Lederman 2006 AE IRB Article

RENA LEDERMANPrinceton University

The perils of working at home:IRB mission creep as context and content for anethnography of disciplinary knowledges

A B S T R A C TAmong kinds of fieldwork at home, ethnographiesof higher education inevitably draw on informalgleanings of everyday insider experience. Suchinformality is implicitly outlawed by federalhuman-subjects research regulations, which presumea clinical biomedical model that formally demarcatesresearch from other activities. Intricately implicatedin these circumstances, this article describes acomparative investigation into the methodologicallyembedded ethical conventions of anthropology andrelated disciplines for which institutional reviewboard (IRB) participation itself became inadvertentlyinformative, work that also reveals a conflictbetween the ethics of human-subjects protections(confidentiality) and of collegial exchange(citation). [disciplinarity, institutional review boards(IRB), mission creep, participant-observationfieldwork, research ethics, unfunded research,ethnography of academic life and higher education]

Over the past five or six years, a long-brewing controversy has onceagain come to a boil concerning the adequacy of the presentframework for overseeing human-subjects research in the UnitedStates.1 Hypervigilance at the federal level has percolated throughthe network of local institutional review boards (IRBs, commonly

referred to as human-subjects committees) that do the everyday workof reviewing research proposals and that have final say over questionsabout compliance with the federal regulatory code 45 CFR 46 (DHHS 2005,known since 1991 as the Common Rule).2 Anxious uncertainty impelsIRBs across the country to apply the profoundly ambiguous federal regu-lations (which many board members have neither the time nor the incli-nation to study) to a widening array of heterogeneous research practices,whatever their funding sources. Critics have labeled this trend bureaucraticmission creep (e.g., Gunsalus et al. 2005). Insofar as its better-safe-than-sorry logic has caught oral historians and even journalists in its web, someobservers wonder whether college novelists and poets in residence arenext.

The Common Rules otherwise perplexing emphases and wording makesense only if viewed as residues of a generation-long history of response tobiomedical research scandals (see introduction to this AE Forum). Its lan-guage presupposes biomedicines distinctive harms and benefits, typical re-search protocols, and background assumptions concerning the agents andobjects of study. Neverthelessand despite controversy from the outsetthe regulations have been applied to a disparate array of behavioral andsocial-science research practices and, in recent years, to an assortment ofhumanistic ones as well.

Doing anthropology among the disciplines

The implications for ethnography are the focus of this article. Its illustrationsderive from comparative research on disciplinary knowledge practices: Overthe past decade, I have been studying disciplinary boundary-work withinanthropology and among anthropology and some of its academic (and not

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 482491, ISSN 0094-0496, electronicISSN 1548-1425. C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content throughthe University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

The perils of working at home American Ethnologist

so academic) neighbors, including social psychology, sociol-ogy, journalism, and historiography. This exploration has in-volved reading publicly available written sources, speakingwith practitioners of various sorts at my own and other insti-tutions, and being ethnographically attentive to the mediaof everyday academic life and to the typically transactionalsociability of scholarly practice.

Treating normal circumstances as field experienceworks to relativize and remap ones sense of similarities, dif-ferences, and relationships by shifting ones point of viewfrom the explicit to the implicit. When disciplines are under-stood in the normal way, in terms of their overt subject mat-ters and characteristic products (e.g., following the logic ofmany colleges first- and second-year general education re-quirements), a certain complementarity is expected: Historyconcerns other times, anthropology concerns other cultures,and so on. That same focus on subject matters and rhetor-ical styles has underwritten the widespread contemporaryconviction (particularly in the humanities, and often citingGeertz 1980) that conventional disciplinary distinctions areblurring.

A contrastive perspective comes into view, however,when attention shifts from the substance and form ofscholars products to how those products are made: to therelatively backgrounded, taken-for-granted practices ofknowledge production in this or that field of study. Payingspecial attention to how research practices are evaluatedincluding how ethical judgments are deployedis especiallyenlightening. That is, whereas research ethics are a legiti-mate and increasingly prominent focus of interest in theirown right (e.g., Meskell and Pels 2005), they are also a pro-ductive means for understanding other things. Disputes overthe criteria for proper and improper research practicewithin particular fields often turn, in part, on tacit assump-tions about what makes a piece of work anthropology orhistory (or whatever) in the first place, such that measuringit by one standard rather than some other one makes sense.Epistemological assumptions implicit in intradisciplinaryarguments over adequacy and ethics become more evidentwhen they are situated in a cross-disciplinary landscape: jux-taposing controversies about acceptable and unacceptableuses of deception within social psychology and only appar-ently similar controversies within sociology; comparing so-ciology and anthropology with respect to the problematicsof the researchers positionality (e.g., their relative emphasison intimacy or distance); or considering contrastive stancesconcerning the value and ethics of naming names in anthro-pology, history, and journalism.

Although an ethics angle does not reveal a vista of un-traversed borders between disciplinary cultures (on the con-trary, intimate liaisons abound), it does reveal evidence ofproperty lines in an only apparently unfenced intellectualneighborhood.

