Ethnographic explorations of accountabilities

Ethnographic explorations of accountabilities

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Public Sector Management, Volume 22, Issue 1

About the Guest Editors Mike Rowe is a Lecturer in Public Management. His research is concerned with understandings of governance and accountability in local public services and in the small scale interactions between public servants and their clients. He is currently working on quality and complaints in social care.Jason Ferdinand is a Lecturer in Management. He has conducted ethnographic research into situated learning, managerial control, employee resistance and knowledge management. He is currently researching law enforcement and counterfeit goods in the UK and Europe.

The papers that form this collection arise from the series of Symposia on Current Developments in Ethnographic Research jointly organised by the Universities of Liverpool and Keele. The origins of the event can be traced to a discussion of the problems and joys of undertaking ethnographic research. In particular, we were concerned with the ethical issues confronted by researchers in an increasingly regulated world but we also recognised the problems experienced by a number of our own students in writing ethnographies. Our discussions have since led to the series of symposia. The response to the first demonstrated the strength and, increasingly, the variety of ethnographic-style research. This collection is a small part of the material presented at the symposia but, we believe, demonstrates the value of ethnography to understandings of public service management and of accountabilities. Together, the papers engage with current debates on the changing nature of accountability, bringing rich sources of data to illustrate and to re-examine some of the arguments with which we are becoming familiar. At the same time, each takes a different approach to ethnography which we will discuss below.

Devanney (2009) presents a detailed study of the individuals engaged in a programme for young people excluded from education, employment and training. These individuals and their complex lives are in stark contrast to the simplistic forms of accountability. Success is only measured by completion of the programme and progression to further education, training or, ideally, employment. Devanney (2009) suggests that, in many cases, achieving apparently basic changes around, for example, personal hygiene or confidence are more profound for the young people involved. She also illustrates the patience and the effort that the work of project workers involves.

The detail of the lives, the case studies, only briefly presented here, is telling. And it is in obtaining this data that the strength of ethnographic approaches is evident. In this case, the client group is notoriously uncommunicative. Getting close to them, observing and participating with them and allowing them to speak through her writing was the work of 18 months fieldwork. The images she is able to present are rich and contrast with any simple understanding of these young people as an homogenous group. As such, it is difficult to envisage the insights being generated in any other way than through a detailed and lengthy programme of ethnographic research. More profoundly, without such an understanding, the decisions of policymakers are, at best, ill-informed. Policy changes made on the basis of flawed evidence of failure and intended to affect a poorly understood client group are largely doomed to a further cycle of apparent failure.

Looking at a different dimension of accountability, McDonald, Checkland and Harrison (2009) present evidence of the impact of the new general practitioner contracts in the UK National Health Service. Their work illuminates the changes in behaviour brought about by the forms of targets and incentives that are integral to these contracts. Presented as a flexible approach to achieve improvements in the quality of care, the case studies suggest that the response of professionals has been to adopt standardised approaches to their work. This has also been accompanied by systems of monitoring within practices and of peer supervision. The paper points to a number of tensions that inevitably arise but, fundamentally, suggests that the systems have largely been accepted.

McDonald et al. (2009) employ ethnographic techniques but over a shorter period of time. But they also demonstrate the benefits of the insider/outsider combination. The expertise of one collaborator, bringing an understanding of the language and culture of the field, is balanced with the fresh eye of the ethnographer. In particular, the danger of insider ethnography, often in the form of participant observation, can be that we present what we understand of our world and fail to listen to the views of others. The additional critical perspective, asking the naïve questions, can counterbalance this tendency. It might be argued that it also allows for shorter periods of fieldwork. Traditionally, the ethnographer (or the archetypal anthropologist studying remote and lost tribes) spends a good deal of time learning the language and the basics. Some argue that others can open up these details to the outsider (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995).

Similarly, Waks (2009) examines the detail of the work of quality audit systems in the Swedish healthcare system. What is striking in her account is the superficiality of the audit technology as a form of account and the subjectivity of the judgements imposed. Indeed, the audit undertaken is a very amateurish affair. This reflects the “new” terrain (emergency ambulatory care) in which the audit takes place. But it is a very amateurish and subjective audit. Perhaps most starkly, it illustrates the degree to which shock waves from Michael Power’s (1994) audit explosion are still rippling out into more and more remote fields and disciplines. The word audit has become almost meaningless.

However, Waks’ (2009) work arises from a very limited study, both in terms of time and of scope. While part of a wider study of audit in Swedish healthcare, the work reports one inspection in one institution. It represents an emerging form of ethnographic research – an illegitimate form for some. Increasingly, just as the term audit is being spread thinly, so the term ethnography is used to describe research that involves a little bit of observation. Policy ethnographies, rapid ethnographies and, increasingly, commercially funded ethnographies of consumer experience fall into this new explosion. While practitioners might not reject the need for lengthy immersion in the field, they argue that it is not necessary where the language and culture are largely shared. On the other hand, others might argue that, however long the study, the central aspect of ethnography is the degree to which the writing richly presents the culture studied to others. Such interpretations admit a much wider range of ethnographic-style research than more traditional ones.

Gastelaars (2009) analyses four studies which, in themselves, present an account of policy and its implementation which will be familiar to many with an interest in social assistance schemes. However, Gastelaars (2009) offers a re-reading of the reports, turning the accountability gaze on the authors of the reports. In doing so, she indicates the care and the clarity that must form part of any ethnographic work. Who was observed, doing what and in what context? Who was not observed? What part did observation play in the construction of the story of the subjects of the research? In privileging the understandings of particular participants, the reports present images of implementation that lack a degree of balance and are misleading in some respects. In a highly political context, this might have damaging consequences and she argues that researchers need to be more politically aware, and indeed accountable, in the way they conduct their fieldwork in such contexts.

Examining concepts of accountability from an anthropological background, Sullivan (2009) suggests it is an alien cultural phenomenon imposed on Australian Aboriginal community organisations. The systems and rules, focused on finance and governance, impose a burden and an expectation about behaviour on these organisations. Indeed, they appear to make Aboriginal organisations accountable to the white community, not to the communities they serve. Analysing the policies and the impact these have on programmes and organisations, Sullivan (2009) turns to continual and reciprocal model of accountability as an alternative, focusing on learning, on relationships and on process rather than on simple numerical summaries and aggregations.

Sullivan’s (2009) piece returns to the themes developed in Devanney’s (2009) paper. Indeed, there are some parallels between the two communities at the centre of these papers. They are both alien and poorly understood by the wider community. And in both cases, systems of accountability impose rules and indicators that do not present a picture of the world they would recognise. Instead, they misrepresent those worlds to a wider community. Both papers also argue for more nuanced forms of accountability, presenting understandings to a wider audience but, at its heart, focused on the relationships between services and their clientele, between project workers and their clients. Power (1994) and Roberts (1991, 1996) have presented critiques of forms of accountability and systems of audit from similar perspectives. But in Devanney’s (2009) work, we begin to see the development of a more the reciprocal, socialising understandings of accountability. And it is in the images presented by the ethnographer that we begin to see some glimpses, some account of this relationship presented to a wider world.

Mike Rowe, Jason FerdinandUniversity of Liverpool, UK