I have found it very difficult to put these notions into academic prose, and the below text is the result. It was written for a workshop at ECSCW 95, "The Professional Stranger", discussing the situated role of the ethnographer (specifically, their gender, race etc), and has the title "Hanging Around Doesn't Mean Sitting On The Fence".
This is linked to the attempt in the call for this workshop to treat the ethnographer as a real, situated human being, with gender, race, cultural background and so on. It is as iniquitous to ignore these matters when considering the nature of the researcher as it is to ignore them (as is done in positivist science) when considering the subjects under study. By ignoring these questions in the case of the subjects, we treat them as machines only distinguishable by the categories we are studying, an activity that is morally dubious (in denying them their full personhood) but also leads to inaccurate research, insofar as it is extremely difficult to determine which parts of the subjects' identities are in fact irrelevant and able to be ignored.
This necessity to treat the subjects of study as real people has been well covered by the various critics of the positivist methodologies, and has permeated thinking in the CSCW community to such an extent that it could be considered folklore. However, less well considered is the consideration of the researcher as an active subject (although the work on reflexivity within the sociology of scientific knowledge bears some resemblance to this). Again, we have a moral and a pragmatic argument. The moral one is similar: by regarding the researcher as an uninterested observer, we deny their identity as full human beings, and treat them as if they were interchangeable. The pragmatic argument is slightly different: it is concerned with the nature of interpretation. All individuals will interpret a situation differently, according to their theoretical biases but also according to their individuality. This is true in an experimental setting, but even more so in a workplace study, where often the data that are captured are solely those in the ethnographer's notebook, making even data capture a question of interpretation. Even if recordings of speech and actions are available, they are as much open to interpretation as any text - one researcher's reading of a transcript may be radically different from another's.
I am specifically interested here in the effect of the ethnographer's morality upon their study. There seems to be a prevailing attitude in CSCW research that taking a moral stance is simply not appropriate for ethnographers - that their correct role is to observe the situation but not to intervene in it, rather allowing participants to act to cure their own situation based on the rational information passed to them by the ethnographer. For ethnographers to actively intervene in situations, it is suggested, would be manipulative and would deny the participants the right to command their own destiny.
This last argument is a powerful one. The position of power that the ethnographer is placed in makes them vulnerable to having their personal opinions on a situation interpreted as Science. It would indeed be manipulative to allow that impression to go uncorrected. But should ethnographers stand by and observe a situation they hold to be damaging to the individuals involved in it without comment or action, or should they act to try to change that situation?
I suggest that to require an ethnographer to stand by is not only to repress their identity as a moral person, with beliefs about life that are as valid as those of the participants, but may also crucially ignore the power balances involved in the situation. The circumstances when ethnographers may want to intervene tend to be those which are disempowering to the individuals in the situation, and particularly to those lower down the organisational hierarchy. Many things may disempower individuals: other individuals (e.g. managers), the organisational structure and culture, or the technology being used. In the first two cases, the ethnographer, if they are in the situation in the role of outside consultant, may well have considerable power to convince management of the need for change. This is a more positive use of their status mentioned above.
This intervention may seem an impossible prospect, and a matter of persuading people to do something they don't want to. Managers seem most unlikely to want to be changed, after all. This may not in fact be the case: there is a lot of change towards empowerment taking place within management just now, as a result of business process reengineering and total quality management. While these are in many cases more to do with hype than actual empowerment, that the words are used so widely suggests that they may have more possibility for acceptance than might at first seem apparent to those used to decades of machine-like organisations following the cues of Taylor and Ford.
Finally, there is a mighty need to positively act to emancipate individuals because of the strong disempowering drives found in many methodologies for experimentation or for software engineering - the former because of their philosophical background (as briefly mentioned above), the latter because of their status in many cases as having been designed for machine-like organisations, such as the military or the traditional bureaucratic corporation. These methods actively lead to the disempowerment of individuals - to redress the balance, ethnographers and others need to work actively towards the empowerment of individuals.
I would urge all ethnographers to come down from the fence (or out the closet?), recognise their personal moralities, and take moral stances towards the emancipation of those they study.