Ethnography as anomaly: An example and apoint of departure

My work on disciplinarity began inadvertently as a by-product of my collegial role as a good university citizen. Aninitial suspicion that ethical and methodological presuppo-sitions structure disciplinary distinctions arose in the late1980s when, as a more or less conventional Melanesianistworking with notes and other materials derived from twoperiods of fieldwork in highland Papua New Guinea, I wasalso beginning a first four-year tour of duty on my institu-tions human-subjects committee.

As IRBs go, Princetons may be characteristic of smalluniversities without medical or public-health schools. Com-prising mostly social and behavioral scientists (along withuniversity counsel and health-services representatives anda contingent of community members), it was headed by asocial psychologist when I was a member in the 1980s, as ithas been consistently ever since. This makes a certain sense:IRBs are meant to have members competent to review thevariety of research proposals they are likely to receive; mostof the proposals Princetons IRB reviews are from the psy-chology department.3

My moment of enlightenment was a serendipitous func-tion of everyday social engagements; that is, it arrived inclassic participant-observation fashion even though (or onemight just as well say, insofar as) at the time I was not en-gaged in research, as such, at all (see, e.g., Bradburd 1998).

As the novelty of monthly IRB meetings wore off andI became familiar with the panels routines, I came to feelincreasingly like an outsider. The occasional anthropologyproposal was always a problem. From the beginning, itwas clear to me that something quite different from long-term, open-ended, participant-observation-based field-work was the unmarked term. After a while (and to hiscredit), our chair agreed that it might be a good idea for meto write the panel a memo summarizing my departmentalcolleagues evidently exotic research conventions. Althoughmy advisory memo was a first, it was not to be the last:Despite my departmental colleagues subsequent restate-ments of the rationales for participant-observation, signif-icant meanings were lost in translation, and the fragility ofcross-disciplinary understanding was evident. In any case,in the 1980s, it was hard for me to shake the feeling that, in theeyes of my fellow IRB members involved in survey researchor experimental social psychology, there was somethingshady, or disreputable, about the ethnographers magic:The radical inefficiency of anthropologists time frames?Our obstinate vagueness about research protocols and sub-ject pools? Our inexplicable qualms concerning consentforms?

That is to say, as a minority IRB member, episte-mologically speaking, I became uncomfortably aware of

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the implicit entanglements of is and ought in thepanels deliberations. Every meeting engendered a kind ofdouble consciousness, presenting me with implicit com-parisons between the ethically loaded suppositions ofpsychological or survey research and those of anthropol-ogy, whether or not there were ethnographic proposalson the table. It appeared to me that the core researchmethods of ethnography and of the other social sciencesdiffered not only in matters of practical detail but alsoin the ethical structuring of their conventions of bestpractice.

But the subject was difficult to raise directly: The po-tential for cross-disciplinary conflict latent in the panelswork was, instead, systematically defused by an explicitetiquettecharacteristic of the university, generallyof dis-ciplinary autonomy. Those of us on the panel would, fromtime to time, remind ourselves that were not here to eval-uate the research; that is, technical evaluations of researchdesign and significance werewithin rather broad limitsunderstood to be the proper concern of disciplinary peers(e.g., departmental thesis advisors and external grant re-viewers), not of the IRB. In this way, overt expressions of ourrespective disciplinary worldviews were muted. Refusing tomicromanage disciplinary practices, the panel construed itsmandate narrowly as overseeing compliance with the fed-eral regulations, which members generally understood toconcern ethical principles universally relevant to social re-search. These principles were itemizedquite succinctly (Ihave since learned) compared with the situation at otherinstitutionson the Princeton IRBs full-review question-naire (the form that researchers of all fields are directed tocomplete).

In fact, a potential for cross-disciplinary conflict ex-isted in all directions. Not only were many of the otherIRB members persistently flummoxed by my colleagues re-search proposals but I also found myself having a com-plementary reaction with respect to theirs. Moreover, itseemed to me that the full-review questionnaire took en-tirely for granted a set of assumptions that, although ap-parently transparent (commonsensical) to my fellow pan-elists, were rather opaque to me. I was particularly struckby one cluster of full-review questionsa frequent focus ofdiscussionthat asked researchers to detail the contexts andprocedures for debriefing subjects after the completion ofresearch.

Debriefing? I was surprised and then a bit out-raged (naively, I now realize) to learn that debriefing isa necessary corollary of the expectation, also built intothe questionnaire, that the intentional deception of re-search subjects is a design feature of many research pro-tocols in social psychology and sociology (e.g., Bosk 2001;Cassell 1980; Fine 1993; Harris 1988; Korn 1997), as it isin biomedical research using double-blind procedures andplacebos.

