The productive and disruptive methodology of doing fieldwork at work

Abstract

This paper argues that the ‘place’ of work matters methodologically in producing knowledge in and about the field. It draws on research conducted in Mexico with economically disenfranchised labourers and elite workers. Analysing two different sites in comparative context highlights the productive and disruptive function of the workplace. In the first example, interviewees play with constraints, freedoms and productivities of ‘work’, disrupting heuristics associated with this category. In the process, there is a blurring of formal/informal space meaning that for marginalised groups in Latin America there is often no ‘outside’. In the second example, employees at a non-governmental organisation internalise the discursive messages associated with neoliberalism. Here, the workplace is transformed into a productive site of subjectivity while also functioning as a limiting mechanism in the interview process.