COMM 7360—11/18/14
Jason & Erik—
The first half had more new, useful things. The second half dovetails with other stuff we have read or
studied. We want to draw some connections to other things we’ve read.
High school yearbooks—how they were catalogued compared to my experience. Identity formation and
how learners constitute the self in schools—what could be gained or added in.
In ethnography, your informants should make the decision as to what is relevant—you need to pose the
questions to them.
If a policy or document had no meaning to the members in that context, does that mean it is not
relevant.
Member checking isn’t just verifying what should I include or not include—it’s checking if your reading
of the document has validity.
Researcher is always selecting, but your selection can be disciplined. You have to think about intention
of the text. Text as industrialized, monetized, and personalized. Journal notes are for myself or for
posterity or for what? you have to know something about that in order to know how to interpret the
journal.
Someone wanted to be discovered after death. The intention of the text is quite different.
Intention of the text is the discursive form that the text inhabits.
Jason—did a UNT master’s project—they looked at apologia (organizational apology), looking at the
philly eagles when they picked up michael vic. We were interested not how the org engaged in apologia
but in how fans engaged in that discourse. The easiest way to do that was to go to the comment
sections of new stories. This was real for those people who were commenting. It worked in that sense
because regardless of who these persons were, where they lived, they were evidencing that they were
fans of that organization.
Mike—thinks online communication is disingenuous, like road rage.
Jim: think of world of Warcraft—if you went down those seven elements of culture, would you find
them in this community. All of that is captured in the performance of the avatars and discourse that
goes around. The process is still an ethnography, though it’s a restrictive environment, still similar to
what is happening in real life. Real consequences—predators trying to lure someone out of home.
Old tech—scribble notes. Now you just dictate it to your phone. Write on your hand. Recording device.
A little book, writes thing in normal conversation. Jim’s strategy: he leaves his notebook out, puts it on
the desk, come back and pick it up, everybody reads the notes, that demystifies the ethnographic
process, you say “I’m trying to remember this when I get home” , there is no deception in the process.
the best you can do is build a level of trustworthiness among your informants, you want them to be
comfortable that you will keep their confidences and try not to embarrass them. Example of racism in
mule club: so he asked other members what went on, he said he found that unsettling, what did you
think? The person that he was talking to said that in the end you have to decide for yourself. Then you
are finally faced with the ethical issue. As an ethnographer in the campfire under those circumstances, I
was one of the ones who allowed the discourse to occur. I thought the analysis was spot on.
You write what happened, your own response to it, the response of other people—there was
recognition in the group that it was not good behavior but nobody got up and made a big deal out of it.
They don’t notice you as an ethnographer, but they do notice you as a participant.
You are not noticed as its them and then you are also doing them, it’s just part of them. Aquarium
example.
In some places, people have laptops so you can just do that.
Chapter 8—
“There are certainly no procedures that will guarantee success.” P158
***and this would be why I don’t like to engage in diversity conversations with people. Way too
controversial.
Handling the physical text has an advantage—in nvivo the text disappears. You remember visual
locations, which you can’t get out of nvivo—and locations in text are important—where something
occurs may be important. Location is very important—not something you can get in nvivo. Jason has
done rhetoric studies of supreme court decision—if you don’t know what part of the court decision it
comes from doesn’t mean all that much.
Ashley’s cool visual representation.
What is your analytical approach when it comes to ethnography? Jim: treat your field notes just like any
other text, code it just like any other text. As you move along in an ethnography, you begin to form
impressions about stuff and you begin to focus in on those impressions in your field notes and so your
field notes change over time as you develop a more focused understanding of what is going on. If you
don’t systematically go through your field notes, you will only have available to yourself your latest
positionality versus rediscovering those days of yesteryear where you were uncertain as to what was
going on, and you can see the progression. And the progression is important to the argument. Also
improves your ability to write field notes—minimize those parts where “I don’t even know what I said
here”. you have to code them fairly quickly because after the fact (long after) you may not be able to
remember what you said or why.
Your initial field notes are directed toward the material aspects of the group such as where they sit etc
as opposed to the understandings people have about why they sit where they sit and such. So your field
notes in the early stages might not be very codable because they are just descriptive.
Respondent validation—p181.
One extreme is me showing you what I’ve written—one extreme is me keeping from you that I’m
writing.
Other than leaving your notes out, is this something you formally do, share what you are writing with
participants. Jim: yes, if they ask. He leaves his notes out to build trust, not for validation.