Questions of control

A few years after I rotated off the IRB, my teaching andreviewing responsibilities drew me into worries about thedifficulty that graduate students and younger colleaguesseemed to be having writing grant proposals and explain-ing their work in postfield interdisciplinary contexts, partic-ularly, with regard to justifying ethnographic research vis-a`-vis perceived alternatives. Those concerns were an initialmotive for the project concerning disciplinary boundary-work described above. Doing anthropology among thedisciplines, and paying close attention to disputes con-cerning proper and improper work, I was initially curi-ous about the unevenly porous boundary between his-toriography and ethnography. The importance of tackingbetween history and anthropology was a given by the1990s among my fellow Pacific-area scholars and a keyinterest of our graduate students no matter where theyworked.

In this fresh context, my inadvertent revelation on theIRB in the 1980sthat disciplines were, so to speak, moralorders (or epistemic cultures)became relevant to thestudy. Consequently, my disciplinary ambit expanded to in-clude sociology and social psychology, as I recalled my shockover deception and debriefing. This time, I scrutinized thefederal regulations and vast commentary on them, some-thing most active IRB members probably do not do. Inter-secting IRB matters, I also surveyed the history of exper-imental social psychology, comparing some of its notableethical controversies with those of ethnographic sociologyand sociocultural anthropology.

Federal regulations take for granted that the condi-tion for adequate behavioral and social research is inves-tigator control of the research process by means of spe-cialized, specifiable settings (like clinics or labs) or bymeans of specialized, specifiable procedures (a researchdesign). Consequently, IRBs are set up to evaluate for-mal research protocolsdocuments that clearly demar-cate research from non-research by identifying its locations,time frames, personnel, and procedures. Finallybearing inmind that human-subjects regulations derive from guide-lines originally designed for biomedicine, in which physi-cal risk is often inherent in the research processIRB deci-sions about particular proposals involve relative riskbenefitjudgments.4

Within this framework, it becomes clear how decep-tion is not, by itself, a violation of human-subject inter-ests. The social psychologists and survey researchers on my1980s IRB panel were comfortable treating deception as asometimes necessary, although risk-bearing, means to thebenefit-bearing end of persuasive research because they un-derstood deception as a sometimes unavoidable means forcontrolling key experimental variables. In social psychology,proper research depends on access to a naive subject pool,

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that is, subjects whose lack of knowledge concerning partic-ular research protocols ensures that their behavior can betreated as valid data. Since the 1960s, the term debriefinghas been used to refer to explicit procedures for mitigatingwhatever distress deceptive research processes might causewhile educating subjects about the rationale for the decep-tion and enlisting their complicity (Harris 1988).

Ethnographic fieldwork does not fit this biomedical-and behavioral-science model of investigator-controlled re-search: Participant-observationthe research practice atethnographys coreis downright deviant on practically ev-ery count. As many sociocultural anthropologists and ethno-graphic sociologists practice it, the specific complementaryvalue of participant-observation in relation to other researchpractices is its systematic openness to contingency, partic-ularly, its interest in exploring unexpected entailments ofinformant-generated constraints.

Insofar as they do not organize their research pri-marily around formal interviewing or surveying, ethnogra-phers find it more than just inconvenient to provide IRBswith a detailed, accurate research design: Developed proto-cols are antithetical to participant-observation and there-fore deeply misleading. Instead, like many oral historiansand journalists, ethnographers often expect specific ques-tions to emerge in a relatively uncontrolled, unpredictable,and intentionally interactive discovery process. Structurallyinverting the conventional human-subjects research rela-tionship, many anthropologists (especially these days) viewtheir interlocutors as consultants or collaborators; they per-sist in using metaphors of incorporation or receptionlikeapprenticing, learning, or listeningto characterizetheir fieldworking relationships. These metaphors authorizeethnographic accounts by suggesting thathowever condi-tionally and strategicallyfieldwork involves a disciplinedrelinquishment of control over the sociotemporal contextsand conceptual frameworks of research by the researcherto his or her expert interlocutors (Agar 1980; Briggs 1986),be they Mexicali carvers, drug addicts and counselors at aKentucky hospital, Papua New Guinea farmers, or academicsat colleges and universities in the United States.5

Psychologists and biomedical researchers control theirspaces of research by demarcating them quite clearly. Theynarrowly delineate their roles vis-a`-vis their subjects, some-times introducing specifically defined, hypothesis-testingambiguities by means of strategic deceptions. In contrast,cultural anthropologists and ethnographic sociologists tendto live, for a time, where they work; in these contexts, theyare in a position neither to demarcate their research spacesnor to predetermine their own social identities. Embeddingthemselves in their informants environments, ethnogra-phers cannot have settled identities as researchers, fixedand isolated once and for all from other social identities. Em-beddedness and a certain lack of control over positionalitymay be more palpable for those ethnographers who work

at home than for those who work in unfamiliar settings,but both situations challenge the fieldworker to maintain atension between fluency and translation.

Formal research proposals obscure this fact. In honestefforts to comply with the demands of funders and regu-lators, ethnographers are constrained to make their open-ended process seem more managed and controlled than itis. The fine line between honesty and dishonesty on thispoint causes difficulties particularly for junior scholars, en-gendering a cynicism about research proposal writing andeven misunderstandings about the realities of fieldwork.

