Where is the Field?

Front matter

THE FINNISH LITERATURE SOCIETY (SKS) was founded in 1831 and has, from the very beginning, engaged in publishing operations. It nowadays publishes literature in the fields of ethnology and folkloristics, linguistics, literary research and cultural history.

The first volume of the Studia Fennica series appeared in 1933. Since 1992, the series has been divided into three thematic subseries: Ethnologica, Folkloristica and Linguistica. Two additional subseries were formed in 2002, Historica and Litteraria. The subseries Anthropologica was formed in 2007.

In addition to its publishing activities, the Finnish Literature Society maintains research activities and infrastructures, an archive containing folklore and literary collections, a research library and promotes Finnish literature abroad.

Contents

LAURA HIRVI AND HANNA SNELLMAN Introduction: Nine Tales of the Field 7

REACHING THE HARD-TO-REACH

Laura HIRVI Multi-sited Fieldwork amongst Sikhs in Finland and California Reaching the Offline via the Online 23

Introduction

In the last decade transnational migration has reached unprecedented levels. The United Nations estimated that in 2010 the number of international migrants exceeded 200 million.' The number consists of labour migrants, refugees, students, families, retirees, highly skilled migrants and irregular migrants who cross national borders in clandestine ways in search of a better life. The increasing importance of transnational mobility and migration calls for new and innovative ways of studying this phenomenon, of bringing a human face’ to the study of global mobility.

Ethnographic fieldwork provides excellent tools for studying the migrant experience as well as for looking at the on-the-ground influences of these transnational population movements on both the sending and the receiving localities. Some small (national) migrant groups are scattered in different places, even though their reasons for mobility and their individual characteristics are fairly similar. This article asks how the labour market experiences of such migrant groups can be studied. Are there alternatives to traditional ethnographic fieldwork, which focuses on one location, or should one conduct fieldwork in several different locations? Or is it possible to be in the field virtually and study the experiences of such groups via the Internet?

1 United Nations 2009. 2 Favell et al. 2006.

The development of the Internet with its online communities like Facebook, and tools such as web surveys, blogs and Skype, a free software application for making online telephone calls,’ have offered ethnographers a new, virtual field to explore. This chapter discusses the methodological choices made in a case study of educated Finns who have moved abroad to look for work or accepted job offers in other European Union countries. The research focuses especially on the ways in which cultural capital‘ can be transferred across borders. The paths leading abroad from Finland are much more diverse today than in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was common that whole families from certain Finnish towns and villages moved to work in the industrial towns of Sweden. Many of those leaving today have higher education degrees and are free to choose their workplaces from a variety of destinations.’ The participants of the study in question had tertiary degrees, were aged 25-44 years and had moved to different European Union countries. The key research question was to try to understand how they find work abroad and what it is like to be a highly skilled Finnish migrant in today’s Europe.

The chapter discusses the possibilities of studying the experiences of such small migrant groups online against the background of some historical developments in the ethnographic method. Can collecting data from a geographically scattered migrant group online create a sample of respondents that would resemble a community - even though the people in question have never met each other? The chapter traces a narrative from armchair ethnology to what could be called ‘armchair netnography’f Along the way it asks if researchers who want to be in the field virtually can share the experience of the group of migrants that they study, as with traditional ‘physical’ ethnography.

From armchair ethnology to ‘writing culture’

The anthropologists of the nineteenth-century era of ‘armchair ethnology’ sought to establish a general science of Man by looking at the origins of modern institutions, rituals and customs and mapping their evolution toward ever higher standards of rationality.’ At the time, physical travel to these far away places was not necessary, as interpretations could be made on the basis of cultural artefacts gathered and travel accounts written by missionaries and traders, for example. In the early twentieth century, anthropology was established as an academic discipline unique in its capacity to produce new information based on professional fieldwork. Early fieldwork-based ethnographies belonged to the genre of ethnographic realism: the attempt

Skype can be downloaded free from www.skype.com.

E.g. Bourdieu 1986.

