal areas and was introduced to them by the supervisors whom I was accompanying. At this stage, I felt comfortable interacting with other employees who seemed to accept my presence; the role of my initial personal

contact became secondary. On one occasion, I was in the company of one supervisor, and there was one senior staff member who came into the supervisor’s office, I indicated to the supervisor whether I should introduce myself; he replied there is no need as ‘nothing stays a secret around here’. At this stage, I felt that I had become accepted in

the setting and that my identity as a researcher was known to most employees. This relatively smooth entry into the field was aided, to some extent, by a combination of formal access granted in addition to the informal wasta relations. The wasta relations manifest in the personal introductions to other staff by insiders. These introductions positioned me favourably in the field helping me establish trust and enhancing the quality of the fieldwork.

This experience illustrates one vital dimension of access negotiations in this context, namely, the intricate interplay between the informal (the pre-bureaucratic) and the formal (the bureaucratic). Research methodology literature highlights different strategies to gaining access to formal organisations. These include, for example, identifying key contacts in the organisation and writing formal emails or attending industry or government conferences to establish formal contact with key individuals (Bryman, 2012; Feldman, Bell, & Berger, 2004). Others also suggest using PhD supervisors help and connections to gain access and capitalising on formal institutional support from the university (Myers, 2013). Moreover, the bureaucratic process is usually given prominence in discussions of research access (Feldman et al., 2004; Hayes, 2005; Monahan & Fisher, 2015). Monahan and Fisher (2015), for instance, highlighted that accessing formal organisations typically requires following prescribed bureaucratic patterns of communications such as going through a Public Relations departments or specialised review committees established to study research access requests (Grant, 2017; Hayes, 2005; Hayes & Devaney, 2004). This might be attributed

to the fact that in Western contexts, bureaucratisation is much stronger and the process of gaining access to do research is well-known and quite formalised (see Munro, 2008). Nonetheless, such strategies are largely shaped by experiences of researchers in the west and stem from Western cultural contexts (Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013). Moreover, such strategies tend to stress formal processes more than informal relations.

In the case of the DCA in this context, the process of qualitative research was alien and there were no formal and clear communication channels for such requests as may be found in Western organisations. Because this is typically the case in non- Western contexts, Morse (2019), argued, drawing on her fieldwork experience in Sub- Saharan Africa, that gaining access then becomes subject to the discretion of the senior official and requires greater informal relations. For this reason, informal relations in the guise of engaging in wasta and resorting to pre-bureaucratic practices, becomes paramount to establish trust, rapport, and facilitate the formal, or in other words, the bureaucratic aspect of the process. Establishing trust through informal relations, therefore, must precede any formal requests in the journey of gaining access to formal organisations in this context as evident in the case of gaining access to the DCA.

Wasta has not been discussed before in the literature on methodology as a culturally shaped form of informal relations and an expression of the pre-bureaucratic during access negotiations. While some methodology books and academic articles on access highlight the importance of informal relations (Grant, 2017; Feldman et al., 2004), how such informal relations are enacted in different cultural contexts with different customs, values, and practices is rarely discussed. There are, nonetheless, a few exceptions where researchers have shared their experiences of conducting fieldwork in non-Western cultural contexts. Bondy (2013) for example highlights the

significance of such cultural relations during fieldwork in the context of Japan. Owens (2003) discusses access negotiations and cultural relations in Zanzibar. Tittensor (2016) describes his experience gaining access in the Turkish cultural context. Ali (2015) describes her experience navigating cultural relations to gain access to female participants in a small mountain community in Pakistan. Petkov and Kaoullas (2016) focus on access negotiations and cultural relations in Bulgaria and Cyprus. Cunliff and Karunanayake (2013) discuss fieldwork and cultural relations among tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka.

All these studies are important as they reveal that what is vaguely described as the ‘informal’ in methodology literature refers to complex cultural relations and

practices unique to different contexts. Considering that there are not any studies within this literature that discuss the cultural practice of wasta during the fieldwork, this chapter is positioned to address this gap in the literature. Next, I provide a more detailed discussion of the role of wasta in gaining access to Tracer offices, which were more secretive and protective than the DCA. This discussion can be seen to contribute to the literature on methodology by illustrating how the ‘informal’ in the course of the

fieldwork is enacted through the cultural practice of wasta in this context.