Consider, for example, the argument Joanne Passaromakes in her chapter You Cant Take the Subway to theField! (1997). Contrasting research at home with the an-thropological ideal of going elsewhere, she argues that re-search is more clearly grounded when (as in home-basedwork) the investigator is able to begin without first drawingup a formal research proposal. Proposals must specify all thewhats, wheres, whens, and hows, but, she insists, one cannotknow these things in advance of familiarizing oneself withreal-world conditions.

For all its strengths, Passaros argument overstates thesignificance of research proposalsinstruments designedfor funders and regulatorsas plans for actual fieldwork.Those of us who have done foreign fieldworkand for thatreason have had first to write funding proposalsknow that,just like Passaro, we have also shifted our topics, our sensesof relevant literatures and questions, even our research sites,populations, and time frames, in response to the contingen-cies and vagaries of field-based circumstances.

Connections and disconnections amongdisciplinary cultures

So, scrutiny of the rationale informing IRB concern aboutdeception and debriefing reveals an ethical-epistemologicalspecificity beneath the veneer of universality: experimental-ist assumptions about control that are conventional in somefields but not in others. Further scrutiny makes other dis-ciplinary specificities evident. For example, IRBs typicallydemand that data be kept confidential: Research partici-pants names are to be separated from personal informationand removed from written reports. In the interest of con-fidentiality, researchers may also be asked to destroy theirraw data after the analysis is completed. Anthropologists aregenerally comfortable with expectations about confidential-ity; and although they are likely to balk at the idea of de-stroying their field notes, they do tend to keep the notesin their personal files rather than archiving them to giveothers access. In contrast, oral historians have been horri-fied by these expectations when, in the wake of the recentbureaucratic mission creep, they have come under IRBscrutiny. Primary research in oral history is all about creatinga permanent, reconsultable archive of taped and transcribed

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words by named individuals whose stories are not yet partof the historical record (Shopes 2000). Similarly, with no-table exceptions that underscore the rule, ethical practicein journalismthe very mechanism of a storys credibilityalso entails precisely identifying ones sources.6

In fact, with respect to confidentiality, anthropologi-cal practice appears hybrid, in between that of journalists(or historians) and that of sociologists (or social psycholo-gists). Proper research in anthropology is conventionallyor perhaps ideallybased on a distinctive construct of in-tersubjective encounter (rapport, or complicity) implied bythe metaphors of incorporation and reception referred toabove. The importance of demonstrating this sort of so-ciable engagement as a means of validating ethnographicknowledge is evident in numerous descriptive and prescrip-tive accounts of fieldwork. It is also evident in key disci-plinary controversies, several of which have turned on in-stances of alleged failures to achieve, or betrayals of, thatintersubjective, collaborative ideal (e.g., the MeadFreemanor ChagnonTierney disputes). Consequently, although an-thropologists are inclined to preserve confidentiality, theirsocial positioning both during fieldwork and afterward hasnot infrequently encouraged them to respect their inter-locutors requests that their names be used. In contrast,planted on firmer ground, the disciplinary identities of soci-ologists and social psychologists turn them more systemati-cally into outsiders (and critics) vis-a`-vis their informantsunderstanding of the world. Rigorously preserving infor-mant confidentiality allows these scholars a critical but stillethical voice.

With respect to IRB requirement of informed consent,it is illuminating to compare field practice in anthropologywith experimental practice in social psychology. As notedin the previous section, good psychological research designmay involve a degree of deception. Because deception as aresearch tool is procedurally enacted in and around the con-sent process (e.g., consent forms and other initial informa-tion provided to participants), it necessitates post-researchdebriefing, when research subjects are accurately informedabout the study.7 In contrast, anthropologists generally con-strue consent to be negotiated throughout a long-term rela-tionship, as a substantive part of the research itself. In thisway, anthropologists part company not only with psycholo-gists but also with investigative journalists and some ethno-graphic sociologists, who share a strategic, qualified accep-tance of deception, particularly in critical research on socialproblems.

Anthropologists have long struggled with the discon-nection between IRB protocols of informed consent and an-thropological field ethics. Clearly, demanding prior writtenconsent makes sense in a Western biomedical lab, when theresearch procedure itself may cause physical harm. In con-trast, those of us who have worked in the rural Third World(or in marginalized communities close to home) know that

asking folks to sign a form may imply collusion with un-welcome authorities, from whom researchers may need todistance themselves (Lederman 2004, 2006). Informed con-sent in fieldworkwhich, unlike research in an investigator-controlled environment (like a biomedical or psychologylab), takes place in ones informants own environsis anongoing interaction . . . subject to the cultural rules and un-derstanding of that community (AAUP 2002).8

One size fits all?

In summary, scrutiny of ethical and other evaluative dis-courses reveals a complex configuration of similarities anddifferences among related disciplines. Nevertheless, the fed-eral human-subjects protection regulations treat all researchpractices alike, as if distinctive epistemic cultures did not ex-ist. Despite ample evidence that disciplinary ways of know-ing have distinctive ethical constitutions, structural factorsstill incline the federal system, through local IRBs, towardapplying one homogeneous ethical standard, based on oneconcept of best practice: a highly idealized model of thescientific method abstracted from clinical biomedicineand experimental behavioral research.

