From Access Challenges (as Data) to Methodological Insights: Enhancing Qualitative Inquiries in Public Administration Research

Abstract

Little attention has been given to questions of blocked access in public administration research. We draw on past scholarship on access: qualitative research accounts in public administration that address access processes, problems, and possibilities; and our own experience with access challenges in a public school setting involving public sector employees. This allowed us to detail three methodological principles to facilitate the initiation of ethnographic research while access was constantly (re)negotiated: accounting for regulations, rules, and ruling artifacts; meaningful events; and routine and non-routine artifacts. We investigated public administration regulations, events, and artifacts, developing and employing an empirical method to collect data under conditions where access to primary field sites is blocked based on the boundary condition of our investigation. By describing the research findings and their applications, we demonstrate that conceptualizing access problems as multiple data layers can provide researchers with profound insights into relational dynamics, thereby enriching qualitative inquiry in public administration research. We conclude by arguing that this approach remains highly relevant even as field access is constantly negotiated.

Keywords

public administration access public organizations regulations sociomateriality organizational ethnography

Introduction

Successful organizational research frequently depends on negotiating access to collect data. The project here took shape because access to the classroom situation in a primary school organization was denied. Negotiating access to the public school as a site for fieldwork was relatively easy. Access to the school did not mean one could access the classroom; the teachers were the barrier to this. The school was open, but the classroom teachers were not. “Openness” may vary depending on many factors: the organization funding the project, the influence of research subjects, the local political context of the organization, and the degree of government secrecy (Gains, 2011; Guiney, 2020). As Rhodes (2005) states, “even if more research does equate to less secrecy, it is not synonymous with open” (p. 21). Despite public organizations being increasingly open to research due to civil service reform and freedom of information acts in different countries, gaining access as a qualitative researcher can still be limited. Qualitative methods have been a central aspect of public administration research (Brower et al., 2000), presupposing open access to the people who are the fieldwork subjects (Gains, 2011; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007). A corollary of gaining such access is that the researcher’s relation to research participants matters (Brower et al., 2000; Grant, 2017; Wagenaar, 2004), with access to privileged informants and situations through building trust and networks a vital issue (Kwa, 2022; Matheson, 2019; Oelberger, 2018). Grant’s (2017) discussion of research design and methodology highlights that gaining access is presumed to be a relatively unproblematic first step for researchers. The construction and negotiation of access as a central ethical, analytical, and methodological concern for many social scientists need to pay more attention to how research is conducted when public administration grants access but limits qualitative research. The situation we discuss was one where the need for access to the preferred data site presented a puzzle to be solved if the research was to proceed (Bondy, 2012; Irvine & Gaffikin, 2006).

We address this gap and recount how we overcame the challenges of accessing the public school organization by treating access problems as data (Brown-Saracino, 2014; Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Grant, 2017; Ho, 2009; Katz, 1982), reframing the boundary condition of the research (Karjalainen et al., 2015). Resistance encountered during fieldwork can reveal more profound layers of organizational dynamics and power structures, providing a richer context for qualitative analysis (Anteby, 2024). At the beginning of fieldwork, the research’s sponsor in the school was undergoing personal problems that meant her absence from the scene. Consequently, the first-named author had to develop personal relationships and negotiate access with school staff directly, without the mediation of a sponsor. Local access negotiations were slower than expected. Patience began to run thin (Grant, 2017). Limits were imposed. For instance, interviews could only be conducted at the end of the second school trimester. Indeed, as many have noted, a priori ethical approval to observe public officials working with clients is difficult to obtain in workplaces with vulnerable citizens and service users (e.g., children, the elderly), mainly if the researcher works outside specific education or health departments, as in our case. The opportunity to turn an access problem into an opportunity presented itself. Qualitative inquiry usually requires access to subjects that respond to questions or are observed in their daily work (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019). Access problems in organizations, conceived as a data source, can lead to “methodological creativity in circumventing barriers” (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016, p. 22). One way of developing this creativity is by recognizing that the social-symbolic work of public administration is not only performed in everyday interactions. When problematic access to interpersonal relationships with subjects (Harrington, 2003) requires continual negotiating (Bondy, 2012), written records may be turned to instead (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019). One aspect of public administration is that bureaucracy, as an autopoietic system (Luhmann, 1986), produces itself mainly through rules and regulations, providing rich opportunities for data access.

In step with exemplary practices in past qualitative research in public administration and recognition of the resources of public administration bureaucracy, we developed and applied three non-linear methodological principles in developing an empirical method. The first principle was identifying the relevant rules and regulations to report on and frame the organization’s practices being studied. The second principle was to scan documentary data on meaningful events regarding local professional discourses (Halford & Leonard, 2006) and debates (Aroles & McLean, 2016). Third was to map the routine and non-routine artifacts the organization produced as inscriptions requiring regulations. Jointly, these principles can enhance qualitative inquiries in public administration research as they provide fieldwork directions for researchers facing access challenges in investigating bureaucratic organizations. Framing our method, these three principles acted as tools for collecting data and starting the research despite the limits to improved access (cf. Brown-Saracino, 2014; Burtt, 2021). The characteristics of public organizations, enacted following public administration protocols, provide a conduit to data (Karjalainen et al., 2015). Different operating norms and the artifacts produced in response (Mathur & Skelcher, 2007) can potentially open multiple layers for analysis (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Strathern, 2020). Such analysis, highlighting the actual routines that face employees, offers insights for practitioners and researchers.

In this article, we first address past scholarship on access (Alcadipani & Hodgson, 2009; Anteby, 2024; Aroles, 2020; Burgess, 1984; Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Harrington, 2003; Land & Taylor, 2018; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016). We then focus on qualitative research accounts of public administration that address access processes, problems, and possibilities (Brower et al., 2000; Gains, 2011; Graham et al., 2016; Guiney, 2020; Hunt et al., 2020; Kwa, 2022; Matheson, 2019; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Oelberger, 2018). Having looked at existing qualitative research approaches, we detail the three methodological principles. We then describe the research findings and the application they produced. Finally, we discuss and conclude our arguments about the design and use of the empirical method.

