Ethnographic sensibility and professional skill in policy making

• In Event: Educational policy as a research object: the ethnographic possibilities, challenges and limits of studying power

Proposal

Ethnography is much more than a method for data collection. It is an outlook on the world, a way to do research but also be a researcher in the world. This is as true studying in the realm of policy-making and the realities and imaginations (re)presented therein, as it is in any archetypal ethnographic ‘field.’
Textbook approaches to policy assume particular perspectives on power that may be summed up as follows: positivist perspectives (who holds power over whom in a particular setting, reflected, for instance, in workplace hierarchies); constructivist perspectives (power is relational, created, negotiated, and appropriated); and poststructuralist perspectives (power as fragmented, contingent, and constituted in/through discourse). Such “pure” theoretical forms and descriptions (or prescriptions) do not, however, readily or necessarily map on to the lived, material worlds in which policies are enacted and researched. If policy-making is more usefully conceptualized as overlapping force fields where diverse forms of power percolate (Sutton & Levinson 2001; Shore, Wright & Però 2011), how can the researcher of policy better attend to such diverse mechanics? In particular, given the intellectual and psychological rollercoaster of everyday politicking in the meetings, emails, terms of reference (ToRs) and so on that also constitutes the researcher’s lived reality?
As important as it is to describe the underlying “big” power structures (e.g., class, race, gender, and otherwise) that determine broader outcomes, the knowledge alone is rarely enough to ‘make a difference.’ To navigate actual policy-making encounters (meetings that lead to meetings that lead to meetings with the president, for example) requires a set of delicate, “touchy-feely” skills – which, I suggest, can be cultivated by training one’s ‘ethnographic sensibilities’. Drawing on episodes from different levels of the policy making process – that is, ranging somewhere in between ‘identifying a policy problem’ and ‘having an innovative idea for a solution’ to ‘negotiating the implementation of a respective intervention’ – this paper offers ethnographic sensibility as a professional skill. These episodes range from “noticing a pair of tennis shoes,” “imposing a dictatorial writing regime on undergraduate students,” to “the political need to negotiate the results of an applied [paid for by someone in power] research project.” In presenting these episodes, I consider where “the ethnographic” is/emerges; how ethnographic sensibilities may relate to participating in the game (Goffman 1981) as well as to one’s own political/ethical stances; and what modes of power are seen, felt and sensed that may be otherwise opaque to study.

Author

• Susanne Ress, University of Bamberg