The official Institutional Review Board Guidebook(Penslar with Porter 1993) makes this bias clear but in anuncritical fashion that obscures important facts.9 For exam-ple, the guidebook is written without a clear warning aboutthe accidental character of the federal code. That code wascreated in 1974 when the then Department of Health, Ed-ucation, and Welfare (now DHHS) upgraded a set of preex-isting NIH guidelines to regulatory status but without mak-ing good on promises to adapt those biomedical guidelinesfor social research systematically (Tropp 1982:391392; seealso Pattullo 1982, 1984). Instead, the regulations were re-vised piecemeal over a 30-year period in response to diversepressures.

The guidebook is also written as if it makes unprob-lematic sense to implicate judgments about research designin judgments about ethics in the work of multidisciplinarypanels. This stance is a misfit for IRBs in academic communi-ties (like Princetons) that are inclined to allow departmentsconsiderable autonomy (trusting and deferring to local dis-ciplinary expertise). But the same stance neatly fits IRBs incommunities with medical schools or otherwise involved inbiomedical research (Stark n.d.). Those IRBs may follow theguidebooks advice religiously: scrutinizing research designsin detail on the basis of lengthy, elaborate full-review ques-tionnaires; interviewing principal investigators; and evenediting protocols as part of their ethics reviews. When theydo, the review process may take months without commen-surate benefits.

Whether followed to the letter or more loosely, theguidebooks interpretation of the regulations is troublingnot because it recognizes that methods and ethics are

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inextricable but because it encourages IRBs to adopt a sin-gle, narrow model of adequate research design. In a nutshell:Clearly, if [the proposed research] is not good science, it isnot ethical (Penslar with Porter 1993:ch. 4, p. 1).

The guidebooks concept of good science is reductivelybiomedical: The broad objective of the behavioral and so-cial sciences is similar to that of the biomedical sciences: toestablish a body of demonstrable, replicable facts and the-ory that contributes to knowledge and to the amelioration ofhuman problems (Penslar with Porter 1993:ch. 5, p. 1). Thisinterpretation mirrors the regulatory definition of research(which is, however, more vaguely worded): Research meansa systematic investigation, including research development,testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute togeneralizable knowledge (DHHS 2005:102[d]). If one is notaware of the biomedical context implied when these wordswere written (a context that the guidebooks wording clar-ifies), then one has scant basis for excluding the activitiesof literary fiction writers on college payrolls, together withtheir autobiographically inclined creative-writing students,from IRB oversight.

The regulatory definition of human subject is consis-tent with this sense of its origins: Human subject means aliving individual about whom an investigator (whether pro-fessional or student) conducting research obtains (1) datathrough intervention or interaction with the individual, or(2) identifiable private information (DHHS 2005:102[f]).As the regulations clarify, intervention denotes physi-cal proceduresthe example given is venipunctureand manipulations of the subject or the subjects environ-ment. This definition is clearly designed for experimentalbiomedicine. It makes sense, then, that the only example of-fered of private information is a medical record. In con-trast, when the regulations go on to elaborate that inter-action denotes communication or interpersonal contactbetween investigator and subject, readers are left to gropeabout in the dark. If the biomedical context of this otherwiseutterly global definition is not kept in view, then it is hardto think of anything (asking your mom for her basic muffinrecipe?) that might fall outside IRB oversight.

This implicitly clinical notion of human subject istherefore distinct from both the survey researchers respon-dent and the ethnographers informant (Cassell 1980).But, although noting that differences exist among biomedi-cal, behavioral, and social research practices, the guidebookbrushes them aside because there is considerable overlapamong the three areas (Penslar with Porter 1993:ch. 5, p. 1).

The guidebooks representation of qualitative social re-search was woefully inadequate in the premission-creep1980s when it was first drafted. Despite revisions, it is evenmore so nowadays, when IRB oversight is expanding deeplyinto the humanities. Its experimentalist reductionism is poi-sonous for ethnography. Intentional and unintentional eva-sion and active cynicism about IRBs are predictable re-

sponses when regulations appear to make no sense becausethey persistently refuse to take heterogeneity seriously in theethical structuring of disciplinary practices.

Reprise: Colleagues as informants and vice versa

Given the recursive loopiness of my projects engagementwith these issuesan ethnography of disciplinary knowl-edge practices that had gradually come to recognize ethi-cal discourses and controversies (including those relating toIRB practice and policy) as both field contexts and subjectmatterI should have anticipated the Alice-in-Wonderlandturn of events that transpired in August 2004 when my de-partment chair passed along to me a request from our IRBthat an anthropologist join the panel. One of us had to serve:Who better than you? she asked brightly.

I could not refuse. But the request forced me to face adilemma that I had allowed myself to avoid and that thisarticle and the others published in this AE Forum approachfrom various angles.