Past Scholarship on Fieldwork Access

Numerous studies on fieldwork instruct researchers on what to do and how to do it (manage impressions, obtain formal approvals, deploy progressive and bottom-up access, engage in networking, and act according to norms of reciprocity to informants and gatekeepers) and what not to do (do not make explicit the object of the study and do not judge interlocutor’s practices) (Burgess, 1984; Gill & Johnson, 2002; Whyte, 1943), seeing access as an “ongoing process” (Brown-Saracino, 2014; Katz, 1982; Leigh et al., 2021). Research on “getting in” the field (Buchanan et al., 1988; Irvine & Gaffikin, 2006; Silverman & Jones, 1973) typically represents access problems as temporally specific practical hurdles preceding research (Buchanan et al., 1988; Crowhurst & Kennedy-Macfoy, 2013; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016) to be overcome by better presentation of the researcher’s self (cf. Brown-Saracino, 2014; Land & Taylor, 2018). By contrast, access can be conceptualized as a political, dynamic, fluid and unfolding process (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016); a continuous performance (Aroles, 2020); a political act that must be continually negotiated (Bondy, 2012; Land & Taylor, 2018), renegotiated (Aroles, 2020) and re-strategized (Peticca-Harris et al., 2016).

Negotiating access to the people who are the fieldwork subjects is assumed to be an essential presupposition for qualitative research to be carried out (Brower et al., 2000; Burgess, 1984; Gains, 2011; Matheson, 2019; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Oelberger, 2018; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016). Getting in and gaining access is not a necessary route to collecting data; once in, one may find many limits and barriers to data collection. Many qualitative researchers will appreciate the panic arising from being blocked by an organizational gatekeeper or other interlocutors (Kwa, 2022). Access long has been a topic of intense interest to organization researchers (Brown et al., 1976). When access is denied (Burtt, 2021) or gatekeepers make it difficult (Komil-Burley, 2021), researchers can either give up or negotiate and create a new strategy for collecting data. Researchers should not choose the first option before trying the second.

Past scholarship on access problems as data (Blee, 2002; Brown-Saracino, 2014; Carmel, 2011; Cassel, 1988; Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2002; Ho, 2009; Karjalainen et al., 2015; Katz, 1982; Land & Taylor, 2018; Seaver, 2017) recognizes that the process of gaining access can reveal essential aspects of organizational culture (Anteby, 2024; Carmel, 2011). In addition, limiting political and organizational practices (Land & Taylor, 2018), professional culture (Ho, 2009), or social conditions can make access difficult (Bondy, 2012). Organizational specificities need to be considered (Karjalainen et al., 2015), such as how to facilitate data collection processes with respondents (Althaus & O’Faircheallaigh, 2022; Blee, 2002; Leigh et al., 2021; Oelberger, 2018). How to manage personnel with different place-specific identities having disparate responses to research also may pose problems (Brown-Saracino, 2014; Evans, 2010; Gains, 2011; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Rhodes, 2005; Wagenaar, 2004).

Strategies for achieving successful access have been problematized in past research (Alcadipani & Hodgson, 2009), as have epistemological/methodological commitments sustaining ideas of negotiating access (anonymity, distancing, validation) (Taylor, 2015). How access is secured acts “as a means of clarifying how the knowledge produced from the research may be bounded in its political potential” (Land & Taylor, 2018, p. 471). For instance, Cunliffe and Alcadipani (2016) claim that negotiating access positions researchers as respectful supplicants of organizations’ powerful practices. Gatekeepers must be identified and mollified (Komil-Burley, 2021; Rashid, 2007; Whyte, 1943). Organizations’ likely openness must be assessed (Bondy, 2012; Grant, 2017). Marginalized groups with a stakeholder claim on organizations must be identified and accessed (Crowley, 2007).

Cunliffe and Alcadipani (2016) show how negotiating access to fieldwork can be influenced by the organization’s social context and micropolitics. The authors introduce three perspectives on access: instrumental, transactional, and relational. Gaining access is a fluid, temporal, and political practice of immersion, backstage dramas, and deception. Securing access entails complex trajectories (Bruni, 2006), forming relationships with informants, and convincing them to “open organizational doors” to provide information to the researcher (Feldman et al., 2003). These “doors” can be located on a long, dark, uncertain “corridor” riddled with political tensions over provisos about whether and how far they open. Peticca-Harris et al. (2016), for example, recount stories about the (successful and unsuccessful) access of three PhD students in American universities, in doing so presenting ways to restructure field access through the formulation of an initial study with plans for identifying, contacting and interacting with potential informants.

Neither researchers, informants, nor gatekeepers are sovereign powers entirely limiting access. Social media (Land & Taylor, 2018), the integration of data systems (Graham et al., 2016), and freedom of information laws (Guiney, 2020; Hunt et al., 2020; Lee, 2005; Savage & Hyde, 2014) break down the formal boundaries of different types of organizations. Access can be achieved in ways that go beyond the relationships enacted between researchers and gatekeepers (Crowhurst & Kennedy-Macfoy, 2013). Organizations are not just variably coherent or bounded spatial/physical entities (Land & Taylor, 2018; Srnicek, 2016). Networks enact them, with chains of connectivity and relations sometimes constituted contractually and other times socially either “within” the organization or “remotely” (Land & Taylor, 2018). Different paths thus open to accessing data (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016) as “organization spills over into many other locations” (Land & Taylor, 2018, p. 477). Even in more complex cases involving government secrecy (Rhodes, 2005), public administration research can benefit from being reflexive about access as a complex processual issue (Brown-Saracino, 2014).

Access and Qualitative Research in Public Administration

At its best, qualitative research in public administration inquires into administrative practice constituted not just by rules but also by countless actions, judgments, and rituals (Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Rhodes, 2005). These enact decisions, follow procedures, conform with or deviate from rules, and more or less respect hierarchy and accountability (Wagenaar, 2004). The distinctive contribution of qualitative research is inquiring into institutional prescriptions to show the behavior of public servants in practice (Rhodes, 2005). Gains (2011) explored a study by Rhodes (2005) that used ethnography to investigate political elites’ impact on public policy-making processes. Mathur and Skelcher (2007) discuss different interpretative approaches to collecting data on informal day-to-day practices of public administrators in networks. Such interpretative approaches can provide accounts of actors’ meanings (Hajer & Wagenaar, 2003) and how comprehensive governance networks perform (Mathur & Skelcher, 2007). Oelberger (2018) conducted qualitative research using micro-level qualitative data to understand who benefits from institutional structures and practices where public and private goals inform nonprofit organizational design. Matheson (2019) combined ethnographic, documentary, and quantitative data to map and interpret different cultures within the Australian Public Service, using interaction ritual theory (Collins, 2004) along with more hypothetic-deductive approaches. Guiney (2020) promoted systematic archival research as a methodological tool for criminology to complement semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, or quantitative historical data research.

