Qualitative research is often an “interactive process shaped by one’s personal history, biography, gender, social class, race and ethnicity and those of the people in the setting” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 5). This implicates the conduct of empirical research in a number of ways as demographic markers of the researcher, events, histories and moments
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of biographical disruption are co-constitutive of the research process, not only throughout fieldwork, but also throughout the writing process. Drawing on the notion of cultural insider/outsider required critical reflections about my own multiple positionalities, such as European, white, male, affiliated with a New Zealand-based university, and the inscriptions these markers might have evoked.
As suggested earlier, those basic biographical facts failed to offer any immediate points of connection with the research topic or the people I was hoping to make contact with prior to conducting fieldwork. Therefore, interacting in the field and conducting interviews, I needed to ensure that my self-representation rendered me knowable to research participants beyond immediately accessible biological and social markers, or information that could be found elsewhere. For instance, one interview participant from Israel candidly relayed he googled my name and found my LinkedIn profile prior to agreeing to be interviewed. Reversing conventional conceptions of researcher versus researched, I became the temporary subject of someone else’s research. On these grounds, I chose to highlight different subject positions and foreground certain biographical aspects that added different layers and texture to the knowable subject of what might have been perceived as a ‘Western’ research student. Effectively, I attempted to invoke a range of shared positionalities (Mullings, 1999) depending on study participants and distinctive research moments as described below.
For example, representing myself as a research student, was generally met with a great degree of collegiality from participants who were either students themselves, or working in academia and knew about the occasional difficulties to enrol study participants. Some students voiced excitement about being able to help, while others commented on how difficult it must be to find Chileans wanting to be part of this study, an assessment that was far from being congruent with my experience throughout this study. At other times, however, negotiating the different invisible positionalities such as biographical ruptures, I chose to foreground particular biographical facets to create a degree of commonality without attempting to suggest sameness. For instance, highlighting a childhood spent under the dictatorial East German regime and the ensuing transition to a life within a liberal democracy sought to signal a sense of credibility, rather than ingratiation for interviewing Chileans that have experienced Chile’s authoritarian period.
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The strategy of constructing a shared space was grounded in the belief that invoking a sense of shared positional space may assist, not only in gaining the trust of a population with whom I otherwise shared only a few commonalities with, but also in representing the views of research participants more faithfully (Mullings, 1999, p. 340). In reflecting on the application of constructing shared positionalities, study participants reacted with a mix ranging from insouciance to acknowledging similar experiences such as a comment from a Canada-based senior manager who commented on experiencing dispossession under the Allende government and repression under the Pinochet regime by saying,
“Well,you know how it is” (Lorenzo, manager, 2013). Other study participants appeared indifferent towards my status as a student with a dual biography of authoritarianism and political liberalism, and were more interested in my personal motivation to study a topic that is related to Chile. For example, with the question “Tell me, why are you interested
in Chile?” I was more often than anticipated quizzed about how someone with no immediate connection to the country would be interested in Chile. Occasionally, this question was phrased somewhat conditionally, almost like a test in the sense that participants waited to have the question answered satisfactorily before engaging in a deeper conversation.
The notion of constructing shared positionalities in the context of self-representation, however, is also a treacherous and complex one that may raise a number of misconceptions and ethical dilemmas (Mullings, 1999, p. 347). For instance, throughout the first stage of fieldwork, I was particularly aiming to conduct interviews with a group of CEOs and senior executives and typically highlighted previous meetings with the network director Molly Pollack so as to invoke a sense of legitimacy and trustworthiness. While this strategy proved to have worked with associates and friends of Molly Pollack that were part of the initial core group, the strategy reached its limits when contacting research participants with different occupational and social backgrounds. For example, during one interview with a UK-based interviewee who was working in the public health system, I was asked whether I could use my affiliation with the directorate of ChileGlobal to secure employment for the interviewee. Taken by surprise, this unusual query prompted a reassessment of my self-representation in the written interview requests to determine what may have given the impression I was in the position to assist in employment and career-related prospects of interviewees.
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Retrospectively, invoking a more neutral and impartial self-representation, which prioritises an interest in the organisation rather than a strategy that consist, of name dropping and mentioning meetings with staff at the directorate in Santiago de Chile, might have been a more sensible approach in this instance. Similarly, in hindsight knowledge that ChileGlobal’s transformation generated a mix of incandescent grievances among the first generation of network members and reflecting on interview requests that were left unanswered, it seems reasonable to assume that rather than aiming to construct a shared positionality, maintaining an identity as an impartial foreign outsider may have occasionally helped to enrol other study participants. Either way, the lesson for subsequently occurring interviews was to exercise more reticence about my meetings with the directors of ChileGlobal and Fundación Imagen de Chile to avoid any misunderstandings, and fallibilities on my part.
Research in a cross-cultural setting needs to acknowledge the existence of power relations that shape the conduct of research relationships. However, assuming innate and stable power differentials along neat and categorical inscriptions such as ‘powerful’, ‘western’, ‘researcher’ versus‘powerless’, ‘southern’, ‘researched’ are problematic, because these dualisms fail to recognise the complex and dynamic processes during which identities and power relations are renegotiated in the field (ThaparǦBjörkert & Henry, 2004). Likewise, the relationship between researcher and study participants was often not clearly cut along the classical binaries such as an inherently powerful, white, male research student versus powerless Chilean study participants. Often, it was quite to the contrary.
Engaging with study participants who were materially and relationally resourceful because they were the offspring of well-known politician families and close friends with billionaire then president Piñera positioned me not only as a cultural outsider, but also as someone with a vastly different social status. Indeed, in one interview prior to the presidential election that would determine the next Chilean president following president Piñera, a senior executive based in California made a remark that encapsulated both, the relational proximity of some network members with the two frontrunners for Chile’s presidency in 2013, and by implication the social distance that divided a good part of other study participants and myself by saying:
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Michelle Bachelet studied medicine with my sister, she’s a friend of my sister and Evelyn Matthei, who is the other candidate, is a school mate of mine. We both attended the Deutsche Schule in Santiago so I know her very well. So whoever wins the election is kind of like family to me. It’s a small world.
Rafael, CEO, 2013
There was no doubt that some of the study participants occupied social positions, moved and socialised inside distinct elite type social, political and corporate networks that were clearly not accessible to me even if I had been a cultural insider. Indeed, a critical awareness about the limits of positionality and reflexivity is important to recognise that researchers can never completely reflect on their own position or the position of their interview partners (Rice, 2010, p. 73; Smith, 2006, p. 651).
Conducting fieldwork in the context of development is increasingly defined by its multi- positional and multi-sited nature where research “is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations” (Marcus, 1998, p. 90). This enmeshment that influences fieldwork holds true for researching the ChileGlobal collective where the absence of any natural association with Chile surely positioned me as a cultural outsider. Yet, invoking shared positionalities such as being a student, living overseas, and having experienced authoritarianism all of which the different categories of research participants could identify with, undermined neat insider/outsider categorisations and enabled the process of engaging diverse research participants in mostly genuine conversations. Not only was I navigating and negotiating, but I was also learning from the flaws of constructing nuanced positional spaces that are important to create research relationships based on mutual trust.