Dr Dave Calvey's PowerPoint for the Research Training Programme (RTP) 2018-19 Methods and Methodologies session. 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. ‘ Creative ethnography: Reconsidering covert
research’
Postgraduate methods workshop, Faculty of
Arts and Humanities, Manchester
Metropolitan University, 5th
December 2018
Dr Dave Calvey (Sociology Department,
Manchester Metropolitan University)

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

4. 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 surveillance in
modern social media

5. 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)

6. 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

7. 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, 2017)
-financial services (Brannan, 2016)

8. 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

9. Night-time economy
330,964 licensed door supervisors, with
231, 530 being active (Security Industry
Authority (SIA)
£66 billion revenue (6% of UK total)
Employs 1.3 million in the sector (8% of
UK employment) Night-Time Industries
Association (NTIA)

10. 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)

11. 5) Reflections from passing as a bouncer

12. 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

13. 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)

14. 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

15. 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)

16. A local media moral panic

19. 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)

20. 7) 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 an immersive, emotional
and experiential doing

21. Emergent and messy nature of ethical
dilemmas and ambiguities
Move away from a heroic picture of the
covert researcher
Covert research as part of an ethnographic
imagination (Atkinson, 1990; 2015)
Covert ethnography as part of an artful and
creative sensibility (mixed methods)
Are the social sciences missing a trick?