Qualitative researchers gain access to privileged informants and situations by studying what administrators do and administrative work as a practice. Close observation and understanding build trust with those doing public administration (Kwa, 2022; Matheson, 2019; Oelberger, 2018). It is built slowly and experientially. For example, Oelberger (2018) collected data from 25 grant-making foundations over 9 years. Gaining access to the 25 foundations “was a slow and laborious process” (Oelberger, 2018, p. 980). As private institutions, foundations limit research access, making it challenging to collect micro-level qualitative data on their behavior and grant-making processes. A longitudinal design was essential in gaining greater access to the organizations being studied and strengthened the author’s social capital sufficiently to persuade other foundations to participate in the research. Oelberger (2018) overcame access challenges by discussing her past work in the nonprofit sector with research interlocutors. Her prior experience as a private foundation consultant enabled her to share experiences. Mathur and Skelcher (2007), citing Wagenaar (2004), observe that the researcher’s position in relation to participants matters, for one needs to gain access to respondents’ tacit ways of knowing what practice entails in terms of unspoken matters, especially its emotional and verbal repertoires. For Matheson (2019, p. 1369), “the difficulty of gaining access to organizations to conduct participant observation means that this can generally only occur in a lucky access situation . . .”. Matheson (2019) had worked in the Australian Public Service and knew some public servants who could be interviewed and observed; it was these serendipitous points of connection with existing networks that made his access possible. He maintains that researchers can and should use personal contacts as well as snowball and random sampling to select and access respondents in organizational studies. Similarly, the access of Althaus and O’Faircheallaigh (2022) to Indigenous public servants in Canada and Australia in the context of an inquiry into emerging inclusive models of representative bureaucracy in multicultural societies could not be based on published information on the identity of Indigenous public servants, as the data were not compiled. The authors identified potential respondents through existing professional contacts with high-ranking Indigenous public servants who vouched for them as non-indigenous researchers. Personal contacts matter in gaining access; as Kwa (2022, pp. 100–111) notes, “if a researcher seeks to observe the teaching behavior of school teachers in a public school, he or she would need to get permission from the head teacher of this public school. Getting this permission necessitates the researcher being socially connected with the head teacher in the first instance, which may be difficult to establish.” Brower et al. (2000) observe that much qualitative research in public administration originates from fieldwork, perhaps because researchers have ready access to the field studied.

Guiney (2020) used systematic archival research as a methodological tool in criminology, pointing out that with the improvement of search engines, it is possible to interrogate digital records (e.g., email systems, correspondence) in detail using qualitative data analysis software packages. One concern Guiney (2020) raised is whether handwritten ministerial notes and memos from private offices will change with their translation to information technology systems. The immediacy of reflections may or may not be preserved when transcribed electronically in a minister’s office rather than recorded as a memo by hand. Rhodes’s (2005) political anthropology of the day-to-day work of ministers, permanent secretaries, and civil servants was possible because he had worked in the Economic and Social Research Council’s Whitehall Program for over 5 years. Thus, Rhodes (2005) was trusted by senior civil servants and ministers, who spoke frankly and allowed interviews to be recorded and observed in their private offices. Such access may not be possible for or given to many researchers lacking these preconditions building trust (Evans, 2010; Gains, 2011; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Rhodes, 2005; Wagenaar, 2004). Nonetheless, Rhodes (2005) encountered many obstacles: nonetheless, governments often act in secrecy; interviews can produce deliberately misleading data; politicians may deliberately mislead researchers; and accounts proffered and actions undertaken may be skewed due to the researcher’s observations affecting the behavior being examined. To deal with secrecy, Rhodes (2005) observed similar departments (three mid-level domestic service ministries) and conveyed a general picture of the department and its minister instead of attributing quotes and describing the behavior of appointed officials and politicians in the face of problems. For Gains (2011), researchers need to negotiate access to the times/spaces in which relevant social interactions occur; without easy access to the field, much time will need to be invested prior to even beginning fieldwork.

The Problem Encountered

The field setting for our project was one of the 497 public schools in the Education Network in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo. We started negotiating administrative access to collect data during the 2016 school year. A specific aim was to study the regulation movement in education (Berkovich, 2018; Nordholm & Andersson, 2019), a movement that tightens educational organizations’ linkages (Gamoran & Dreeben, 1986; Weick, 1976; Xia et al., 2020), centrally shaping schooling and educational organizations’ structure and culture (Berkovich, 2018).

Seeking access to a school of the State Secretariat of Education of the State of Espírito Santo (SEDU), we contacted Glory, the director of the Escola Estadual de Ensino Fundamental e Médio Vila Regência (EEEFM VR). A meeting was scheduled at the school at the end of 2015 to present the research’s general objective. We strove to ensure her that the research would not interfere with the school’s daily life and that the research results would be discussed with the school workers before release. Soon after, the proposal and its statement of ethics were accepted by the Brazilian university where the research was lodged and by the EEEFM VR.

When the first-named author arrived at the school to start the research in February 2016, he was welcomed not by Glory, the principal, who was supposed to be his gatekeeper. Instead, Maria, the coordinator of the Final Grades of Primary Education, greeted him. Maria was new at the school and was getting to know the organization. According to her, the 2016 school year would be Glory’s last, as she was about to retire. As this was a transition year and Glory’s husband (who died at the end of this school year) was experiencing severe health problems, Glory was spending little time at school. Maria made it clear that she could not provide much support. She emphasized that “your workstation is at the secretariat. You can have access to all school spaces except for the classroom. Into the classroom, only if teachers invite you.” The teachers did not invite. They regarded researchers with suspicion. These suppositions were not as outlandish as they might appear for three reasons.

First, at the beginning of 2016, the village was under the media spotlight due to an environmental disaster involving mining activities in Brazil—caused by Samarco Mineração S.A., Vale S.A., and BHP Billiton on November 5, 2015—which had a significant impact on the Sweet River region where the EEEFM VR is located. Thus, considerable media presence and intrusion in the community compounded the hostility toward outsiders that the ecological disaster provoked. Second, the presidential impeachment process was occurring, which saw Dilma Rousseff, head of the Workers Party (PT), dismissed from the national presidency. Teachers strongly supported the PT. Radical right-wing elements claimed that educational professionals had been captured by “Cultural Marxism” under the PT’s imprimatur and were allegedly trying to ruin Brazil. Third, there was a lack of understanding of what research meant, making being a researcher questionable; if it meant observing teachers at work or asking questions, the investigator could be considered a “spy” and not to be trusted (cf. Mol, 2002). The tense Brazilian national political context and the local environmental problems framed the interpretation of the research objectives and researchers in a context of suspicions and hostilities aroused by this national “culture war” and the suspicions it provoked.