First, the tone. Re-reading it, I feel it to be rather polemic, yes, and rather over-stating the case in places, and certainly inappropriate as Proper Academic Writing; but I nonetheless do not apologise for it. On a similar line to the above argument about the whole person, I think it is a shame if our norms are such that people can't write in their natural style, and express their full panoply of concerns, without either personal or collegiate embarrassment. As the above is my natural style, I felt it useful to use it here.
I wrote the Statement before I read the commentaries in the CSCW Journal on the 'Suchman-Winograd debate'. In some ways my argument resembles Suchman's, and some critiques of her position are relevant. Particularly so is a comment of Dave Randall's:
one might draw attention to a certain naivety in what is essentially a 'liberationist' politics by asking why other politically derived theories, for example Marxism, cannot be invoked. After all, in the drive for predictability in organisational life it is not as if managers and owners of corporation manage those corporations with indifference towards the profit motive (Randall, 1995:47).
This is a serious flaw - I urge ethnographers to "recognise their personal moralities", assuming that those moralities are ones which require one to be active as an emancipator. This is completely incorrect of course - ethnographers presumably have the same range of beliefs, moralities and politics as other folks (a Tory sociologist may be hard to imagine, but such people must exist!) This puts me in a position rather like those American free speech advocates who found themselves defending fascism: I am arguing for morality, and yet may end up encouraging those whose position I would vehemently disagree with. It must never be forgotten that Frederick Taylor genuinely believed he was doing good for those he scientifically managed.
What to do then? One option is coming further out of my own closet, and explicitly identifying myself as one concerned with the nurturing and emancipation of the unique human spirit. But given that my position comes from liberal Christianity (although as the theologian Hans Kung has written, it is by no means incompatible with critical theory), admitting this too freely may lose some fellow-travellers who are uncomfortable with that source.
There are two further problems I see with this work (others will no doubt occur to readers of this paper!) First, there is rather a sense of smugness, of moral superiority in it. It's full of 'ought' and 'should' (implicitly at least). It sounds rather as if I thought I'd invented CSCW-with-morality single-handed. This is no doubt partly a side-effect of my writing style. I would emphasise here that I fully recognise that moral approaches aren't confined to any one place or method. Here I take issue with the writers in the field known as Critical Systems, who have sought to develop work on 'soft systems' (especially that of Checkland) by the incorporation of emancipatory perspectives, usually based on Habermas or Foucault.
A good introduction is the book edited by Flood and Jackson (1991). Several of the papers in that book can also be found in the journal "Systems Practice". Most of this approach is based on Habermas; for an approach based on Foucault, see the paper by Mingers (1992).
They have written much about the inadequacies of Checkland's work, and of those using 'hard' systems approaches, for their supposed failure to take emancipation into account. I think this is rather short-sighted. An example I find helpful is Stafford Beer's (1974) work in Chile to 'reengineer' the economy, during the short-lived government of Salvador Allende - surely a place where emancipation was high on the agenda. Yet it is strongly criticised by those writers purely because it uses hard methodologies, despite Beer's highly motivated emancipatory stance. To emphasise this point again: morality, and critical CSCW (or whatever we call my approach) is not tied to a particular kind of method, person or work.
Further to this point: I am most interested in how material from the more general critical theory - the first generation such as Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse as well as the more recent writers like Habermas and Foucault - can be integrated into these ideas. There is in fact work under the title of 'critical ethnography', mainly in education, which would seem relevant but on which I have little in the way of literature (Paolo Freire is sometimes mentioned as one such). And then there's the area known as 'liberation theology', which has mainly been carried by Latin American priests...
A final point of concern: how to convince anyone to let you do this kind of work! Managers aren't typically very keen on emancipation ('empowerment' is a different matter, but see Andrew Clement's (1994) excellent article on that point). I have suggested above that a way in is through the empowerment talk within reengineering and the like (rumours have it at least one consultancy is doing critical theory under the name of reengineering...). This may be overly optimistic, given that even access for ethnographers is difficult. Are companies really likely to want to listen?
To end on a more polemic note again. In some ways, this whole paper doesn't go nearly far enough for me. I get very angry at situations of disempowerment and injustice within organisations, and I feel it my duty to try and change them. This is an essentially emotional position rather than a rational one. I can't tell others that they should be doing likewise, but I do get bothered by people who have the awareness of situations of injustice, and the power to do something about them, but don't act against them. This is the stance I have tried to work against in this paper.