168 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
Caroline Tauxe emerged from her ethnographic fieldwork in Mercer County, North Dakota,
with some interesting observations—and lessons—about the effect of different discourse styles
in the transformation of a farming community into a more industrialized, less rural area (Tauxe
1995). In the 1980s, the energy industry boom brought new development demands to the county.
A professional planner from the East Coast was hired. Small business owners tended to be in
favor of the new industries, while farmers tended to be against them. The business leaders and
planners spoke the same decision-making and land-use language, that of the bureaucrat, with a
rational, economic, and technocratic approach that institutionalizes comprehensive plans, treats
all people alike, and enacts a monolithic land-use rule by which all must abide.
Through her participant-observation Tauxe came to see this bureaucratic discourse style as a
“legalistic ethics” position. She also came to see that the farmers typically used another, compet-
ing style, one she dubbed a “moralist ethics” position. The latter ethic derived not from the ratio-
nalist, bureaucratic perspective, but rather from the style of the early-twentieth-century farmers
who had settled the area. This style emphasized nonconfrontational negotiation, paternal author-
ity (i.e., elders held sway by virtue of their age), a populist stance against big business, individual
sovereignty over land, and individual and case-by-case mediation of disputes among the affected
parties. The farmers expected a more personal, less formal, less contract-bound verbal and busi-
ness style. This approach was disempowering them in their dealings with the professional plan-
ners, because the latter’s rational planning beliefs were more widely accepted than the farmers’
discourse style, and they joined these accepted beliefs with the money to back them up. The
business leaders and their allies in the “legalistic ethics” camp had more experience in this large-
scale development battle than the farmers with their “moralist ethics” approach.
Fundamentally different approaches and beliefs such as these are so deeply embedded as to be
almost invisible. Without the insights of the ethnographer, the reasons for the farmers’ losing the
battle might have been put down to less money, disinterest, being “backward” and less educated, or
some other surface explanation of why they were marginalized in the decision-making process and
thereby constrained from changing the situation. The role played by differing discourse styles might
have been missed. Even though most outsiders would likely see the Mercer County businesspeople
and farmers as belonging to the same “ethnic” group, their disparate ways of communicating are
similar to inter-ethnic (mis)communication. The analysis of discourse styles in such a case would
provide data for policy analysts and planners that no amount of survey data could produce. In this
light, it is hard to imagine a conscientious policy analyst not asking a fundamental question that
requires observation to answer: Do stakeholders approach decision making in the same way using
the same discourse strategies or are they inadvertently talking at cross purposes?
It is not uncommon for groups to negatively stereotype others based on their own emic, so-
cially constructed concepts and experiences, without even recognizing that exploratory questions
might be asked. Through their more intimate, and integrative, participant-observation perspec-
tive, Scollon and Scollon (1981) were able to realize that Athabaskans, a native people of Alaska
and northern Canada, were not receiving the governmental assistance to which they were legally
entitled. The Scollons’ project concerned the relationship between a nondominant population’s
culturally created discourse style—roughly defined as what people say, how they say it, and the
listener’s interpretation—and the dominant group’s culturally created perception of the
nondominant speakers. Many of the Athabaskans speak English, as do the “American” govern-
ment workers with whom the Alaskan Athabaskans were trying, often unsuccessfully, to sign up
for benefits.^4 Participant-observation showed that the major obstacle was not vocabulary and
grammar. Instead, it was more subtle, less visible, facets of language use that caused problems—
the cues that each group read differently.