See e.g. Koikkalainen 2011b; Kiriakos 2011.

I am not the first to use this analogy; see for example Roff 2005; Haverinen 2009. Marcus & Fisher 1986, 17-18.

ND WW À © to present a culture as it ‘really was. In many early texts, the delicate balance between the objective and the subjective was maintained by producing polished ethnographies as the end product of the fieldwork, stripped of the failures, feelings and frustrations of the anthropologist.* These genre conventions were contested in the 1980s, when the art of writing an account of a different culture was acknowledged to be a separate skill, along with experimenting with different kinds of ethnographic writing.’

One of the key contributions to the textual turn in anthropology, which dealt with the problems of ethnographic texts, was Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986). The discussions that preceded and followed the publication of Writing Culture suggested that anthropology had to either look critically at its own conventions or be reduced to producing texts that are merely subjective accounts of foreign cultures. This period has been described as a ‘representational crisis’ in ethnography, and some scholars later criticised it for being too self-reflective and lacking scientific value." Even so, the textual turn significantly influenced our understanding of what ethnographies are. Ethnographies are not true representations of the essence of a particular culture but culturally constructed texts, since culture itself and our views of it are ‘historically produced and actively contested’!! They are inherently partial, as the writer always chooses what to include, whose side of the story to tell and how to translate the reality of others.”

Today, ethnography can be seen as a ‘cocktail of methodologies’? used in a variety of disciplines, encompassing many forms of data-gathering and suitable for a wide range of research topics. Ethnography has been extensively used in the field of interdisciplinary migration studies, and the lives of Finnish migrants have also been studied with this method. Examples of studies loosely falling into this category have, among other subjects, focused on Finnish women married to Greek men," Finns working in Silicon Valley,” Finnish retirees moving to the south coast of Spain" and Finns who have moved to work in Sweden.”

It would be quite possible to study the experiences of educated Finns in the European labour markets using the traditional ethnographic approach. To the extent that immersion in the culture of the migrants in question is expected, the research would have to be limited to one geographical location. Of European cities, the most natural choice would be London,

14 Järvinen-Tassopoulos 2007.

15 Kiriakos 2011.

16 Karisto 2008.

17 Snellman 2003; Piippola 2007.

which is a magnet for highly skilled workers from around the globe.’* However, even in this location, the field would be dispersed and fragmented, since the Finns living in London do not form an ethnic enclave or inhabit the same neighbourhoods, nor do all of them work in the same types of jobs. It is also worth noting that concentrating on just one location, like Europe's major global city London, would inevitably alter the scope of the research. Focusing on the subjects’ experiences in one location would make it difficult to answer the research question posed in the introduction to this chapter: How do educated Finns find work abroad? And further, how have they benefited from the opportunities offered by the European free mobility regime? Do they face discrimination, or does their cultural capital transfer abroad easily?

Multi-sited ethnography and ethnography as an art of the possible

There are nearly as many definitions of ethnography as there are major works written by renowned anthropologists and research methodology guides for social science students. The fact that ethnography has developed and endured many paradigm shifts and been adapted to research fields ranging from human geography to consumer behaviour and from psychology to economics testifies to the adaptability of this research approach. Many definitions of ethnography stress the personal engagement of the researcher in the life of the subjects of her/his study.” Ethnography is more than mere participant observation of the culture and everyday practices of a particular group in naturally occurring situations. It entails the utilisation of different types of data, such as life histories, films and photography, in-depth interviews and ‘engaged listening.” Other interpretations of what it means to be in the field have been suggested in addition to the traditional protracted period of fieldwork. If we wish to study phenomena that are no longer bound to certain localities then the field has to be understood more widely.”!

One interesting departure from the traditional model is the introduction of multi-sited ethnography, most notably by George Marcus (1995), who argued that postmodern ethnographic work, which moves out from single sites, should ‘examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space.” In this case, the object of study would be cultural formations produced in several different locales. Multi-sited ethnography is not just a controlled comparison of field sites but a more complex process since the objects of study are also ‘mobile and multiply

18 See e.g. Favell 2008.

situated’ Marcus concludes that multi-sited research can be designed around six different themes. The first possibility is to follow the people. This type of approach has been used in migration, diaspora and transnational studies, where the journeys of migrants are followed from the place of origin to the country of destination.” The other possibilities suggested are to follow the thing, the metaphor, the story, the life of a particular individual, or to follow the conflict.”

