It's Not What You Know, But Who You Know: Social Networks and the
Negotiation of the Formal,Informal, and Technical Cultures in
Fieldwork 
Duncan Waite
The University of Georgia

     I was midway through my first year as an assistant
professor.  I had begun an ambitious ethnographic research
project, and had been granted official permission from a school
district in the Southeast to begin the research.  It was late
winter, early spring.  My three initial volunteers withdrew from
the study.  I was despondent.  Without informants I was stalled. 
I began to deeply question what I was about, the nature of the
project, my academic future, even who I was.
     Romanticizing a bit, I drew comfort from the thought that
many an anthropologist had suffered like me, some worse
(Malinowski, 1967; Stoller, 1989, for example).  But research was
a part of the job.  Ethnographic research requires fieldwork. 
And fieldwork in modern urban settings requires more than just
selecting a site, beaching the canoe, and establishing one's
place in a remote village as in the bygone days of anthropology. 
I needed people.  I needed people to respond to me, to my
probings, and more:  I needed people to take me into their
confidence.  I knew I could teach.  I could read and write. 
Would field research be the only part of the job that I couldn't
do?  Would this (potential) failure disqualify me from my chosen
profession?  These were my thoughts as I emerged from the winter
of my first year, and into the spring.       The Brazilian author
Jorge Amado (1971) wrote that it's better to know the judge than
to know the law.  In the U.S., folkwisdom holds that it's not
what you know, but who you know.  Academics and beginning
fieldworkers --recovering positivists, especially- - tend to
overlook the truth of this saw and rely on formal relations and
systems to gain entr?e to research sites and informants. 
Further, beginning fieldworkers mistakenly assume that entr?e is
a done deal --once accomplished, it never has to be attended to
again.  Fault lies with the lore of ethnography and its
unexamined transmission to new generations of ethnographers.      
     Making sense of my initial field research attempts as both a
new assistant professor and new to the South forced me to realize
that, indeed, it was who I knew or didn't know that seemed to
make the difference between successful experiences and
frustration.  Getting established in my role occurred on at least
three levels simultaneously, and I grudgingly accepted that it
would take time, patience, and effort.      In making sense of my
experience, I synthesized the work of Edward Hall (1959) and
Lesley Milroy (1980).  In Silent Language, Hall wrote of three
levels of culture --the formal, the informal, and the technical. 
Language and Social Networks is Milroy's report of linguistic
variation in Belfast, Ireland and the social networks of her
informants.  For the purposes of this paper, I view my role as an
assistant professor through Hall's lens of the three levels of
culture.  Acceptance of this tripartite view of a role implies
that an assistant professor, for example, operates on all of
those levels of culture simultaneously and may progress toward
role fulfillment or full cultural membership at different rates
in each area.  My own progress, especially in field research, can
be explained by imputing to each level a distinct social network
(Boissevain, 1974; Boissevain & Mitchell, 1973; Milroy, 1980).
     The formal level of culture has to do with my formal status
or position with an established institution, and its formal
relationships:  In the fall of 1991, I was a first-year assistant
professor of supervision at The University of Georgia.  The
informal level of culture in which I was operating involved the
relationships I was beginning to establish with people in the New
South (Escott & Goldfield, 1991).  On the technical level, I had
experience as an elementary teacher in Guadalajara, Jalisco,
M?xico; experience as a graduate student and student-teacher
supervisor at the University of Oregon; but was new to teaching
graduate classes in supervision.  Clearly, except for my personal
biography, I was a beginner, an unknown, untried and untested.  I
knew no one here and no one knew me.  Worse yet, I was an
outsider, a Yankee, where those things matter.      Looking back,
I see why my early experiences in fieldwork were relatively
unsuccessful.  Not only was I a beginner, with relatively little
status, I had no local networks upon which to rely.  This is the
story of how I became established in my profession, in my job,
and in the field.  Hopefully, other beginning fieldworkers may
benefit from my experience.
Beginning Stages
     I don't need to spell out how important it is for a
beginning, tenure-track assistant professor to get published.  In
fact, I was well into my first year before I became aware that
research really meant publication!  I had naively assumed that I
was doing research when I was in the field.
     I was interested in drawing on and expanding the work I had
begun for my dissertation --construction of an ethnography of
instructional supervision.  But I found myself far from the place
where I had done that fieldwork and, since I believed that I
would find certain cultural similarities here among supervisors
and because I wasn't that keen to spend the money to return to
the original sites, I set out to study the local supervisor
culture.
     You could say I backed into my research and learned a bit
about my formal status and obligations in the process.  First, I
mentioned my interest to a few colleagues and was put in touch
with a local administrator who sent me an application form for
doing research in her district, which I filled out and returned. 
The next thing I knew, I received an official form from my
college's Associate Dean of Research requesting me to fill out
and file a form with the college and requesting authorization
from the university's Human Subjects Review Board.  Fortunately,
I had already received that clearance, and the official
permission to proceed was granted shortly.
     The local school district administrator solicited
volunteers.  She sent a letter to all assistant principals in her
district asking if they would be interested in assisting me. 
Four replied positively and I was sent their names and the names
of their schools.  I arranged a meeting with each one
individually.  This took some time because assistant principals
are busy people, and, I suspect, these volunteers were not
entirely convinced they wanted to get involved with a stranger
doing research up close.

