Fieldwork in labour relations research

Regeni’s research

The series of events that came to be known as the ‘Arab Spring’ started when Regeni was studying for a degree in Arabic and Politics at Leeds University. The overthrow of the Libyan government in January 2011 was followed by protests in Egypt. These led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, who handed over to the military. Hundreds of small independent trade unions then sprang up, in sharp contrast to the existing state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation. The presidential election of 2012 was won by the Moslem Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi. He was deposed in 2013 by a military coup, at a time when Regeni was working in Cairo as an intern for the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation. The interim government, before the election of Abdul el-Sisi as President in June 2014, initially appeared to be sympathetic to the new trade unions.

It made sense for Regeni, as a student of political science interested in industrial development, to focus on independent trade unions at this stage in Egypt’s political transformation. Trade unions have played an important part in the difficult transition from autocratic regimes to democracies elsewhere, most notably in Poland and South Africa. At least as important as their role in giving workers a voice on employment issues, trade union activity teaches about local democratic procedures. It nurtures the political skills of representation, negotiation and compromise that are essential for replacing totalitarian structures. It was because they were union leaders that, for example, Tom Mboya, Lech Walesa and Cyril Ramaphosa contributed much to their countries’ peaceful transition to democracy.

Regeni had chosen this as his topic when he commenced his doctoral studies at Cambridge University in 2014. His supervisor was a lecturer in development studies who had previously studied and taught sociology at the American University in Cairo, with substantial research experience on the labour movement and voluntary organisations in Egypt. He also contacted the present author for guidance on the academic literature on trade unions. We met and then kept up an email correspondence on relevant reading until he returned to Egypt in 2015. He established a contact with the International Labour Organisation representative in Cairo. On arrival he joined the American University as a visiting scholar, where he was supervised by a Canadian trained political scientist who had researched and published on Egyptian labour organisations

As a result, Regeni was well-prepared when he commenced his fieldwork in the autumn of 2015. He spoke and read Arabic, was familiar with Cairo, and knew the relevant research literatures on contemporary Egypt and on trade unions. He had supervisors in Cambridge and in Cairo who were both knowledgeable about current Egyptian politics and had themselves carried out similar fieldwork in Cairo. He planned to carry out informal interviews with people in a range of roles, as well as reading relevant documents and, when possible, observing meetings. Through a contact from a local NGO, he started with a case study of the street vendors’ trade union.

Regeni followed the standard steps of a time-honoured research method which, as the next section illustrates, has been developed by experienced industrial relations researchers elsewhere. His death was deeply shocking to the academic community. Its circumstances were investigated in depth by the journalists Alexander Stille for The Guardian in October 2016, and Declan Walsh for The New York Times in August 2017. They speculate about whether it was the consequence of intent, incompetence or infighting by the three Egyptian security services. Walsh, citing an Obama official, raises the serious possibility that it was a deliberate act ordered by someone in the ‘upper echelons’ of the government to ‘send a message to other foreigners and foreign governments to stop playing with Egypt’s security’.

The tradition of fieldwork

A proper understanding of the nature of employment has relied upon fieldwork at least since the industrial revolution. Whether it was Adam Smith’s association with the merchants of Glasgow in the 1750s or Alfred Marshall’s autumn factory tours of the 1880s, the best way of understanding rapidly evolving employment relationships has been by talking to the people immediately concerned at their place of work. Many of the early scholars, such as the American labour economist John Commons (Barbash, 1989), were drawn into fieldwork by work for government agencies which were concerned to understand the latest manifestations of ‘the problem of labour’, and they were also called on to mediate the associated industrial disputes. Fieldwork was the basis of the seminal analysis of organised labour in Britain by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in the 1890s. They were later to write about the particular research methods that had been required for the fieldwork in their book Methods of Social Study. As they put it: ‘For the ground we were exploring was, in fact, a permanent battlefield, upon which was being waged, day in and day out, the endless secular conflict between the capitalist profit-makers and the manual working wage-earners, whilst within the ranks of each of the opposing forces there went on a continuous petty skirmishing between rival profit-makers for markets and men, and between rival unions for work and members’ (Webb and Webb, 1932: 134). The guidance they provide on successful interviewing (described as ‘conversation with a purpose’) is just as relevant today as it was a century ago with regard to, for example, selection of interviewees, being a good listener, making it agreeable to the interviewee, picking up incidental information, and checking for bias.

Fieldwork flourished again as governments tried to tackle the different problems of labour that accompanied full employment after the Second World War. The authors of the classic studies often said little about their fieldwork techniques. For example, in Alvin Goulder’s Wildcat Strike the reader is told little other than ‘the continued cooperation of both the men and the management …, even during the travail of the strike, was an indispensable condition for the successful conduct of the research’ (Gouldner, 1954: 8). James Kuhn reports in Bargaining in Grievance Settlement that ‘my study of the grievance process is based on field investigations of several years, and I am indebted to the officers and representatives of many companies and unions who took time from their busy schedules to explain their work and thoughts to me and allow me to inspect their records and papers’ (Kuhn, 1961: x). For Allan Flanders’ The Fawley Productivity Agreements, ‘much of my evidence has been collected by undirected interviews with the main participants among management and unions’ (Flanders, 1964: 18). Huw Beynon writes laconically that the material for Working for Ford came from ‘men and women in the pub, the factory, on the picket-line or in their homes’ (Beynon, 1973: 9). Some authors are more informative. Tom Lupton’s On the Shop Floor contains a thoughtful appendix discussing what he calls ‘open participant observation’ in a manner that would have resonated with the Webbs (Lupton, 1963: 202–203). Michael Burawoy provides an account of his comparable research method for Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy, 1979: xi–xvi). In Strike at Pilkingtons, Tony Lane and Kenneth Roberts provide a full account of the varied sources they drew on among management, unions and workers with the comment that: ‘it was obviously impossible for us to have planned this particular investigation and designed our research strategies in detail before the strike actually began’ (Lane and Roberts, 1971: 18–19). For what are arguably the most meticulously evidenced of all workplace studies, Shop Stewards in Action and The Social Organisation of Strikes, Eric Batstone, Ian Boraston and Stephen Frenkel provide a substantial appendix which explains and justifies their interview, observational and documentary research methods (Batstone et al., 1977: 273–280; 1978).