If I were to follow the lead of George Marcus in formulating my study design, I should identify potential intra-European migrants while they are still living in Finland and follow their journeys to other European countries. I should sit with them in the waiting rooms of potential employers and observe how they succeed in finding a job, either starting a career abroad, moving on to a new country or returning home. There are many interesting examples of researchers tracking the lives of mobile groups that cross national borders.” In Europe, Adrian Favell’s (2008) study of young professional ‘Eurostar’ used such a multi-sited approach when he interviewed transnationally mobile Europeans living in three cities: London, Brussels and Amsterdam. In the case of highly skilled Finns moving to Europe, too, this would be one possible course of action, albeit rather slow since gathering enough field data on the individual journeys of those choosing to go to cities like Paris, Rome, Brussels or Dublin would take years.

The traditional ethnographer conducted fieldwork to record, understand and explain cultural processes such as farming practices, religious acts, initiation rites or other mystical rituals. Observing transnationally mobile highly skilled individuals trying to find work in different European locations would not create the same kind of data. The migrants of interest to me are homogeneous in many respects, for example in having a tertiary degree and being within a specific age bracket. But there are differences as well: they have diverse educational backgrounds and work histories, and they encounter an equally diverse set of employers in their countries of destination. As Ulf Hannerz has argued, some of the changes affecting the ethnographic method are caused by modernity and the changing nature of work itself: participant observation makes little sense if the people you are studying spend hours alone at a desk staring at a computer screen.”

As also becomes clear from looking at the other contributions in this volume, there are numerous ways of conducting ethnographic research in the field of migration studies and in the contemporary world in general: the fieldwork may be deeply rooted in one local community which is a key node in a migrant network, or it may span multiple localities or include the

24 See Vogt in this volume for a description of such an approach.

26 See e.g. Greenhalgh 2007; Hannerz 2003; Sinatti 2008; Smith 2007; Smith & Bakker 2008.

act of following mobile populations commuting from one place to another.” As Karen O'Reilly concludes: ‘the sense of a group and a locality has not gone, but there is an argument that people can no longer be understood simply in their local context, that the regional or global context must be addressed as well as political, economic, social and cultural relations?” In this sense, focusing on one small and dispersed national group located in several countries can reveal something about the nature of European mobility in general and about the kinds of barriers that still exist for transnational mobility within this seemingly border-free area.

But if a long-term immersion in the culture of the mobile population in question is not feasible, one has to make do with the next-best option for gathering information and be content with what Ulf Hannerz calls ‘ethnography as an art of the possible.” The tools provided by the Internet are helpful in such an endeavour and can help in answering questions of a more general nature: How does intra-European mobility work in practice? How can these migrants make the best use of their education and previous work experience in a new country? Is there a European labour market that they become part of when they leave Finland?

In the world wide field of the web

In the past twenty years, information technology and new communication methods have challenged the ways in which we study culture and society. The development of different online networking tools, virtual communities and discussion platforms has created a multitude of new and exciting forums for interaction. People across the globe play interactive online games, meet in chat-rooms, share their photos on Facebook, write microblogs, create content for wikis and publish music and videos for anyone to see. The Internet was therefore the ethnographic field that I chose to enter in order to find informants who could help in answering the key questions of my study.