Working at home, informally (without funding-proposalrubrics), is a commonplace among ethnographic sociolo-gists. For their part, sociocultural anthropologists have scru-tinized the benefits and challenges of fieldwork in familiarplaces methodologically, politically, and in other ways, al-ways in counterpoint with the disciplines paradigm of leav-ing home (e.g., Jackson 1987; Messerschmidt 1981). Anthro-pologists, however, have not considered in a focused mannerthe specific dynamics of informality in field research. Informal fieldwork, the purposefully uncontrolled condi-tions of research associated with participant-observation,in particularconditions that enable its distinctive accessto lived realitiesare qualified by demarcations, howevernominal, necessitated by funding proposals. Insofar as it isnot initiated in this way, informal fieldwork dispenses witheven those distinctions. But the absence of such investigator-defined initial conditions with respect to places, time frames,and other conditions of research does not mean that infor-mal research is unconstrained. On the contrary, it is struc-tured by the researchers charge to remain systematically andcritically attentive to the social conventions of the field com-munities in which she or he is progressively embedded.

Those social conventions may conflict with backgroundassumptions guiding IRB deliberations. In the case of my in-formal fieldwork on academic cultures, there is a conflictbetween IRB assumptions about the ethics of research onhuman subjects and the social conventions of a field com-munity in which the researcher and her interlocutors arecolleagues (see also Bradburd this issue). Collegial rela-tionships are conditioned by a problematical entwining ofgift-inflected expectations about the mutual benefits of anopen exchange of ideas and market-implicated rationalesconcerning intellectual capital, credit, and citation. Col-leagues may be unequal, and their relationships fraught, but

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their differences are commensurable and ideally worked outwithout third-party mediation (e.g., McSherry 2003, whichmakes these points through the analysis of a worst-case sce-nario, in which intellectual property laws were invoked).

Can a colleague be a human subject (and vice versa)?Can citation be squared with confidentiality? Human-subjects regulations construe the researcher and the re-searched as having radically different kinds of agency. Theyare construed not simply as unequal but as incommensu-rable: always potentially opposed and most certainly in needof third-party mediation. Can this logic of protection be rec-onciled with that of collegial exchange (whether in a gift ormarket or hybrid transactional mode)?

So long as my research remained informal and, in par-ticular, undeclaredsubterranean, as Jack Katz (this issue)puts itI had not had to face these questions. In my accus-tomed contextstalking with historians or sociologists orjournalistsworking out how to be simultaneously a nor-mal colleague and a proper fieldworker had been relativelyeasy, the distinctive challenge in developing fieldworking re-lationships amidst ordinary collegial exchanges being that Ihad learned to profess less than I might have otherwise, infavor of listening much more patiently to my interlocutors.

But if I rejoined the IRB, I would face a double bind:a social-relational conflict at the limit of what I consideredethically acceptable. Up to that point, I had not consideredstudying actual IRB meetings (as others were; see Stark n.d.).Instead, memories of my 1980s IRB experience were a sug-gestive rationale for developing other sources: publications,online materials, and fieldwork-style attentiveness to thosemany moments when IRB matters came up in encounterswith friends, colleagues, and students. If, however, I were toagain be an IRB member, there was no way I could imagineparticipating in IRB meetings without both injecting some ofwhat I was learning about the national regulatory situationand being attentivein the usual ethnographically globalfashionto the panels practice. That is, whatever else it was,whether I liked it or not, my impending IRB service wouldnecessarily also have to be fieldwork.

In this new context, working out how to be simultane-ously a normal colleaguedoing my share of the panelsworkand a proper fieldworkercommunicating my inter-ests and then developing productive relationships with myinterlocutors through mutual accommodationspromisedto be a major challenge. Fieldwork risked being miscon-strued in terms of the research models more familiar in IRBdeliberations: The apparent ordinariness of my presencewould make it seem that I was not doing research at all(when I was).

There was also a more basic (although not necessarilymore obvious) problem. Because I had understood my workon disciplinarity to consist in reading and consulting col-leagues about their experiences (a style of work that KristinaGunsalus [2004] has recently labeled two people talking), I

had never applied for special research funding nor had I eversubmitted a description of my research for IRB evaluation.It simply had not occurred to me to think of my colleaguesas human subjects in need of special, federally mandatedprotections because, as suggested above, collegiality has itsown distinctive ethics of transactional sociality and meansof redress. In any case, I had begun these activities beforethe recent anxious expansion of regulatory controls madesubmitting a project like mine to an IRBeven for an ex-pedited review or to certify its exempt statussomethingother than parodic. Although this project may be an extremecase, it nevertheless shares with more typical research in so-ciocultural anthropology and sociology the quality of beinga disciplined species of everyday behavior, risking a widerange of possible everyday harms (from boredom and an-noyance to accusations of libel or intellectual property theft)and promising an array of familiar benefits (from friend-ships to liberatory insights and social criticism). The ratio-nale for special control, including prior review, of this be-havior is murky.