The research on which Regeni had embarked was very much in this tradition. Whether carried out at or away from the place of work, it involves negotiating access, building trust, largely informal interviewing and, to varying extents, the observation of meetings and of interactions. There really is no alternative. The origins of worker collectivism are typically informal, ephemeral, and with few written records. Collective behaviour develops in the context of a power relationship with the employer; indeed, its main purpose is to shift power in the workers’ favour within that relationship. As with most attempts to shift power, it has substantial consequential risks of, for example, work disruption, job loss, financial damage and legal intervention. The exercise of power in employment is usually tacit and taken for granted. Probing of its attributes can be uncomfortable or embarrassing for the interviewee.

The fieldworker becomes attuned not only to what people say, but to what they do not say, to the humour they use, to their gestures, to eloquent silences, and to their interactions with others. Success requires an approach that is sympathetic but disinterested, and respectful of interviewees. It demands great care to disclose nothing that might harm them. Fieldwork is never straightforward because the micro-politics of inchoate institutions are by their nature complicated. Employers are rarely at ease with the idea of outsiders talking to their more troublesome workers. The academic researcher has to deal with suspicion from all sides about ulterior political or commercial motives.

There is an important caveat to this recollection of fieldwork classics in labour studies. They were researched in what could be seen, in retrospect, as relatively tolerant times and places. The prevailing competitive contexts and the available supervisory technologies meant that management controls tended to be far looser than is normal today. Fieldworkers in the twenty-first century face substantial challenges unknown to their predecessors. These include the well-intentioned ethical clearance procedures that are now generally required by the authorisers and funders of research, which can greatly complicate the negotiation of research access (Ryen, 2016). Even in the industrialised Western world, the decline in collective bargaining has made employers less sympathetic to research on labour issues; they see little to be gained for themselves from an improved understanding of worker collectivism. Beyond this world, the exploration of employment practices takes the researcher into territory long familiar to social anthropologists, with very different choices between curiosity and caution (Lee-Treweek and Linkogle, 2000). Indeed, it has been argued that in conflict-affected situations the process of research is increasingly seen to be intrinsically a security concern, and consequently more dangerous for the researcher (Mateja and Strazzari, 2017). For Regeni this was tragically true.

The threat to fieldwork

How far a particular set of employment circumstances is perceived to be a problem depends to some extent upon the observer’s frame of reference. More evident are the perceptions of governments. In the late nineteenth century the issues that made the work of the Webbs and Commons important for government policy were the socially unacceptable exercise of employer power and the disruption of economic life that accompanied the emergence of trade unions. For governments of the 1960s and 1970s, it was trade union power that posed many policy questions with regard to wage inflation, competitiveness and strikes. In the present century, concerns have switched back towards unregulated employer power and the implications for job security, low wages and social cohesion.

In the interest of better policy, governments have, directly or otherwise, been the major source of financial support for this sort of work in developed countries. A particularly interesting example has been the succession of six Workplace Industrial/Employment Relations Surveys supported by British government agencies over the period 1980–2011. Widely used for legislative and other policy purposes, as well as by employers and trade unions, the questions for each of these were kept relevant in rapidly changing circumstances by careful reference to contemporary fieldwork research, some commissioned for the purpose. This permitted the unparalleled and statistically substantial monitoring of continuity and change (Brown et al., 2009: 1–3; Van Wanrooy et al., 2013: 189–208). More generally, unless refreshed by fieldwork to renew their relevance to changing circumstances, the questions that are deployed in large-scale social surveys can lose their cutting edge. As the questions lose touch, the statistical analysis of the resulting data can become little better than the sophisticated treatment of conceptual rubbish.

For honourable reasons, face-to-face fieldwork has much in common with the best journalism. As with journalism, if direct fieldwork is neglected, social science is in danger of losing grip on the realities of a rapidly changing world. It can fail to engage with the elusive complexity of power relationships and the subtle mutation of social categories and perceptions. Without fieldwork the academic researcher comes to depend on little better than press releases, social media and websites for information. For much social science there is consequently a resonance with the prescription of the journalist Andrew Marr for his own trade: ‘the best slogan for a more vigorous and useful news agenda today would be: get out more often’ (Marr, 2004: 116).

Giulio Regeni’s death has been a personal tragedy. But it threatens wider damage for social science research. Those with knowledge of Egypt report that it has already paralysed fieldwork-based research there and elsewhere in the Middle East. The danger is that research administrators across the world may over-react, ascribing levels of risk to fieldwork which are wholly unjustified. The consequent restrictions would jeopardise the proper use of fieldwork for policy-related research in the developing world. They would make it even harder for those who are seeking to use evidence to nurture more tolerant and democratic societies.