In her influential book Virtual Ethnography (2000), Christine Hine developed a methodology for an empirical investigation of the Internet and its current uses. She divided previous research into two categories. The first strand of research sees the ‘Internet as culture’ and has explored the rich ethnographic field-sites provided by new forms of computer-aided communication. These include the study of newsgroups, virtual communities and trying to understand online identity play. The second type of research has looked at the ‘Internet as a cultural artefact’ that is shaped by the social context and the technological applications used. In this approach the design of the Internet today is seen as the result of the actions of various interest

28 For one example of how the lives of migrants originating from one country can be studied in multiple locations, see the article by Hirvi in this volume.

groups and social forces that have allowed certain types of technology to flourish, while other possible forms of communication and interaction have been sidelined. The content of the media produced and consumed can be examined through ethnography utilising categories such as producer, user and audience to understand the capabilities of technology in situated contexts.*!

The main practical problems with these two types of virtual ethnography lie in the location of the field itself. If doing ethnographic fieldwork is understood as a prolonged engagement with a specific location and culture, then how is this engagement to be achieved online? And if one wishes to study the Internet as a cultural artefact (or a form of text), then how can one observe the everyday actions of individual web content producers when they largely engage in these actions in the solitude of their homes?” For Hine, the development of multi-sited ethnography, ‘the interactive and engaged exploration of connectivity’ provides an interesting avenue to follow. Her solution to the problem of locating the field is to choose a specific topic as the object of virtual ethnography, not a bounded spatial location.*

Ethnographic methods have been used online in a variety of disciplines and with diverse research topics ranging from the study of sexual expression to food culture and from online fashion to cross-cultural weddings.” Several researchers have argued for a disciplined approach to studying the virtual world. These include Arturo Escobar (1994) with his anthropology of cyberculture, Anjali Puri (2007) with webnography, Dhiraj Murthy (2008) with digital ethnography, and Robert V. Kozinets (2010) with netnography. Yet another attempt to formulate a coherent agenda for online research is offered by Jennifer Brinkerhoff (2009), who has studied ‘digital diasporas’ in the field of international relations, and who sees the Internet as being ‘ideally suited for connecting diasporans who are geographically scattered and removed from their homeland.’

The Internet and especially social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook provide inexpensive ways of keeping contact with those who stay at home as well as tools for building networks in their new home areas or countries. They can increase one’s social capital as contact with old friends and acquaintances can be maintained across geographical distance.” Brinkerhoff defines diasporas as migrant groups who are dispersed, whether by choice or by force, across at least one national border; who share a collective myth or memory of their homeland and are committed to keeping that alive; who ponder on the issue of possible return one day; and who share a diasporic consciousness and hybrid identity.**

36 Brinkerhoff 2009, 12.

37 See e.g. Ellison et al. 2007.

38 Brinkerhoff 2009, 31.

Finns, too, have websites and discussion groups that serve expatriates living in different locations. These include commercial and non-commercial websites like www.expatrium.fi and www.ulkosuomalainen.com and discussion forums, mailing lists and Facebook groups for Finns living in London, Florence or Berlin, for example. Thus, even though their numbers are small in comparison with the global migration networks of larger groups, at least online Finns exist as a distinct migrant group. Many expatriate Finns are also active in local Finnish associations, the Finland Society or Finnish-language schools for expatriate children. These organizations are active both locally and transnationally, so expatriate Finns do engage in some forms of diaspora politics and take part in transnational advocacy networks.”

But whether Finns discussing matters online can be regarded as taking part in a digital diaspora“ is debatable. Finns as intra-European migrants are privileged in having the right of free movement and being able to freely engage in circular migration or take up short-term work, language training or traineeships abroad. Their relationship with their homeland is not complicated in the same sense as that of those who have been forced to leave, nor do they generally send remittances home or plan to invest in developing their country of origin. Teaching the Finnish language to their children and applying for dual nationality are ways of keeping the Finnish heritage alive, but this does not add up to a shared myth of the homeland that is ‘created and recreated across distances and generations,“ as Brinkerhoff describes one of the key elements that define a diaspora.

It would be possible to study Finns in Europe either by openly taking part in the discussions that they have on the expatriate websites or by reading what they write about work and looking for employment as a passive observer.” The problem with this approach for a study like mine is that the websites that I found do not focus on discussions about finding work per se. More commonly they exchange information on how to find housing or affordable day-care, open a bank account or beat the local administrative bureaucracy. They provide a form of on-the-ground tacit knowledge that is shared with more recent movers, together with tips on where to find a sauna or get the cheapest flights home. If the ethnography is limited to a certain online discussion group, for example, it might be difficult to produce the kind of diversity of voices that my study is looking for.

