PAHC RTP 2019-20: Methods and Methodologies, Dr Dave Calvey, 30-10-19 This workshop will critically explore the role of covert research in social research methodology. This controversial and ethically stigmatised tradition is under-utilised within the social sciences and can provide creative and disruptive insights on the praxis and practice of fieldwork.

1. ‘Covert research in Social Science: A creative pariah’
PAHC, MMU, 30/10/19

2. Contents
1) Societal context
2) Professional governance
3) Submerged covert tradition
4) Bouncers in the night-time economy
5) Reflections from my covert passing as a
bouncer
6) A revival in covert research
7) Creative ethnography
8) Some conclusions
References

3. 1) Societal context
 Contradictory themes of
 protectionism (Data Protection/Human Rights
Acts)
 Voyeurism (public appetite, popular culture
passing)-voyeur nation (Calvert, 2000)
 Populist investigative journalism (expose work
e.g. The Secret Policeman, Daly, 2003; The
Undercover Soldier, Sharp, 2008, Gomorrah-
Saviano, 2006)
 Practitioner work (untroubled surveillance)
 Normalization and saturation of cyber lurking
and surveillance in modern social media

4. 2) Professional governance
Ethical bureaucratization and
regimentation (reviews, committees,
audit trials)
Professional Governance requirement
for social research to be more
accountable and transparent
Doctrine of informed consent (hyper
sensitivity, research mantra)

5. Professional codes, associations and obligations
 Charters from various bodies-BSA (British
Sociological Association), ISA (International
Sociological Association), SRA (Social Research
Association), ASA (Association of Social
Anthropologists), ASA (American Sociological
Association), British Society of Criminology (BSC)
 Frowning up covert research/last resort methodology
as a form of deliberate deception and ethical
transgression causing harm (inflated risk and danger
discourse)
 Paradoxical fear and fascination with covert research

6. 3) Submerged covert tradition
-sex work (Cressey, 1932)
-religious cults (Festinger, 1956)
-management culture and bureaucratic dysfunctionality (Dalton, 1959)
-asylums, (Goffman, 1961-Bly, 1899)*
-pain experiments (Milgram, 1963) *
-sexual deviance (Humphrey,1970) *
-pseudo-patients (Rosenhan, 1973) *
-juvenile gangs (Patrick, 1973 and Parker, 1974)
-workplace pilfering (Ditton, 1977)
-police force (Holdaway, 1982)
-legal work (Pierce, 1995)
-bouncers (Hobbs et al, 2003)
-football hooliganism (Pearson, 2008)
-organ trafficking (Scheper-Hughes, 2004)
-hospitality industry (Lugosi, 2006)
-management training (Smith, 2007)
-lap dancing (Colosi, 2010)
-call centre (Woodcock, 2016)
-financial services (Brannan, 2017)
-Islamophobia (Zempi, 2017)

7. 4) Bouncers in the night-time economy
 Expanding night-time economy and leisure
capitalism-moral panics about binge drinking/
recreational drug use
 Stigmatized occupation
 Precarity of the work
 Casualised workforce
 Dangerous work (extreme)
 Attempts to regulate, professionalise and unionize
bouncers (Security Industry Authority, established in
2003)
 Links to gangsterism and criminality
 Intensified surveillance of the NTE

8. Situated door order
 Folk devil stereotype and urban mythology
 Fictive kinship
 Hyper-masculinity and interpersonal violence
as a performative doing
 Collective bouncer code
 Private policing
 Bouncing as dirty work (Hughes, 1956) and
emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983)
 Dramaturgical bouncer self (Goffman,
1961,66)

9. 5) Reflections from my covert passing as a bouncer

10. Ethnographic features and conditions
 Embodied autoethnography, biographical
familiarity (Layered account, Rambo, 1995)
 Lived experience (Geertz, 1973) of doing
doors embedded in the natural setting
(dual identity)
 Longitudinal immersion
 Relatively small field-Hobbs et al, 2003;
Monaghan, 2002; Winlow, 2001)
 Interaction rituals (Goffman, 1967), bodily
capital (Wacquant, 1995) and hardness
passport (Patrick, 1973) as fieldwork
mimicry strategies