Working Around the Problem

The problem was evident: a lack of trust and local support led to restricted access. In our investigation, there was a specific site; there were interview participants we hoped to observe but could not easily access. Nonetheless, we had additional means of data collection despite subject access having to be continually negotiated (Bondy, 2012). Over time, it became possible to access many school employees, including teachers, pedagogues, coordinators, monitors, administrative staff, and cooks. We discussed their work organization with them and shared moments of emotional reflexivity in which personal and academic aspirations and desires for individual and contextual change were discussed and worked on (Hibbert et al., 2019; King, 2006).

The school is a public organization that produces different kinds of data. Like any other public organization (e.g., public hospitals, universities, city government, aerospace agencies), the school has governance procedures requiring public disclosure through minutes, notices, and public meetings. Even though we did not have direct access to classroom interactions, it was possible to scan publicly available regulations, rules, and artifacts, as well as to attend public meetings and events to watch actions, listen to stories, map the participants and question them, either overtly or covertly, knowing that there might be no answers (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2002). Moreover, local access challenges could be circumvented by focusing on how practical matters in the local school that SEDU mandated were organized through rulemaking and rule-following (Vaujany et al., 2015). Since the state publicly mandates these practices, access to their artifactual output could not be denied. At school, SEDU’s regulations and rules (e.g., state school calendar) were inscribed in different kinds of artifacts. Some were routine (e.g., student learning outcomes and performance synthesized in reports and inscribed in the state education systems). In contrast, others were non-routine (e.g., bound and printed copies of educational projects). The school’s education professionals produced such artifacts in relationship with different local organizations (e.g., Tamar, a Brazilian conservation project that preserves endangered sea turtles) as well as through historically recorded practices (such as teaching through educational projects) and in reporting on the organization of regulatory meaningful events (e.g., at the end of the first trimester, submission of partial school reports).

Education professionals simultaneously taught and documented their teaching-learning activities in step with national curriculum parameters. To warrant their work, they produced reports on the school’s relative success in terms of these parameters. In addition, their reports on special educational projects also were in the public domain. Accessing these data, despite the political and environmental setting (Burgess, 1984) and the respondents’ sense of insecurity influencing research access (Blee, 2002) made the research possible within the access limitations. Records, such as field notes, audio-visual material produced in projects in the school, as well as documents, websites, and minutes the organization produced, were available. We took advantage of the boundary condition of our study (Karjalainen et al., 2015) to access the intersubjectivity of participants in the field (Harrington, 2003) through their responses to SEDU’s regulations and rules as these responses were inscribed in the school’s artifacts and events (Latour, 2005). Meanwhile, access was continually negotiated (Bondy, 2012; Land & Taylor, 2018). Reflection subsequent to the fieldwork established three non-linear methodological principles appropriate for researching in public administration; with these, we moved from confronting access challenges to being methodologically creative.

From Access Challenges to Methodological Creativity

When access is blocked, researchers must embrace creativity to find solutions to overcome initial problems and open new possibilities for fieldwork. As researchers, we found that when opportunities for interviewing and ethnographic fieldwork are limited, data can still be collected and analyzed. We observed online and in situ mapping of rules, regulations, and events, as well as how routine and non-routine artifacts were inscribed in the school. From this inquiry, we developed three methodological principles.

First Methodological Principle: Accounting for Regulations, Rules, and Ruling Artifacts

Contemporary public sector organizations, professional associations, and business corporations are subject to myriad forms of regulation (Levi-Faur & Jordana, 2005; Monteiro & Adler, 2021). These regulations may be rooted in laws, standards, or formal and informal norms, generating expectations about how social actors should act in a specific context (Morgan & Engwall, 2002). Since the regulations created to control and manage public organizations are in the public domain, they can be easily accessed by any researcher interested in investigating organizational phenomena. Regulations expressed as rules and artifacts framing the work done (Joerges & Czarniawska, 1998) implicate different interests (Akrich, 2000, p. 208). National and state government-mandated rules frame intraorganizational regulation normatively (Foucault, 1981; Jacobsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006; Miller & Rose, 1993; Reed, 2002). These rule systems strive to produce objective standards that transcend the characteristics and context of local organizations (Herzfeld, 1993). In principle, their relationship with these local sites is guided by reciprocity rather than by coercion and sanctions (Jacobsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006). Regulation is delivered through rational, hierarchical, specialized, and impersonal management of organizations (Monteiro & Adler, 2021; Reed, 2002; Weber, 1978). Following regulations in a public bureaucracy produces a record of material inscriptions on paper or computer screens. As a consequence of different forms of regulation, public sector organizations leave many material traces of their rule-oriented behaviors. Being accountable in terms of these behaviors, public organizations’ written records of the tasks performed in the organization are permeated by what Lawrence and Phillips (2019, p. 270) call “highly visible social-symbolic work” embedded in material artifacts. These artifacts are a viable option for overcoming problems in accessing fieldwork and collecting data because they are publicly available material, either in print or online (Graham et al., 2016). Moreover, what occurs is inscribed in accounts that are a record of practice in the organization. Thus, the first methodological principle is to follow inscriptions that record accounts produced for regulatory purposes. Interest in and knowledge of these assist researchers in building rapport and trust with potential interview by developing knowledge and understanding of their work.

Second Methodological Principle: Accounting for Meaningful Events

By focusing on local organizational events as arenas for the production and reception of professional discourses (Halford & Leonard, 2006) and debates among actors, researchers can access local forms of temporality, spatiality, and intensity that matter (Aroles & McLean, 2016). Local debates arise when disagreements between professional and expert group actors question practices (D’Adderio, 2008; Venturini, 2010), opening fissures in organizational configurations (Nyberg, 2009). When events pose issues about what must be adapted or retained, these divisions become evident in the controversies that arise, and social dynamics frequently appear in their most vivid form (Aroles & McLean, 2016; D’Adderio, 2008; Tureta et al., 2021). Those “social unities that seemed indissoluble” suddenly break “into a plurality of conflicting pieces” (Venturini, 2010, p. 261). Observing conflicting realities in practice can help researchers challenge the positive taken-for-granted images that bureaucratic leaders create when addressing public issues (Brower et al., 2000; Gains, 2011; Rhodes, 2005).