Finding Finns in Europe: the online approach

During the development of the European Unions free movement regime over the past sixty years, crossing intra-European borders has been made so simple that it has been said to resemble regional mobility more than

39 Vierimaa 2011.

40 Brinkerhoff 2009.

41 Brinkerhoff 2009, 31.

international migration.* European citizens wishing to look for work in other member states can cross national borders and do so legally without necessarily showing up on migration statistics. Researchers studying intra-European mobility have faced a difficult problem: how to reach this population that is almost invisible in the new host country, at least compared with other migrant groups such as asylum seekers or refugees who are under rigorous control?“ Even the statistics on how many intra-European migrants there are in each member state at any given time are not fully reliable as, owing to the unique national histories of each state, the methods of collecting population data and the systems of measuring incoming and outgoing migrants are different across Europe.“ This difficulty applies also to Finns: there is no up-dated address register of Finns living abroad, so it is impossible to draw a representative sample of this population.

The ‘new map of European migration’ consists of different forms of mobility and migration: students, workers, professionals, retirees and long-term tourists.“ It has been noted that, as the standard of living rises, the reasons for international mobility also become more diverse and change from being mainly economic to being governed by other factors, such as choices concerning family, love or lifestyle.” This has also been observed with Finns who move abroad, whose reasons for mobility vary.“ If at least some of the diversity of current Finnish outward migration is to be highlighted, the ethnographic focus cannot be on a single destination or route but should aim at a broader reach, despite the difficulties in obtaining the relevant data.

My study used the Internet as a tool to reach expatriate Finns scattered across the continent.” An online survey Working in Europe [Työntekijänä Euroopassa] was designed with SurveyMonkey,” a popular online survey tool. It was publicised with the aim of reaching as many individuals as possible, from different countries and from both cities and the countryside. A combination of techniques was used in generating a sample for the survey. Three methods were combined for maximum coverage: sampling through an organisation, targeting flow populations and snowballing.” The organisation whose help I sought was SEFE, The Finnish Association of Business School Graduates, which agreed to forward my message to all its

43 Recchi & Favell 2009. For the development of the free movement regime, see Koikkalainen 2009b or Koikkalainen 201 la.

44 A method called respondent-driven sampling offers one possibility for reaching such ‘hidden populations. It was not chosen for this study owing to its emphasis on quantitative methods. See Wejnert & Heckathorn 2011.

45 Fassman et al. 2009.

47 Santacreu et al. 2009; O’Reilly & Benson 2009.

49 See also Meissner & Hasselberg in this volume for how Internet surveys have been used as a tool for reaching the ‘hard to reach.

50 For more information, see www.surveymonkey.com.

expatriate members.” I sought to draw the attention of flow populations from various discussion forums and websites that serve Finns living abroad and sent a request to discussion forums of Finns in Britain, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Spain, and to Finnish schools in Italy and Austria asking members to take part in the survey and to encourage their friends to do the same.

In addition, the snowballing method was used in asking friends and acquaintances as well as 30 Finns who write blogs on their life abroad to respond to the survey and to forward the message to others in similar situations. I also set up a Facebook group for the project in order to publicise it in a social medium. The respondents were advised to click directly on a link to the survey on the e-mail/web-page or to take a closer look at the research questions, objectives and research ethics from a web page that presented the study.” During the period from March to July 2008, 545 individuals joined the survey, and 471 (86%) of them finished the whole questionnaire. The survey consisted of 27 questions on the personal and educational backgrounds of the respondents, their international experiences and reasons for moving abroad and their labour market experiences both in Finland and abroad. Most of the questions were multiple-choice, but there were also open-ended questions about the work life experiences and future plans of the respondents.