Precipitously faced with the prospect of monthly IRBmeetings, howeverin which I expected that the regulatoryhuman subject would be the only category of person ac-knowledged in discussions of social researchI suspectedthat members of our IRB would not see things my way. SoI met with the acting chaira member filling in while thechair was on leaveto explain my pickle, half hoping hewould tell me that I should stay off the panel.

He did not. Instead, he told me that the IRB needed ananthropologist to assist in reviewing ethnographic researchprotocols; and he was intrigued by my project, saying, Wecould use your expertise! What is more, he told me that,coincidentally, he had recently had a very interesting con-versation with a sociologist from the University of California,Los Angeles, who was researching IRBs, apparently just as Iwas. That is, he treated me as a colleagueas someone withwhom one might exchange information. Which is to say, hedid not think to assume the subject positionas someonein need of special protection.

But this is not the only way things could have gone. IRBresearchers have told stories of collegial interlocutors refus-ing communication on grounds that proper IRB approvalsand consent forms were not to hand. For example, in 2005,Gunsalus (a lawyer at the University of Illinois Office of theUniversity Counsel and professor at the College of Law) orga-nized a multidisciplinary conference on the troubling trendsin IRB regulation that I have noted in this article. Calling vari-ous national disciplinary societies to ascertain whether theywere, for example, tracking problems . . . members are en-countering with IRBs, she was taken aback when one officialreplied (without irony), Im happy to answer your questions,but before I do so, as chair of a social humanist and behaviorIRB, I must ask: Does Professor Gunsalus have IRB approvalfor her study???? (Gunsalus et al. 2005:23).

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A quarter-century earlier, during another period of reg-ulatory intensification, E. L. Pattullo had had an invertedversion of this encounter that set me wondering abouthow differently we perceive identical activities depending onwhether or not they are categorized as research (1982:377).He described a phone call he received from a Department ofHealth, Education, and Welfare staff member charged withadvising that department about the 1979 Belmont Reportproposals for revising human-subjects regulations. After re-sponding to a long list of questions and being asked to an-swer a further series of questions in letter form, Pattullo satdown, quill poised when it suddenly struck me: This guy isdoing research, and Im his subject! (1982:377). The letterhe drafted was a play of ironical juxtapositions that sharplyunderscored the regulations inconsistencies.

In happy contrast with this persistent and pervasivecraziness, my colleagueinformants on the IRB have beenopen to exploring the boundary between normal collegial-ity and ethnographic relationships, in search of a cache ofpartially overlapping interests.10

Conclusion

Everyone knows from experience that multiple socialidentitiesparent, employer, friend, and coworkerwithdifferent and conflicting ethics and politics, intersect oneanother in everyday life. Situating themselves in the every-day both as persons and as researchers, ethnographers ex-pect to learn how their interlocutors negotiate the tanglesof social life by observing, listening, and getting partiallycaught up with them. Expectations of these sortsthe veryframework that gives good work in ethnography its comple-mentary value relative to other kinds of social researchsimply cannot be translated in terms designed for experi-mental biomedical and behavioral science, in which goodwork depends on creating a demarcated, controlled spaceof research.

The focus in this article on informal (unfunded) field-work at home exaggerates the qualities that make ethno-graphic research in anthropology and sociology anomalousin an IRB context, underscoring a point that is also true ofmainstream anthropological fieldwork conducted far fromhome: Genuine IRB compliance is impossible for ethnogra-phy (as for certain kinds of critical social research) so longas the regulations recategorize all research participants ashuman subjects necessarily in need of special protection.Ethnographic research is radically misrepresented if the onlyallowable ethical discourse implies objectification and pre-dictability, one-way control over the research setting, and aresearch process that aims to design and thereby to predeter-mine the character of the researcherresearched encounterso as to tease single strands out of the tangled social fabric.Effective ethical scrutiny of social research is necessary. Butagreements about by whom and how are not possible with-

out a framework that clearly acknowledges the actual varietyof distinctive, ethically ordered methodologies among thedisciplines and that strengthens protections for varieties ofcritical social research as it zeros in on the significant con-texts and sources of risk for research participants.11

Notes

Acknowledgments. This article was originally presented as a pa-per at the 2005 American Ethnological Society annual meeting inSan Diego, in a panel that I organized entitled Anxious Borders be-tween Work and Life in a Time of Bureaucratic Ethics Oversight.Thanks to all participants, to Virginia Dominguez for encouragingsubmission of the panel papers to AE, and to Dan Jorgensen foralerting me to Canadian research ethics issues and sources.

1. See, for example, American Association of University Professors[AAUP] 2001, 2002; Gunsalus et al. 2005; Gunsalus 2004; Hamburger2005; Krieger and De Pasquale 2002; National Bioethics AdvisoryCommission 2001; Shopes 2000; Sieber et al. 2002; and Singer andLevine 2003.

2. The full designation of the relevant portion of the code is De-partment of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Code of FederalRegulations, Title 45 Public Welfare, Part 46 Protection of HumanSubjects.

