116 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
historical context, in which a researcher—typically from England, France, the United States or
some other Western country—sought (and seeks) to conduct research—to observe, to participate,
to talk to people—in a village or community in some non-Western location. To do so, researchers
often did have the experience of exerting pressure on some barrier—often a colonial administra-
tion or, later, perhaps an officer in a Ministry or a prefecture in a non-Western country—for
permission to set up shop in some remote location. The Ministry was, for all intents and purposes,
a single door that, eventually, usually yielded.^1
But more than that, a whiff of the colonial heritage out of which late-nineteenth-century an-
thropology grew and the patronizing or even racist attitudes of that era and those practices seems
to attach to the concept of that entryway: Textbooks treat it in a dehumanized fashion, as if it were
an inanimate object, with the person seeking entry—the researcher—as the only party having
reasoned agency. Those with authority to grant or deny entry are often portrayed, historically at
least, as unreasonable, and therefore lesser, human beings. Yet, there are people behind those
literal and metaphoric doors. And so Feldman and her colleagues propose that the problem of
access be treated as a matter of human relationships that need to be created, fostered, and nurtured
in an ongoing fashion over time; and that the researcher needs to have some skill level in such
processes (2003, xi). The problem, then, is one of gaining access, as their title proclaims, more
than entry, more verb than noun. Similarly, those researching documents in archives typically
must gain access to those repositories and are faced with somewhat similar issues.
This more human-centered, interactive, process approach dovetails with our articulation of a
set of methodological skills used in accessing potential sources that might help generate potential
evidence or data, which are distinct from the sets of tools used in analyzing those data once one
has them in hand (although we note later that this distinction is largely a heuristic device that does
not hold uniformly or universally for all the analytic methods discussed here). Among these
methods of generating data is the ability to talk with people: the interview.
“Interviewing” as used in interpretive methods means something other than administering a
survey or otherwise following a list of questions that the researcher feels he must cover in their
entirety lest the interview be deemed a failure. Chapman (2001) captures the differences in spirit
underlying these practices in describing the reactions of his research partner, an economist trained
in survey research, and himself, trained as an anthropologist, as they set out to talk to people in an
organizational setting. Chapman finds himself completely enthralled with what he is learning
from their field research—interviews that last half a day, observations of meetings—while his
colleague’s attention wanders and he sees little coming out of such “nondirected” research. On
their interviewing, Chapman writes: “I think my colleague at the time viewed [what the textbooks
call ‘unstructured interviews’] as a subset of ‘interviews’; I regarded it as a subset of ‘talking to
people’” (2003, 23). The relationship building that Feldman and colleagues argue for seems para-
mount in Chapman’s comments.
This phase of interpretive research, however, does not necessarily concern gaining access
solely for purposes of interviewing, as many modes of interpretive research draw on sources of
evidence other than people’s talk. Ethnographic, participant-observer, and other methods draw
also on observations of what people do, with varying degrees of researcher participation in those
acts. Some studies—analyses of work practices or organizational culture(s) come to mind—rely
on observations of the physical objects used by people in these acts, including the spaces within
which these acts take place and the objects used therein, and they entail analyses of the meanings
embedded in, conveyed by, and interpreted through these artifacts (see, e.g., Gagliardi 1990;
Rafaeli and Pratt 2005). In addition, historical, deconstructionist, semiotic, frame, and other analyses
rely on documents as potential sources of potential evidence.