The respondents were also asked for their e-mail addresses, should they be interested in participating in a more thorough interview later. Submitting the e-mail address was voluntary. Gathering the experiences of Finns abroad by openly requesting them to take part in the survey eliminated one of the most problematic features of online research, that of getting the consent of those being ‘observed’. Engaging in participant observation by lurking in the background in online discussion groups, quoting from blogs and treating all web content as research material has been criticised as unethical since, even though content produced on the web is by its very nature public, not all Internet users always perceive it to be so.” Further, Kozinets strongly argues against any kind of covert observation as part of one’s research because a researcher who wishes to conduct netnography ethically should always inform the participants of her/his presence”.

Altogether 364 respondents were included in the final sample on the grounds that they lived in 12 different countries in the European Union area,** had completed tertiary degrees, were within the age bracket set for the study

52 This message generated 58 complete responses to the survey.

53 Information on the research was available in Finnish at www.ulapland.fi/EUtyo.

56 There were no responses from Greece, and even though Sweden is the most popular destination of Finns moving abroad, there were only eight completed responses from there. These were omitted from the final sample because of the geographical proximity; a common language (Swedish is Finland’s second official language) and a long history of migration between Finland and Sweden make the latter a special case.

(25-44) and had completed the whole survey. It has to be recognised that the publicising of my survey mainly via the Internet communities of Finns abroad did have an impact on the kind of people who were reached and who chose to take part in the survey. Certain groups are surely overrepresented as a closer breakdown of the respondent characteristics reveals. Thirty nine per cent of the respondents (143 individuals) were from the United Kingdom; this partly reflects the fact that it is one of the most popular destinations of Finns moving abroad, but it was also an indication that the snowball method worked efficiently in London. One may also suspect that those who have not lived abroad for very long are more active in the Finnish forums online than those who are more integrated into their current home countries. Moreover, there is a clear gender difference as 280 women (77%) and only 84 men (23%) responded to the survey.

However, despite the sampling bias of the method, which makes generalising to the overall expatriate Finnish population somewhat inappropriate, I was able to collect the labour market experiences of a large group of highly educated, contemporary Finnish migrants in 12 different countries. The Internet proved to be a useful tool for reaching this privileged group of migrants, for whom online interaction is a natural part of their life. But why should this exercise be called ethnography?

Encounters in a virtual field

If we adopt the proposition of Ulf Hannerz that ethnography is ‘an art of the possible,” then it should not matter how the participants are found if the chosen method is the best one available for the aims of the study in question. Even though the Finns who chose to respond to my survey may not form a diaspora, they do share some of the characteristics of a community, of a cultural group that is distinct in several important ways. As first-generation migrants they share a common background in Finnish society,” a common habitus: the embodiment of cultural knowledge created during their childhood socialization.” Common features were also found in their experiences as expatriate Finns.

The participants in the study speak the same mother tongue® and are highly educated: 338 (93%) out of the 364 respondents had higher education degrees either from a university or university of applied sciences, and 26 (7%)

58 A couple of the interviewees had lived abroad for some years when they were children. However, they had returned to Finland to finish their secondary schooling.

60 Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish, which is the mother tongue of a small minority of around 6% of Finns. I did not ask about the mother tongue of the respondents, but as the survey was conducted in Finnish I assume that to be the mother tongue of most of the respondents, and all the open-ended responses were written in Finnish.

were finishing their studies at the time. Rather than being pushed abroad by unemployment or discrimination, they are voluntary migrants who have chosen to move abroad in order to experience something new, to look for work, to accept a company secondment or to take up a job offer. Some could be identified as professional migrants or ‘Eurostars, while for others the move is a lifestyle choice.” They have not been particularly affected by unemployment, as most had a good labour market position back in Finland. Only 15 (4%) of the respondents said they had been unemployed in Finland for over three months after graduation, and only 41 (21%) respondents said that they completely or somewhat agreed that they had been afraid of unemployment prior to moving abroad.” The same applies to work in the destination country: only 29 (8%) respondents had either been unemployed for over 6 months or had not found work at all.