Events and the controversies they may surface make the relationships between different loci of organizational action more evident. Researchers can understand how local actors relate to regulation (Akrich, 2000; Leonardi et al., 2012; Vaujany et al., 2015) through their terminating, strengthening, or multiplying of inscriptions (Davies & Riach, 2018). Local enactments constituted under the rubric of rules and regulations may interfere and clash with the reality of other heterogeneous organizational elements (Mol, 2002). Thus, the second methodological principle is that staging locally meaningful events can produce non-routine relations and networks. When researchers are blocked from interviewing or observing specific actors, they may overcome the problem by collecting data accounts of meaningful organizational events in which respondents participated (Grant, 2017; Seaver, 2017). Researchers can rethink research designs and collect data on interactions and reactions of various actors to the same event, an occurrence that is outside of the daily routines.

Third Methodological Principle: Accounting for Routine and Non-Routine Artifacts that Inscribe Rules and Regulations

Significant and non-routine events invite memorialization in artifacts. Non-routine artifacts, constructed irregularly or produced for the first time, can be analyzed in terms of the entanglement of social actions and material inscriptions (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Artifacts produced according to rules, while they have objective materiality, are always examples of sociomateriality because they depend on the situation and enactment (Akrich & Latour, 2000). Thus, regarding local definitions of the situation, any artifact’s meaning will represent multiple versions of the same reality produced by actors’ practices (Klemsdal & Clegg, 2022: Law, 2004; Mol, 2002). Research projects must go back and forth continually between the actors and artifacts enacted due to situated practices (Ball & Hodgson, 2001; Joerges & Czarniawska, 1998).

Artifacts of non-routine events provide markers of meaningful events that local actors perform in their roles in public sector organizations. Activities associated with those markers inscribed in the public sphere present a research opportunity even while organization members negotiate or block access. Thus, the third methodological principle is to trace the relations embedded in artifacts: who are the actors related to the event, and what is their network? From the point of view of research design, this principle implies that researchers should be attentive to the artifacts produced by actors during their staging of non-routine events and how they inscribe responses to the routines. From a theoretical point of view, this principle accepts a sociomateriality approach. How humans enact events and create artifacts associated with them are essential to understanding the ways through which government rules and regulations are made meaningful.

Findings: Narrating the Field

Sampling Regulations, Rules, and Ruling Artifacts

What the school’s employees and students do depends on rules and regulations that transcend classroom actions and context (Herzfeld, 1993; Leonardi et al., 2012). For instance, the State Education Department, SEDU, demands countless activities from its schools without necessarily being present in the school units. These demands range in governance from an input-controlled/centralized to an output-controlled/decentralized model (Huber & Gördel, 2006). SEDU produces regulations for routines in education that pursue different objectives, such as recording classroom hours in accordance with input-controlled and centralized calendars and obeying statutory requirements by submitting consolidated forms recording students’ absences and grades as routine artifacts. Non-routine events such as running a science fair or applying for resources gained by award-winning educational practices are output-controlled and decentralized; they entail events that engage actor networks outside the school confines and produce non-routine artifacts.

First, we will consider routine artifacts. Two State Education Department rules, regulations, and ruling artifacts are focal in the life of any school as well as for this research: (1) producing successfully compliant school reports and (2) reporting on educational and interdisciplinary projects. These rules are inscribed in the State School Calendar regulating the 497 Espírito Santo’s Education Network schools. The online calendar is a formal regulation designed to standardize educational activities and actions; it refers to “norms and expectations which social actors generate about how to act in particular contexts” (Morgan & Engwall, 2002, p. 3). The school calendar prescribes organizational action and employees’ behavior (Ball & Hodgson, 2001), as well as other regulations on quality and accountability control of schools (Huber & Gördel, 2006; Jacobsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2016). Moreover, the calendar is an actant in what occurs, prescribing what should happen in the 2016 school year (Akrich & Latour, 2000).

The archive of material generated in response to the requirements of the calendar is an invaluable source of insight into school routines. In the middle of the first trimester, the calendar required state school units to deliver partial reports on student learning outcomes and performance to the Education Department so that the latter could advise school units on their quality development (Huber & Gördel, 2006). Hence, inscriptions made in response to the calendar allowed observation of actions, associations, and assemblages designed by rules and regulations. On the day determined by the calendar, Nana, the school secretary, spent the beginning of the working day receiving a single sheet of paper from teachers, in which students’ grades and absences were inscribed by subject and educational level. Nana synthesized these student learning outcomes and performance and later inscribed them in the state education system, using prescribed software, representing the school’s performance and attendance as metrics of the quality of education provided. Student learning outcomes and performance are synthesized in reports and inscribed in the state education systems, which are routine artifacts produced in response to federal and state education regulations. The school actors engage in report activity to declare, following regulations from SEDU, if there are more than 10% of students with below-average grades. Poor local school performance, defined in these terms, can lead the Department of Education to intervene in the school.

Second, there are non-routine artifacts. The Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) and the State Education Department have regulations in education encouraging schools to teach through projects and do so by awarding prizes for best school practices each year. These are optional and thus are not routine. Printed and bound copies of educational projects were available for investigation; these artifacts refer to chronograms, regulations, and spaces beyond school walls as well as other projects and their objects. Educational projects are non-routine artifacts that respond to SEDU’s regulations and rules by inquiring into local cultural and environmental issues, such as rivers, legends, local traditions, and community associations. Calendars and projects are materialized in different artifacts, which, despite access problems, allow us to map and understand the effects of different types of artifacts produced in response to regulation in education. We shall next consider the non-routine educational projects.

Educational Projects

Educational projects inquired into local issues and were enacted through the school’s relationships with multiple other organizations, among them TAMAR. TAMAR is an abbreviation of Tartarugas Marinhas, Sea Turtles in Portuguese. TAMAR began its activities in Vila Regência in 1980. By the 1990s, TAMAR frequently contacted the school to search for common interests. TAMAR is involved in environmental education, and schoolchildren comprise part of its audience. The school sought to improve its education provision through strategic partnerships, which proved successful. Prize-winning projects were produced in 2015 and 2012. The school developed both projects in relationship with TAMAR’s base in the village where the school is located. Vila Regência has one of the few beaches on which the giant turtles—an endangered species—spawn. TAMAR awarded LIEDI to EEEFM VR, a building in the school that includes a resources room, a science/biology lab, as well as a computer lab equipped with Internet-connected computers for interdisciplinary project work. TAMAR worked within the school for more than ten years after supporting the construction of LIEDI. Every month, there was a meeting at the school. Yet the minutes of some of these meetings reported that TAMAR had created more work for teachers over the years.