Philosophical issues of validation—
Is the ethnographic motive different from the stakeholder motive? Yes. So when I’m writing my
argument I am writing under the governance of the ethnographic motive, an academic argument. What
basis does anybody have to evaluate whether that ethnographic argument is appropriate?
If I am an artist and I paint your picture and you look at it and say that is not me and I say, no, it is my
painting of you. I am not describing you, saying who you are, I am writing an argument about how
culture is put together or how orgs work or something.
If you tell them where they are going, they might tell you more that is relevant.
Gut check for do no harm and a gut check for don’t twist it for your own purposes.
Chapter 9
At the end of the day, academic research is really about writing. We are writers that happen to conduct
research.
What are the implications of the writing process in ethnography?
Narratives, looking to build the narratives.
Mike: I struggle with the implications of being writer. That is not how I see myself.
Erik: Writing is one of the main metrics I will be judged on.
Jim: “Is there anything else besides the writing?”
Mike: There is the knowledge that is held in this repository.
You have to be able to write well, very competently, to do ethnography and have it be of any
consequence.
Chapter 10
Informed consent, privacy, harm, exploitation, and consequences for future research.
p. 219-220 ethical absolutism, ethical situationism, ethical relativism, Machiavellianism
Jason: he was interested about how the authors made situational choices in the field about these
criteria.
So the Prussian solution doesn’t work—to write a policy that covers any instance.
If action appears in the doing, but is known in the done, the issue of ethics has to do with how you
systematically review your performance. You can’t anticipate what you are going to do in a particular
circumstance. The issue of ethics in ethnography is just like ethics in everyday life—you have to do it on
the run and then sit back and say, this was not so good, or this is ok.
Mike: he thinks it has a great potential for harm. In the end if you have someone who is emotionally
submerged (as opposed to immersed), then it is exploiting them. He hopes to beneficial to those
involved, but that is known in the done not the doing.
Jim: ethnography is inherently exploitive. What’s the remedy to something that starts off on the wrong
side of the ledger? Jason: trying to minimize the degree to which your extraction of info does harm,
thinking about the ethical implications of how your ethnography gets reported or used/not used. Jim:
can you create circumstances where it will provide to the organization? You have to be a little bit careful
with the assumption of exploitation. He lives next door to two single women. He is always being asked
to come over and do manly things. It’s exploitive in the sense that they are taking advantage of me. On
the other hand, I find it very rewarding, so I’m getting profit out of it that works for me. At any time, I
can just say no, and so can your respondents, and some of them will. ***this is a good reminder.
Mike: boy if I could take somebody who didn’t really understand what it was like and you could give
them the perspective, that would be a service. The motivation for that research would be to benefit that
population. But still it feels like grabbing the tail of a snake.
Nitty gritty of IRB and informed consent—a form given to participants. You have your informed consent
docs and they are all signed and you are in a meeting three months later, conflict arises, people start
shouting. Did they give informed consent to that? they did on paper. You are assuming that down the
line you want to be part of the organization, a trust thing, so you have to remove it if they tell you to.
Informed consent is a line-item veto or is it more binary—you are in the study or you are not. once you
have the technical aspects of informed consent, you have the signature, you have it. but there are
ongoing ethical concerns.
It’s nearly unmanageable. If you two people in the room don’t want you to observe, you can’t observe
the other 15 people in the room. If you really play it fair, you are out of that meeting altogether, but you
just say, ok, I won’t take any notes about you.
Shima: living in turkey teaching English, she wanted to do an informal interview, family members would
not sign a form coming from the US, but they agreed to do the interview but they didn’t want to sign a
form. What do you do in situations like that? Jim: in the Tongan community, he had a similar problem. If
the elders say it is ok, then it’s ok. I’m not going to sign a paper because that would be disrespecting my
elders. Sometimes a document is the worst possible thing. I made the promise that as soon as I shifted
from being a participant to ethnographer, then I would declare that to the people.
By continuing with this interview, you are granting consent.
He doesn’t do interviews in ethnography. Why? Because the foundation of an ethnography is
participation and unless an interview is an ordinary part of what goes on, then you are introducing an
alien form into the organizational practice.
Generally he has beaten the IRB on this for everybody—ethnography is a process where you and I sit
down in a situation and we are co-equals or I am in a one-down position because I am not a real
member. So you have the power. So it is not the same thing as informed consent because you have the
power. Not the same thing as me administering a drug to you.