3. I should emphasize thatlike everyone else currently seek-ing to situate his or her own local IRB experience relative to IRBselsewhereI have scant comparative data of an ethnographicallyadequate nature to rely on (although see Brenneis 2005; Stark n.d.).What we have is a growing accumulation of provocative anecdotes.Amid this general uncertainty, one thing is clear: IRB experiencevaries widely. Despite appearances, the system is decentralized, acondition thattogether with inconsistencies and vagueness in theregulationsguarantees diverging improvisations. Insofar as insti-tutions with different histories, structures, and resources have dis-tinctive improvisational styles, IRB practices may reflect the insti-tutional culture of which they are a part. This is how I understandPrincetons distinctive IRB process.

4. The specifically biomedical character of regulatory riskbenefitassessments is reflected in provisions that limit these calculi to re-search, as distinguished from risks and benefits of therapies sub-jects might receive, and that exclude from consideration the longrange effects of applying knowledge (DHHS 2005:111[a][2]). That is,research in this case is that which is not therapy (the applicationof medical research results). Similarly, riskbenefit assessments areenjoined for the research, specifically not for the long-term thera-pies. Medical research volunteers (like cancer patients participatingin clinical trials of new cancer therapies) can compare the likelihoodof a direct personal benefit from new knowledge against the risk ofharm in the research process itself. In contrast, social research rarelypromises such direct payoffs to its participants. Its benefits tend tobe indirect for participants, and both its benefits and harms are lo-cated less in the research process than in research products, such asthe consequences of publication (Hamburger 2005; Tropp 1982).

5. I recognize the irony of these conventional metaphors. Howevermuch they may relinquish control during fieldwork, ethnographersmostly accept authorial responsibility for their public analyses andinterpretations (talks and publications). Nevertheless, anthropol-ogy has a long, multivalent history of collaborative projects (includ-ing films and books) with informants; its still-popular metaphorsof incorporation and reception are objects of productive, critical re-flection that pays special attention to political and ethical dilemmas(Brettell 1993).

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6. High-profile cases make the point dramatically (Tavris 2002),but everyday ones also do. Consider an editors note that appearedin the New York Times (2004), reporting corrections to a New YorkTimes magazine expose of sexual slavery trafficking. The notes finalparagraph admittedand apologized foraltering the magazinescover photo, which had shown a 19 year old who had escaped fromher trafficker four years earlier: An insignia on her school uniformhad been retouched out of the picture to shield her whereabouts(New York Times 2004: 3). This is an admission for which few ethno-graphers would dream of apologizing (confidentiality needing nospecial justification in their work).

7. Because so many research subjects are undergraduate stu-dents in introductory psychology coursesfor whom a few hoursas a research participant may be a course requirementdebriefingis also construed as a pedagogic tool and is a means of enlistingtheir complicity in preserving the deception for the next round ofsubjects.

8. For example, one of my undergraduate advisees planned to dosummer fieldwork back home in Montana. The motivation for herresearch on high school rodeo competitors and their families was todemonstrate how rodeo is a central cultural institution in the west-ern United States, despite being largely ignored by anthropologists.She needed IRB approval but was skeptical about how to introduceconsent forms into her conversations with rodeo families. She wasconcerned that doing so would undermine her complexly balancedcredibility and trustworthiness as a member of a rodeo family her-self, whohaving played basketball in high school and then gone offto a fancy East Coast schoolwas, with this work, returning home(Overstreet 2006).

9. The 1993 version of the Institutional Review Board Guidebook isaccessible on the website of the Office of Human Research Protec-tions (DHHS; http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp)the office that anchorsthe national IRB system. A first edition of the guidebook was pro-duced in the early 1980s at the prompting of a presidential commis-sion, in consultation with officers and advisors at the Office for theProtection from Research Risks. For an analysis of the (very similar)2001 version of this source, see Brenneis 2005.

10. With a qualification or two. After the IRB chair returned fromher leave, and after I introduced myself and my special circum-stances againonce again not wanting my inadvertent but un-avoidable fieldwork to be overlooked, as it was wont to be in thiscontextI requested an exemption or an expedited (minimal risk)review for the IRB component of my disciplines project. Becauseresearch involving consultations with past and, especially, presentPrinceton IRB members was just unusual (and sensitive) enoughthat the chair felt she needed a proper, full-scale review, I was askedto make a formal application for full board approval, which wasgranted. The process was informative in ways I do not have room todiscuss here.

11. After submitting this article to AE, I became aware of the 2004Canadian PRE report, Giving Voice to the Spectrum (see this AEForums introduction). Its guidelines and the emphases of this ar-ticle (together with those of this forum, generally) neatly dovetail.It deserves a close reading and stands as a very useful resource forour ongoing negotiations, locally and nationally, over appropriateframeworks for ethically attentive research practice.

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accepted March 27, 2006final version submitted March 2, 2006

Rena LedermanDepartment of AnthropologyPrinceton University116 Aaron Burr HallPrinceton, New Jersey [email protected]

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Documents

Lederman 2006 AE IRB Article