The 2016 school year was overshadowed by an ecological disaster that befell Sweet River. As mentioned earlier, the failure of the tailings dam at an iron ore mine that was a joint venture of Samarco, Vale S.A. and BHP Billiton far upriver from the village, extensively polluted the estuary of Sweet River where the school is located. This had substantial implications for the school community. As a result, in the 2016 school year, many educational projects inquiring into the environmental tragedy were submitted for educational awards. In 2016, the school entered five projects in the 10th edition of the Education Department awards for Best Practices in Education and other related prizes, winning the Samsung regional award.

When a “project” was finalized, a closing event for the community was held, showing the results and announcing future projects. The school documented all educational projects and submitted them for various educational awards. Projects evaluated positively saw students and teachers win individual prizes, and schools received funds to develop further award-winning ideas. In 2015, for example, EEFM VR won the Education Department award for best practices in education and a prize of R$ 25,000.00, which was more than the sum of all other monies the school received in 2016. Despite the success of educational projects in raising money for the school, all teachers put considerable effort into developing these tasks to meet the Education Department’s demands. However, the extent of the effort led them to question whether it would be worthwhile to engage in project activities in the future. As we will show below, several implications for the school and the teachers’ daily work-life were at stake.

Scanning and Tracing Meaningful Events: End of the First Trimester when Routine and Non-Routine Artifacts Became Entangled

At the end of the first trimester, the effect of the additional activities that teachers developed was apparent. The interdisciplinarity required to develop educational projects can only be done well with teachers doing extra work. The more time to develop projects, the less time to teach mandatory content knowledge, reinforce taught content knowledge, and apply simulated and past exams. There was an apparent compatibility between reports created as inscriptions concerning rules and regulations recording local school routine and non-routine activities. The production of school reports and educational projects was stipulated in national/state education system regulations contained in the school calendar; however, the relation between routine reports and non-routine project reports might be better understood in terms of frictions and tensions (Mol, 2002, p. 150). School professionals disagreed about the relevance of projects for school performance and student learning achievement. For example, Maria questioned how it was feasible to produce successful school reports with so much time being spent on interdisciplinary work. As a relatively new appointment, she favored a more traditional approach and was concerned about the excessive work produced by the school’s teaching practices using educational projects. For Maria, the important thing was to teach curriculum content knowledge and apply tests and practice exams to produce successful report cards.

Producing educational projects inscribed in non-routine artifacts enabled EEEFM VR to reach a prominent place in the educational network and raise additional financial resources to reinvest in new projects. However, the individual, collective, and organizational prizes and environmental benefits had costs for teachers and students, creating additional work required for transdisciplinary efforts, project writing, documenting, editing, and meeting to conceive educational strategies. During this period, when Maria first raised her objections, poor performance in Primary Education Final Grades was observed at the end of the first trimester (May 23, 2016). If the school year had ended in the first trimester, more than 25% of students would have been held back. According to SEDU regulations, the result was not satisfactory. SEDU wanted a guarantee of quality signified by reducing the number of failed students (Huber & Gördel, 2006), forestalling SEDU intervention. Therefore, EEEFM VR sought to avoid intervention by the Department of Education. After the first school trimester was finalized, SEDU emailed requests that the school perform (even daily) educational interventions to reverse negative performance. Immediately, new educational activities and interventions to reverse the adverse scenario appeared. They did so in the wake of the failure of existing “ordering practices . . . . . . to generate a trail of unexpected entities” (Law & Lien, 2012, p. 372). From this point of view, the whole teaching team saw the school’s educational projects, including the science fair, Black Consciousness Day, and Tree Day, as the best ways to improve student performance and produce successful school reports. By scanning and tracing meaningful events, we came to understand how these shaped the reception of rules and regulations in the school setting (Harrington, 2003).

Discussion

Use Made of an Alternative Empirical Approach

Our data collection in the school began during the 2016 first trimester, initially restricted by the necessity of non-participant observation in classrooms. Anxiety about not being able to schedule interviews in the first months of fieldwork was resolved positively by recognizing the boundary condition of our study (Karjalainen et al., 2015), which afforded a way of not recounting what the interlocutors said to explain what they did (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). The initial setback allowed us to use these access challenges to design an empirical approach with methodological principles to collect data and start the research. As Grant (2017, p. 4) suggests, “during access negotiations, researchers may choose to focus on access to one aspect of the field at first” to make the development of rapport with the local organization’s actors easier.

Field research began by investigating the design and use of routine and non-routine artifacts inscribing SEDU’s rules and regulations (e.g., school reports and educational projects) (Scott & Orlikowski, 2014). Awareness of the critical role of SEDU’s regulation (e.g., school calendar) highlighted their importance. First, what was important proved to be actions such as the secretary receiving requests from SEDU by email. Second, associations were important, such as teachers submitting forms with student grades by class to the secretary to be reported to SEDU. Third, events, such as the end of the first trimester, which led the school’s professionals to come together to design and implement new educational activities and interventions to reverse negative performance, also were critical in the context of the opportunities afforded by the pollution of Sweet River following the tailings’ collapse. Finally, assemblages such as the integration of and submission to the educational system all pupils’ school reports with grades by class and subject, as well as the unexpected strategic inclusion of EEEFM VR’s, SEDU’s, and TAMAR’s interests in producing educational projects to improve school performance, directed “attention to how “everyday doings” constitute reality” (Scott & Orlikowski, 2014, p. 878).

Like Grant’s (2017) UK research, access challenges framed the choice of specific types of data collection. The data that could be collected provided different answers to initial research questions posed when expecting what sort of data would be collected in the fieldwork. Our access problems led us to focus on rules, events, and artifacts rather than the classroom interactions we initially envisaged. Moreover, the data sources accessed guided our investigation to specific practices and spaces enacted in the school context (e.g., conducting educational projects, delivering reports, and creating chronograms). We identified the several ways that actors manipulate artifacts produced in public administration. Public administration researchers should take the role of practices and artifacts inscribing rules and regulations seriously because, as Law (2004) highlights, specific realities are enacted by inscription devices and practices.

Our theoretical assumptions were reframed by engaging with alternative data (inscribed in rules and regulations) and times and spaces (where practices occur) in doing fieldwork. We cannot assume any public organization to be a single bureaucratic empirical object in which actors enact government policies into action. Instead, in step with Mol (2002), public organizations should be seen as enacted by various practices in which inscriptions in artifacts are used to perform organizational tasks. Being blocked by access challenges reframed our analytic approach. We had to focus primarily on artifacts such as rules, regulations, and educational projects and on the inscribed responses to them at the beginning of the research. Doing so directed our attention to a broader view of public administration by focusing on the local effects of national public policies for education (Anteby, 2024). The challenges pushed us reflect on the influence of these state policies on local practices and daily organizational life, redirecting our attention to relationships between the school and the community, the teachers’ work conditions, and the operationalization of the calendar in different activities.