11. Nomadic Ethnography
 Six-month covert ethnography in Manchester as a
working bouncer
 Governance of the nte (Leisure capitalism)
 Biographical mediation
 Demonized group (exotica)
 Multiple door sites (2 clubs, 3 pubs and 5 café
bars)-engineered exit strategies
 Manufactured door career
 Nomadic style was part of ethnographic risk
management (sub-aqua ethnography)

12. Situated ethics and the blurred bouncer self
 Occasioned character of ethical self regulation
and ethical moments in the field (‘turning the
tape off’ syndrome, being recognized, guilty
knowledge, publication censorship, shelved
data)
 Problem of going native but commitment to
realism (faithfulness-Bittner, 1973)
 Covert research not a panacea-obviate
artificiality but gain sustained problems of
instigation
 Covert role as deeply artful and craft like

13.  A form of edgework: Voluntary risk-taking (Lyng,
1990, 2005)
 A type of narrative reconstruction (Granter et al, 2015)
 The management of the post-fieldwork self (‘getting
back into character’ syndrome)
 Liminality of the setting (sensitive legal tightrope-’The
researcher as hooligan: where participant observation
means breaking the law’, Pearson, 2009)

14. Authenticity, multiplicity and liminality
‘I am a survivor of child sex abuse. I am
also a sociologist, a wife, a friend, and
many other identities one might imagine
for an adult, white female. The
boundaries of these identities converge,
blur, and separate as I write’ (Carol
Rambo Ronai, 1995: 395-396).
 ‘Multiple reflections of childhood sex abuse: An argument for a
layered account’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23 (4):
395-426.

15.  ‘In my attempt at artful sociology, emotional
sociology and sociological introspection, my
goal was to help the reader connect my
experience with their own. By discussing lived
emotional experience, readers are confronted
with the things they have in common with the
author and they are less likely to dismiss the
situation of others are freakish and not their
concern’ (Carol Rambo Ronai, 1997, 427-
428).
 ‘ On loving and hating my mentally retarded mother’, Mental
Retardation, 35 (6): 417-432.

16. A local media moral panic

19.  The Guardian, Education section, ‘I don’t want to get no bullet
over no bullshit’, 6th December 2000, Dave Ward
‘A 17 stone sociologist skilled in ethnography and kick boxing’.
 Times Higher Education, ‘Drugs, guns and fights-all in a night’s
work’, 23rd February 2001, Adam James
‘Some might also recall a short, stocky pony-tailed bouncer called
called David Calvey. But this was Calvey's night job. By day he
was a sociology lecturer’
 Televised interview with Nick Higham at the BA Festival of
Science, Norwich, BBC News 24, 5th September 2006

20. 6) A revival in covert research
Rise in various forms of auto
ethnography as well as more mixed
methods research
Popularity of investigative journalism
(different analytic game)
Virtual, online and cyber ethnography
(lurking)

21. 7) Creative ethnography
Creative ethnography as part of a
toolkit to analayse complexity in lived
realities (narrative and narcissistic
challenges)
Heartfelt, passionate, opportunistic
and curious inquiries (not enterprise
or policy driven) (Game and Metcalfe,
1996; Ellis, 1999)

22.  Creative ethnography as part of a wider
ethnographic imagination and sensibility
(Atkinson, 2015)
 Resist exotica and zoo keeping (Gouldner,
1968) and textual hypochondria
 Recognition and appreciation of loss,
failure and mistake (The Lost
Ethnographies: Methodological insights
from projects that never were-Smith and
Delamont, 2019)

23.  ‘The attempt to approximate some sort of
precision in the study of human conduct is not
unlike the task of swatting flies with a
hammer. Apart from the fact that one must
make the tenuous assumption that the fly will
remain still, one must be willing to settle for a
low batting average while facing the prospect
of leaving the room in a shambles when the
game is done.’
 (Harold Garfinkel, 2005:99, Seeing Sociologically;
The Routine Grounds of Social Action)

24. Howard Becker in Telling About Society
is ‘convinced that there is no best way to
tell a story’ (2007: 285)
(-an appeal to disciplined hybridity not
anything goes relativity?)

