The New Bureaucracies of Virtue or When Form Fails to Follow Function

Abstract

As the prospective review of research protocols has expanded to include ethnography, researchers have responded with a mixture of bewilderment, irritation, and formal complaint. These responses typically center on how poorly a process modeled on the randomized clinical trial fits the realities of the more dynamic, evolving methods that are used to conduct ethnographic research. However warranted these complaints are, those voicing them have not analyzed adequately the logic in use that allowed the system of review to extend with so little resistance. This paper locates the expansion in the goal displacement that Merton identified as part of bureaucratic organization and identifies the tensions between researchers and administrators as a consequence of an inversion of the normal status hierarchy found in universities. Social scientists need to do more than complain about the regulatory process; they also need to make that apparatus an object for study. Only recently have social scientists taken up the task in earnest. This paper contributes to emerging efforts to understand how prospective review of research protocols presents challenges to ethnographers and how ethnographic proposals do the same for IRBs (Institutional Research Boards). This essay extends three themes that are already prominent in the literature discussing IRBs and ethnography: (1) the separation of bureaucratic regulations,policies,and procedures from the everyday questions of research ethics that are most likely to trouble ethnographers; (2) the goal displacement that occurs when the entire domain of research ethics is reduced to compliance with a set of federal regulations as interpreted by local committees; and (3) the difficulties of sense making when ethnographers and IRB administrators or panel members respond each to the other's concerns.