Access to any bureaucratic organization may be slow (Oelberger, 2018), and first-hand observation is difficult to obtain if the researcher is an outsider (Matheson, 2019). Moreover, even if gatekeepers vouch for the study and collaborate with the researcher, the formal procedure they must follow may be time-consuming. Contrary to the naturalized understanding of the field (Brower et al., 2000; Kwa, 2022; Matheson, 2019; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Oelberger, 2018), fieldwork was able to start despite minimal access. Starting research is always involves risks for researchers. The research design can be compromised due to some unexpected event, lack of interest from the expected participants, actors’ overwork in the organization, or even the respondents’ fear of being placed in threatening positions in front of colleagues, superiors, or the community. Our approach presents tools for researchers negotiating access to gather alternative data sources and get the research started. Despite the risk of rejection throughout the research (Peticca-Harris et al., 2016), the insights that these access challenges produced facilitated the development of a new perspective on the empirical phenomenon of interest, enabling analysis of an event that made it possible to collect data.

Although denied access to teachers or pupils to talk with or interview, the empirical strategies that we developed allowed us to map SEDU’s rules and regulations through non-participant observation and scrutiny of online documents regulating organization action. As Guiney (2020, p. 82) pointed out, this type of data “can help us to gain access to aspects of the policy-making cycle that would otherwise be hidden from public view.” By engaging with alternative data sources, researchers can create opportunities to scrutinize unobserved aspects of public organizational realities, showing controversies and conflicting viewpoints about bureaucratic practices and their impact on workers’ daily lives. These sources led to an analysis of the case from an alternative perspective. In this sense, we sought to be agnostic about the data necessary for the phenomenon under analysis. With Lawrence and Phillips (2019, p. 273), we assumed that qualitative research is “an iterative sensemaking exercise, with each data collection episode providing insights that also trigger new demands for sensemaking and thus more data collection.” Inspecting “rules,” “artifacts,” and “events” provide different data and versions of enactments (Davies & Riach, 2018).

The local school’s artifacts inscribing SEDU’s rules and regulations were embedded in the school’s flow of information and were subject to surveillance locally and by SEDU. The design and use of EEEFM VR’s routine and non-routine artifacts (e.g., school reports and educational projects) following SEDU’s regulations (e.g., state school calendar) provided data. The data were enacted through work mediating and negotiating with different local organizations (e.g., TAMAR), historical practices (e.g., teaching through educational—environmental, social, and cultural—projects), and meaningful events (e.g., partial school reports submission, end of the first trimester). Gaining this information vindicated a different form of access that was coherent and out of the control of gatekeepers.

Our investigation complements analyses of how the “macro” logics of the educational system evoke “local” images of principals in school systems (Nordholm & Andersson, 2019) and how district central offices and principals influence school decisions (Xia et al., 2020). The investigation did this by describing the different uses that were made of productions of rules, regulations, and ruling artifacts in education within a local public school. The Education Department regulates schools, and schools have control over priorities in defining how school reports and educational projects might be done well. Yet, setting priorities does not silence local politics that implies the possibility of choice (Mol, 1999); alternatives, in this case, had in the past favored data on projects rather than a focus on pedagogic disciplines, a focus that came under challenge in 2016. School projects reporting on the environment could be accommodated within the regulatory framework, but the facts of 25% failure also were inscribed therein. Both a successful project and an unsuccessful school year were born from the disaster. They shared an everyday reality of a challenging context in which the lives and livelihoods of parents had been irrevocably changed for the worse through the extensive river pollution, devastating the prime occupations of fishing and tourism. Although these provided a basis for a successful school project, their impact on families did not, and it could not be included in the failure rate calculation.

Considering the Alternative Empirical Approach

The article’s main contribution is to draw on past qualitative research in public administration and the features of public administration bureaucracy to discuss problems and solutions to accessing public organizations for data collection. Access has to be continually negotiated (Bondy, 2012; Grant, 2017). The puzzle we faced was one of having access to a public school organization yet not to its professionals. The puzzle was addressed by first making access problems the topic (Brown-Saracino, 2014; Burtt, 2021), which made it possible to consider the organization’s characteristics in alternative ways. Unable to access naturally occurring interactions and faced with a very guarded teacher cohort, we sought alternate points of departure for access to data (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Land & Taylor, 2018). These have been explored and offered as ideas for confronting access challenges in public organizations. Any government organization such as the immigration office (Wagenaar, 2004), the police force (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016), state agencies (Graham et al., 2016), hospitals (Tureta et al., 2021), and government departments (Rhodes, 2005) have their own rules, events, and artifacts. All of them, however, can be addressed by our method of looking at the artifacts that inscribe conformance with the statutory requirements. Public administration researchers may draw insights from the three principles we outlined and apply them to make the first steps of fieldwork easier. Rather than seeing access problems as a setback, scholars must explore them creatively as an opportunity to collect data without incurring retrospective and respondent or researcher bias (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019).

The approach that we have outlined is agonistic to privileged theories, perspectives, or paradigms that determine what data should be and how they should be collected in the field. Privileging perspectives can obscure relevant events, circumstances, and possibilities for research. Researchers can sample, scan, trace, and include heterogeneous forms of things that enact multiple layers of meaning in an investigation (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Strathern, 2020) while continually negotiating subject access (Bondy, 2012; Grant, 2017). Faced with the impossibility of conducting interviews or observing specific spaces, times, and interlocutors, which can happen even when research is already authorized and in progress (Gains, 2011; Grant, 2017; Evans, 2010; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Rhodes, 2005; Wagenaar, 2004), alternative approaches are possible. Researchers need not abandon a field if access to personnel is blocked despite having formal access. They can start their research while continuously (re)negotiating access to fieldwork (Bondy, 2012). Recourse to multiple qualitative data sources has the potential to enact multiple realities and research insights, allowing scholarship to circumvent any idea of a transparent representation (Strathern, 1987). Bureaucracy, as a series of inscriptions demanding further inscriptions, can in itself be accessed as an organizing principle for research opportunities (Monteiro & Adler, 2021).

