Research ethics in an unethical world: the politics and morality of engaged research

This article explores ethical dilemmas in researching the world of work. Recent contributions to WES have highlighted challenges for engaged research. Based on the emancipatory epistemologies of Bourdieu, Gramsci and Burawoy, the authors examine moral challenges in workplace fieldwork, question the assumptions of mainstream ethics discourses and seek to identify an alternative approach. Instead of an ethics premised on a priori, universal precepts that treasures academic neutrality, this article recognises a morality that responds to the social context of research with participation and commitment. The reflection in this study is based on fieldwork conducted in the former Soviet Union. Transformation societies present challenges to participatory ethnography but simultaneously provide considerable opportunities for developing an ethics of truth. An approach that can guide engaged researchers through social conflict’s ‘messy’ reality should hinge on loyalty to the emancipation struggles of those engaged in it

Who were ‘the people’? Classes and movements in East Germany, 1989

There is no shortage of literature on the East German revolution of 1989, but class analyses have been few and far between. In this paper, I survey a number of interpretations of the class composition of the 1989 movements—namely, that they comprised ‘the people’ or the intelligentsia—and find them wanting. I also subject Linda Fuller’s thesis on the non-participation of the working class to detailed examination. Against Fuller, I show that workers were involved en masse, and that although the decisive part they played was on the streets, this movement synergised with upheaval in workplaces, too