There was a group working with child abusers and they wanted to put the abusers through an
experimental therapeutic approach and they did not want to provide informed consent because the
child abusers would not participate in the therapy. So the researcher argued that we couldn’t do the
research with consent. His argument was we don’t know if they would participate, but the real reason
you are doing this is that you don’t like them, you want to fix them. Same argument we used for
homosexuals. He didn’t win that argument, so they went and did it.
He will post the answers to the Sage interview.
He wants us to code this video—have some practice coding video.
We are going to have a debate on 12/9. Jason will get us some judges. We set up a proposition such as
qualitative research is foolishness. Practice defending and attacking. He hopes that if we decide to use
qualitative research that we will adopt some of the criteria and practices.
The Organizational self or The Organization Itself or The Organization Self—a book he wrote.
Jim: Researchers do whatever they damn well please. They do whatever because they are in the
business of attempting to find something new. Whatever works for them is what they are going to do.
like hammersley, they ask questions that are impermissible given the epistemological foundations of
their own argument, questions about validity, etc.
What is your explanatory intent? Are you trying to explain something that is out there available for
everybody to see. Or the material processes of construction?
Understanding of the constitutive processes is what the explanatory focus of qualitative research is.
***so given this can I find some process thing to do my capstone on?
Two great semiotic systems—language and action. Foundation of all meaning, knowledge, and
communication.
Semiosis—a system of signs. A sign is something that stands for something else. In the original
formulation of semiotics, the something else was a material referent. In the piercian formulation, the
sign stands for another sign. A tree itself is a sign of a tree. Every sign points to a sign. The other element
that is involved in the difference between the two kinds of semiotics is the relationship.
Syntagms—new word, does it mean routines? No, it means a linguistic unit composed of linguistic
forms.
Action is structure, routines are structuration
The action is the sign of itself—it tells us what we’re doing. we understand the priorities of what our
next step in the action is going to be.
Behaviorists like to talk about random behavior, cognitivists predicted behavior, social constructionists
like to talk about action as narrative. Action is the narrative of existence.
Your job in ethnography is to discover the language of action. That’s why you participate. When you are
standing outside, you have no knowledge of what the fish are doing, but when you are in the school of
fish, you see that they have a specific objective, you discover what the action actually is. Action is like a
sign in the sense that it has significance, the potentiality for meaning.
The phrase has to make sense inside the action. In the action, the phrase changes its meaning. The
significance of action in order to have meaning.
What does text intend to do? the words are not representational and they are not referential—their
meaning comes out of their embeddedness in the action--***hmm.
Action requires resources, opportunity, and competence.
We don’t invent our activities. If we don’t know what to do, we recognize that situation and we are
scared. Most of our life is spent doing things we already know how to do, we are born and socialized
into this.
Jim: “Non-competence is something you have to have the competence to recognize.” Example of the
bowl—you have to be a knowledgable judge in order to recognize whether there is competence.
Every performance is an improvisational performance, but my improvising is governed by the routine.
Consequences of Action:
Who am I? I’m the acting self. Action establishes the context of the appearance of the self.
Postmodern view says there isn’t anything but what you do. your existential performance is what you
are. When we pull ourselves out of the action and review what we did, we are now a different person in
a different context examining what our other person did in another context and making judgments
about it.
You have to be in the action to have the subtle distinctions of what success and failure turn on. That is
why you participate at the site and then you observe and write at your office. The only thing you got is
the writing in ethnography—that’s the only thing that’s portable, transferrable, exchangeable.
One of your responsibilities in ethnography is to plot out the memberships and the relationships—these
are crucial to your success. Who goes with whom, what goes with what—if you don’t, you are going to
say something to a person in confidence and it will go everywhere because you didn’t account for the
relationships that were higher priority than yours.
There are hierarchies of discourse. If there is a dispute among us, the one higher in the discourse
hierarchy wins. You may persist in holding an alternative position, but ultimately you are not going to
persist in advancing it.
Locations—understanding what happens where.
Constituting the Domain of Agency
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Memberships and relationships
Hierarchies of discourse and action
Locations
Thematics (invocation of narratives)
Components of the Cultural Frame—7 of them
Consequences of culture—
Differences between resistance and opposition.
What is the characteristic of the self that generates resistance? Refusal to be, to become. Adopting a
particular line of action brings into existence a particular self. Resistance develops because I don’t want
to do this, I don’t want to become that kind of person.