The impact on public administration from our perspective is straightforward. Gains (2011, p. 165) states that investigating the practices of actors in a public organization “can provide an understanding of the meaning-making of policymakers [. . .] involved in policy framing; of policy deliverers, reframing policy intent as they operationalize policy; of those who have demands and those to whom policy is directed, to see if it has the desired effect.” However, one crucial question our article brings to the surface and our approach helps to address is desired for and by whom? The implicit answer is to suggest the desired effects as those of the policy designers. Nevertheless, they are only the first inscribers. Many others collectively produce the reports that illuminate the policies’ workings. The desired effect for some stakeholders can differ from those for others. For example, as we have shown, the education policies of teaching through projects can positively affect the local community and school’s budget but not the teachers, who must meet the educational policies of a threshold for success and avoid intervention. Policymakers do not necessarily but perhaps should design policies that consider the condition and the risk that the new policies, practices, and solutions pose for public servaice workers. Public administration researchers can use initial challenges in entering an organization as an exciting point of access to new research questions and data sources for investigation.

Wherever access is denied (Burtt, 2021) or gatekeepers make it difficult (Komil-Burley, 2021), researchers should negotiate and create a new strategy for collecting data. Access should be conceptualized as a political, dynamic, fluid, and unfolding process (Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016); a continuous performance (Aroles, 2020); and a political act that must be continually negotiated (Bondy, 2012; Land & Taylor, 2018), renegotiated (Aroles, 2020), and re-strategized (Peticca-Harris et al., 2016). Such a conceptualization of access makes it possible to embrace access problems as leading to new data (Brown-Saracino, 2014; Burtt, 2021). There are always particular organizational specificities that scholars need to consider in doing qualitative research (Karjalainen et al., 2015), and the approach proposed here is one way of dealing with access in public organizations. Even so, the approach we propose does not explain how access to fieldwork subjects can be negotiated or how to interpret the meanings/perceptions that public administrators have about their practices. The approach should be used with other strategies to constantly negotiate access to field sites (Anteby, 2024; Cunliffe & Alcadipani, 2016; Grant, 2017; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016). Other interpretive methodological tools also can be used to address the meanings of public administrators’ practices (Althaus & O’Faircheallaigh, 2022; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Rhodes, 2005). The key point is that when access is blocked in some ways, one should not despair but creatively reimagine one’s approach to data.

Conclusion

We introduced an approach for dealing with access challenges while doing fieldwork, which we used to solve a puzzle involving blocked access. Based on good qualitative practices in public administration research, we proposed and applied an empirical method based on the boundary condition of our investigation, addressing access problems as data that revealed substantive research findings and insights (Brown-Saracino, 2014).

Researchers can initiate and develop research while continuously (re)negotiating access (Bondy, 2012) to participants in the field (Harrington, 2003). This frequently is assumed to be an essential presupposition for doing qualitative research (Brower et al., 2000; Burgess, 1984; Gains, 2011; Matheson, 2019; Mathur & Skelcher, 2007; Oelberger, 2018; Peticca-Harris et al., 2016). We suggest an alternative of considering the daily practices (actions, associations, inclusions) of public administrators, officials, and technicians shaping and being shaped by the local application of public organizations’ operating norms (Mathur & Skelcher, 2007). Faced with blocked access, research can be started by examining inscriptions responding to rules and regulations, events, and artifacts (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Latour, 2005; Strathern, 1987, 2020). Multiple layers of data offer researchers insight into relational properties and versions of organizational enactment (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Latour, 2005; Strathern, 1987, 2020). Research produces epistemic, relational, and emotional reflexivity concerning the field (Hibbert et al., 2019; King, 2006), while it also cultivates ongoing personal bonds through lived connections, shared history, and place (Althaus & O’Faircheallaigh, 2022).

For further research, investigators should consider developments in information and communications technology when designing fieldwork in a public organization. We are witnessing the age of digitalization “in which social life is organized through and around digital technologies” (Leonardi & Treem, 2020, p. 1602; see also Ågerfalk, 2020). As in the private sector, where companies are using digital platforms to provide value for customers (Rai et al., 2019), governments are designing online initiatives of open innovation, e-participation, civic hackathons, and collaborative e-government for addressing public problems and promoting citizen engagement in the co-production of public services (Mu & Wang, 2022). These initiatives are a rich data source open to any researcher in the field of public administration (Tai et al., 2019).

Contemporary phenomena such as algorithms and digital organizations can be researched as enactments produced by diverse modes of organization and methods (Mol, 2002; Rai et al., 2019; Seaver, 2017). They are not black boxes but are filled locally with many inscriptions. For example, in the case of algorithms, whose construction and functioning are naturalized to keep algorithmic operations hidden and secret, they can be made legible to different interest groups when researchers specify the agonistic and symbiotic modes of organization and methods that enact them (Seaver, 2017). Seaver (2017) acknowledges that when researching algorithms, it is only sometimes possible to access engineers’ workplaces because of non-disclosure agreements, closed meetings, or conversations in email threads/chat rooms. It is necessary to use different tactics or door openers, such as scavenging, which allowed Seaver (2017, p. 7) to learn from hallway chats at academic and industry conferences, mailing lists, patent applications, hackathons, and “off-the-record chats with engineers about industry scuttlebutt, triangulated with press releases and the social media updates of my interlocutors.” Access becomes “a kind of texture, a resistance to knowledge that is omnipresent and not always the same. These challenges are data themselves” that indicate, once again, that access is “not a one-time achievement, but rather a continuous (and exhausting) process” (Seaver, 2017, p. 7).

Footnotes

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Research Interests

Bruno Luiz Americo

Research interests include social sciences and organization studies.

César Tureta

Research interests include qualitative research methods, sociomateriality, creativity, and creative industries.

ORCID iD

Bruno Luiz Americo

Author Biographies

Bruno Luiz Americo, PhD in Management (UFES), including a period as a visiting research student (UTS). Tenure-Track Professor in the Academic Department of Management Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). Part of the School of Government and Public Policy faculty and the Doctorate in Strategic Management at PUCP.

Stewart Clegg is a leading international researcher recognized in several fields in the social sciences for his work in organization studies, power, and project management. Clegg is a prolific writer and contributor of over 300 articles to top-tier journals and is the author or editor of over 50 books. In addition to recent volumes on Project Management: A Value Creation Approach, he has recently published volumes on Paradoxes of Power and Leadership; Organizational Paradox Theory; Positive Organizational Behaviour; Media Management and Digital Transformation; Theories of Organizational Resilience and Management; Historical Organization Studies: Theory and Applications as well as Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory, with various colleagues.

César Tureta is the author of a book on qualitative research methods. He has written articles for journals such as The Journal of Creative Behavior, Organization, Revista de Administração de Empresas, and Brazilian Administration Review.

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