25. ‘There’s nothing in the world we should
trade for what we do have: the bent to
sustain in regard to all elements of
social life a spirit of unfettered,
unsponsored inquiry’ (Erving Goffman,
1983, 17, The Interaction Order,
American Sociological Presidential
Address 1982).

26. 8) Some conclusions
 Ethical dilemmas are complex landscapes
that are managed and not resolved
 Codes and guidelines are abstract
idealizations (disconnect to field realities)
 Ethnography as immersive, emotional and
experiential doings

27.  Emergent and messy nature of ethical
dilemmas and ambiguities
 Move away from a heroic picture of the
covert researcher
 Move away from extreme ‘love/hate’
reactions to it into appropriate use
 Are the social sciences missing a trick?

28. References
 Atkinson P (2015) For Ethnography. London: Sage.
 Brannan, M. J (2017) ‘Power, corruption and lies: Mis-selling and the production
of culture in financial services’, Human Relations, 70 (6): 641-667.
 Bulmer M (1982) When is disguise justified? Alternatives to covert participation
observation. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4): 251–264.
 Calvey D (2000) Getting on the door and staying there: a covert participant
observational study of bouncers. In G Lee-Treweek and S Linkgole (eds) Danger
in the Field: Risk and Ethics in Social Research. London: Routledge, 43–60.
 Calvey D (2008) The art and politics of covert research: doing ‘situated ethics’ in
the field. Sociology, 42(5): 905–918.
 Calvey D (2013) Covert ethnography in criminology: a submerged yet creative
tradition. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 25(1): 541–550.
 Calvey D (2017) Covert Research: The Art, Politics and Ethics of Undercover
Fieldwork. London: Sage.
 Calvey, D (2019) ‘The everyday world of bouncers: A rehabilitated role for covert
ethnography’, Qualitative Research, 19 (3): 247-262.
 Colosi, R (2010) Dirty Dancing? An Ethnography of Lap-Dancing. Abingdon:
Willan Publishing.
 Denzin N. K (1968) On the ethics of disguised observation. Social Problems,
15(4): 502–504.

29.  Ellis, C (1999) ‘Heartfelt autoethnography’, Qualitative Health Research, 9 (5):
669-683.
 Erikson K. T (1967) A comment on disguised observation in sociology. Social
Problems, 14(4): 366–373.
 Game,A and Metcalfe, A (1996) Passionate Sociology, London: Sage.
 Miller M (1995) Covert participant observation: reconsidering the least used
method. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,11(2): 97–105.
 Mitchell RG (1993) Secrecy and Fieldwork. London: Sage.
 Patrick J (1973) A Glasgow Gang Observed. London: Eyre Methuen.
 Pearson G (2009) The researcher as hooligan: where ‘participant’ observation
means breaking the law. International Journal of Social Research Methodology,
12(3): 243–255.
 Ronai CR and Ellis C (1989) Turn-ons for money: interactional strategies of the
table dancer. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18(3): 271–298.
 Roulet TJ, Gill MJ, Stenger S and Gill DJ (2017) Reconsidering the value of
covert research: the role of ambiguous consent in participant observation.
Organizational Research Methods, 20(3): 487–517.
 Woodcock, J (2016) Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call
Centres, London: Pluto Press.
 Zempi, I. (2017) ‘ Researching victimisation using autoethnography: Wearing the
Muslim veil in public’, Methodological Innovations, 10 (1): 1-10.