Before I entered the field, it was important to acknowledge that, as a researcher, the materials I was bringing forth were being framed in certain ways through different layers of mediations, and I needed to be reflexive about this process. Some researchers may hold on to a fragile fiction that, as an observer, they are not intervening. However, despite possible attempts to remain ‘non-intervening’ (Adler & Adler, 1994), a researcher will always influence the setting she is observing. She is a positioned artefact in the very situation she intends to study (Angrosino & Mays de Perez, 2000). That is, researchers enter the field imbued with their own subjective and personal attributes and assumptions. Schultze (2000), for example, found that her body language and her analytical standpoint, although unconsciously displayed on her part, were picked up on by her participants, and influenced the way they interacted with her as a researcher. At TurboUK, I was positioned as a political body coming from an academic institution to ‘conduct research’, perhaps viewed to be making judgements and evaluations of the employees’ professional practice. Thus, what my participants chose to
reveal to me in interviews was mediated by this awareness; they were performing to a specific political audience.
I was a different body and voice moving in the office space and adding to the work dynamics. My performance as an ‘outsider’ researcher had to be negotiated with the performance of the workplace. For example, one Monday I joined a weekly sales meeting and, as we all filed into the seats around the boardroom table, not one seat was left empty. Just after the meeting started, the managing director came in and looked around for a seat. I was suddenly very aware of my interloping. An awkward thirty seconds passed as I debated what to do (I stayed seated)!
Angrosino and Mays de Perez (2000) note that it is important to recognise that an ethnographer will give cues to their audience. Adhering to the organisation’s dress code and maintaining a conscious effort to learn the routines, the cultural references and organisation’s acronyms can be the first steps taken by the ethnographer to increase trust and acceptance into the field. However, there were some cues that were beyond my control to modify, and these added further layers of mediation to my observations.
As a white, English woman in her thirties, entering a profession traditionally dominated by men, I will have left the field having evoked different stories than if I were an older, Scottish man. A telling instance occurred when I was on a windfarm site one day with a participant (Walter). Just before attending a site meeting, I asked where I could find the ladies’ toilet. I was shown a temporary unit of toilets next to the office cabin. The man who led me there quipped that he didn’t know what condition it was in, as there were hardly ever any women on site to use it. As I closed the door behind me, I heard an ominous grating sound. I realised the door, not used to being shut through lack of use, had jammed against the steel floor. No amount of pushing or shoving would move it. I had left my phone in the office so I could not call Walter. There was nothing for it except to start shouting, first feebly and then rather loudly. Much to my embarrassment, Walter, accompanied by two of the civil contractors, thought I was taking a long time so came to see if I was okay. With more pulling and heaving, the door became free and I slunk back to the meeting, feeling very much a nuisance. I
think the others felt as awkward as I did: rescuing women from the ladies’ toilets was not normal practice for them. The effect of my gender and the materials it mobilised (ladies’ toilets, stuck doors) raises interesting questions about engineering practice and gender and, as inviting as these are to address, my research questions do not include this phenomenon in their scope.
Finally, it was important to consider the limits of the network to be studied, as “one could trace forever outward” (Strathern, 1996, p. 529). This requires the researcher to reflect on which networks to follow and to foreground, and which to deliberately de-emphasise or even omit from the research. Thus, I had to be aware of whose voices I chose to attune to (Heyl, 2001) and which events I decided to attend because these decisions imbue the researcher with a certain amount of power to represent. For example, it was my interpretation of an event, or what I chose as a moment to represent as an event, that bestowed its importance. If there were two meetings happening at once, I had to choose which one to observe. These choices immediately foregrounded some workers, objects and process, while back-grounding others in a process of representation that Law (2004) would term ‘othered’.
This section shows how important it was to reflect on my positioning as a researcher who influenced the research setting. However, to strengthen my research, I needed to adopt strategies that would demonstrate how I conducted myself as a ‘good’ ethnographer, beyond simply acknowledging the ways in which my presence was shaping the materials gathered. These strategies are explored in the following section, where I detail how I defended my methodological strategy’s worth and rigour.