     That winter I met with three of the four assistant
principals who had expressed a willingness to participate in the
study.  I met the first in February. "Rita" was a new assistant
principal of a new elementary school already embroiled in a
school-community controversy.  I began interviewing her on our
second meeting and I thought I was off and running.
     I met the second and third assistant principals --both women
elementary assistant principals-- and, after our initial meeting
and my explanation of what I was doing, they both politely
declined.  Shortly after that, Rita decided that, after numerous
interviews, she would be uncomfortable trying to establish
herself with the teachers at her school if I were to tag along. 
She withdrew from the study.  I took her withdrawal to heart and
began to question what it was about me that had caused these
three potential participants to shun me.  I wondered if this
study would ever get done.  For a short time I was overcome with
self-doubt and anxiety.  It was as if my university career hung
in the balance.  
     Two weeks after Rita withdrew I managed to arrange a meeting
with the fourth of the interested assistant principals, "Steve." 
He was assistant principal of a large middle school.  Steve set a
date for our first meeting; but when I showed up I found he was
on business elsewhere.  This happened twice.  While I was at the
school unsuccessfully trying to meet Steve, I saw someone I
recognized --"Karen," the administrative assistant of the school,
had been a student in one of my early classes.  Karen and I
always got along well.  When I was finally able to meet with
Steve, he made a point of saying how positively I was regarded by
Karen and let me know that he regarded her likewise.      I
became a regular visitor to the middle school and spent hours
observing Steve and listening to his interactions with teachers,
students, parents, administrators, and other staff.  But I wasn't
entirely satisfied with what I was getting.  Not that Steve
wasn't forthcoming, he was; it was just that most of his duties
were disciplinary and not instructional supervision as I
perceived it.  I decided to be more assertive and expend more
energy in the search for other informants.
Later Stages
     I set out to widen my circle of informants, not realizing at
that time how vital social networks were to successful fieldwork. 
By this time I had taught graduate classes in supervision for
three academic quarters, an academic year.  I began looking at my
students with renewed interest --most held administrative
positions or aspirations.  I approached a few.  "Dory" expressed
immediate interest.  She is a transplanted New Yorker and the
Instructional Lead Teacher (ILT) in an elementary school about an
hour's drive away.  I kept in contact with Dory throughout that
summer.  That fall she began work as an assistant principal/ILT
in another elementary school within the same district, the result
of a lateral transfer.  I was able to gain entr?e to that site. I
have been making the drive to Dory's school for three months now. 
The atmosphere there and my reception by Dory and the school
staff encourage me.  Dory did much to pave the way for me; but
that is the subject for another discussion.  I seem to have found
the ideal informant in Dory:  one who is reflective --an
"observant participant" (Florio & Walsh, 1981), and well thought
of by her colleagues and the central office administration.
Networks of Culture
     There is, in the fieldwork literature, some discussion of
gatekeepers and the role they play in granting or denying access
to fieldworker (Adler & Adler, 1987; Burgess, 1991; Shaffir,
1991; Wax, 1971).  But entr?e is much more than simply "getting
in."  Entr?e is a continual process of negotiating, often through
impression management (Goffman, 1959), the role or roles the
fieldworker adopts, or is allowed to adopt, vis-?- vis research
participants.  Clearing official gatekeepers is only one, and
often the least important, aspect of gaining entr?e (Burgess,
1991; Shaffir, 1991).  Burgess wrote that each participant was,
in effect, a gatekeeper of sorts and that "access had to be
negotiated and renegotiated" (p. 48).
     In my study I had already negotiated entr?e with the
official, formal gatekeepers.  I had trouble at the informal,
individual level.  As it turned out, I was aided at the
individual level by both my technical cultural knowledge and
membership, and by informal network contacts.  This last was
facilitated, in part, by what interpersonal skills I had
demonstrated:  Karen had put in a good word for me with Steve,
her assistant principal.  In the language of social network
theory (Milroy, 1980, p. 46), Karen, as a point in my "first
order network zone" (emphasis in original), had introduced me to
Steve, previously a point in my second order zone --"a
friend-of-a-friend" (Boissevain, 1974, p. 91).

     Entr?e at the formal level was facilitated, no doubt, by any
status accruing to me because of my position and title within a
formal system, the university.  That proved to be the easiest
phase of the entr?e process.  Negotiation of the informal levels
of culture took more time and the members at these levels were
more circumspect in judging me and deciding whether they wanted
me close at hand for long periods.      People in the South tend
to be more relational, more traditional (Escott, 1991):          
The personalism of social relations and the closeness of many     
     Southern communities help to explain the ambiguous feelings  
        non-Southerners have toward the friendly but
hard-to-get-to-           know natives.  Such comments as "It
takes a long time to be           accepted" simply point to the
fact that a newcomer is not yet           part of the close-knit
community.  He or she can be welcome           but still not
belong.  Proving that one is truly part of the          
community, and not merely passing through, is often a matter      
    of time. (p. 4) 
And participants in the research process, whether teachers or
administrators, judge the researcher on informal, though
important, criteria.  Philip Jackson (1991) observed of his
attempt to get teachers involved in collaborative research that
"it is the moral qualities of the researcher, her honesty, her
trustworthiness, her discretion, her courteous manner or lack
thereof that the teachers seem most inclined to judge" (p. 11).   
  The moral of the story, for me, is that aside from the time
involved in gaining access to social networks for the beginning
researcher, one must tend to the cultivation of relationships
with those who populate the research landscape.  This message is
often neglected in the lore of fieldwork and in introductory
courses in qualitative research.  Perhaps it should be addressed
more thoroughly; for I suspect that my experience is not unique
and not restricted to the southern U.S.
References
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